Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 109 - The Too-Wise Owl

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THE TOO-WISE OWL
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I. THE OWL
? Chapter II. JASPER
? Chapter III. THE GALLANT MAN
? Chapter IV. GIRL GETS OWL
? Chapter V. DEATH FOR OWASSO
? Chapter VI. DEATH FOLLOWS THE OWL
? Chapter VII. DEATH IS A QUESTION
? Chapter VIII. BLOOD ON HIS HANDS
? Chapter IX. TROUBLE IS LIKE BANANAS
? Chapter X. BROTHER’S SECRET
? Chapter XI. GUILLOTINE
? Chapter XII. HOT TRAIL
? Chapter XIII. SNOW BIRD
? Chapter XIV. WHY THE OWL WAS WISE
? Chapter XV. OF THE MIND
? Chapter XVI. LONE WOLF
? Chapter XVII. NO WISE MEN
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Originally published in Doc Savage magazine March 1942
Chapter I. THE OWL
TROUBLE comes to men in strange shapes. It came to Doc Savage in the form of an owl.
It was a Tuesday afternoon. There came a knock at the door. The cold winter wind was making such a
whoop and whine around the midtown skyscraper that no one heard the knock the first time. The next
knock was louder. Monk Mayfair opened the door.
Monk blinked. "Well, well," he said. "A man with an owl, as I see the situation."
The man was a boy in uniform; otherwise, the statement was correct. The boy wore the uniform used by
the attendants in the candy shop in the lobby downstairs. The owl wore feathers and a sleepy look. He
was not a large owl. He was a rather fat one. He was brown, inclined to red. The owl’s ears were rather
long.
Monk winked solemnly at the owl. "Hoot mon, what’s the idea?" he asked.
Monk had a small squeaky voice that might have belonged to an individual just above diaper age.
"It ain’t funny," said the boy in uniform. "It ain’t funny, at all."
Monk winked at the owl again. "He looks funny to me. He looks like Ham Brooks."
"He got handed to me," the boy said.
Monk thought there was something very funny about the owl. He lifted his voice. "Ham, come here
quick!" he shouted. "Here’s an owl that looks just like you."
Someone in the next room said something that was to the point about one of Monk’s ancestors.
Something about tails and trees.
The owl blinked his eyes slowly. He was a boy owl—or an old man owl—there was no doubt. He had
the reversible outer toes of an owl, and he flexed these slowly. After that, he was motionless, apparently
asleep with his eyes wide open.
The boy said, "Here." He took hold of one of the owl’s legs. "Here’s why I brought him." The boy
exhibited a tag. The tag said:
For Doc Savage. URGENT!
Monk eyed the tag. "A present for Doc, eh?" He burst into laughter. "Ham, hurry out here!" he bellowed.
"This owl looks exactly like you."
The boy in the uniform got impatient.
"Listen, brother," he said. "A guy handed me this bird in an awful dither. There was something wrong
about the guy."
"Wrong?" Monk said.
"He ran away from there in a hurry."
"The guy who gave you the owl, you mean?"
"Yeah. The guy had a ski pole."
"Maybe he was in a hurry."
"Sure he was," said the boy. "So was the other guy who was after him—the guy who wore the diamonds
and came in a Rolls-Royce."
"One guy chased the other?"
"That’s it," the boy said. "And if you ask me, there will be one dead guy if they get together."
WHILE Monk’s jaw was down in astonishment, a dapper man with a large mouth, good shoulders, a
thin waist, seven hundred dollars’ worth of clothes and an innocent-looking cane came out of the
adjoining room. He asked, "Where is this owl that looks like me?"
As a matter of fact there was no resemblance between Ham Brooks and the owl that anyone except
Monk Mayfair could see, then or afterward. Except that the owl did not look wise, and Ham did, which
was not a resemblance.
Ham was displeased. "Day by day, you show more earmarks of a goon," he said.
Monk swallowed. "You don’t get it. There’s some trouble."
Ham flourished the cane. "There will be a decapitation if you don’t stop saying I look like animals."
"This is a bird."
"All right! A bird is equally as offensive."
The boy who had brought the owl was becoming desperate.
"A guy rushes up," he said, "and jams this chicken in a candy jar. The guy has a ski pole. He turns and
runs. Another guy races after him. This other guy is a million bucks on legs."
Ham frowned and indicated the boy. "Friend of yours?" he asked Monk.
The boy said, "I ain’t friends of either of you guys, if you ask me. All I do up here is deliver the owl, like
it says on the tag."
Ham examined the tag. "This says the owl is for Doc."
The boy nodded violently. "Now, you’re getting places. Doc Savage. Where is he? This his place?"
"Is this his place?" Ham looked startled. "You must be a stranger in these parts."
"I work downstairs," the boy snapped. "I haven’t been there long. Say, do I stand here and argue, or do
I see Mr. Savage?"
Monk and Ham gave the matter thought. Doc Savage was a democratic fellow, but he was also at work
on an important manuscript of scientific data. A matter of two men quarreling over an owl might not be of
enough importance.
While they were thinking, the owl scratched his hooked beak in a tired fashion, wriggled the tufts that
made him look as if he had long ears and settled back into silent contemplation.
Monk said, "I guess we better call Doc."
"Suppose so," Ham grumbled. Ham hated to agree with Monk.
"Hurry up, you two humorists," said the boy angrily. "My boss gives me five minutes to deliver this night
chicken. You wanna get me fired?"
"It’s an idea," Monk said.
DOC SAVAGE had one quality not always owned by famous men. Doc looked the part. His giant size,
his-bronze hair, his regular features, bronzed a hue almost as dark as his hair, made him impressive. But
the things that were startling about him were the small things. The nature of his eyes, like pools of flake
gold, perpetually stirred by small currents. The amazing timbre of his voice—like thunder under control,
as someone had once put it. The sinews in the backs of his hands and in his neck which hinted at the
physical power he possessed.
The Man of Bronze, as the newspapers called him occasionally, was a remarkable combination of mental
ability and physical brawn, trained and directed since childhood toward the unusual occupation which he
followed, the career of righting wrongs and punishing evildoers.
Doc Savage did not follow his unorthodox profession for any impractically idealistic reasons. If there
were an idealist, it had been his father, who had placed him in the hands of the world’s leading scientists
in specialized lines for training. The idea had been to create a superb human machine for fighting the
battles of the weak. The project had been a success.
Actually, no normal man is likely to be a professional Sir Galahad, unless he has good reasons. Doc
Savage was normal in that respect. He had his reasons.
His reason was excitement. He liked it. The fire and crackle of danger in far places, the impact of the
unexpected. He was one of those men—and they are few—who thrive on things that keep other men
awake nights and give them gray hair.
He had gathered together a group of five associates—Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks were two—who
shared his liking for excitement.
They had, the bronze man and his associates, made a reputation that had filtered to the far corners of the
earth. They could get recognition from the authorities of any nation. Bandits in outer Mongolia, thieves in
Paris, had been known suddenly to shut up shop and lie very low upon getting the mere information that
Doc Savage was in the vicinity.
All of which seemed to mean nothing to the boy in uniform. He extended the owl. "Here," he said. "This
chicken is for you, I guess."
Doc Savage took the owl. The bird accepted the transfer placidly, looking the bronze man over with one
eye.
"The boss says," said the boy, "for you to ask your friend not to stick his owls in our candy jars no
more."
"Did your boss see the man who brought the owl?" Doc asked.
"Uh-huh."
"We might talk to him, then," Doc said.
The bronze man placed the owl on a chair. The bird had become interested in Monk. He fell to watching
the homely chemist with gimlet intensity.
Doc Savage went downstairs with the boy.
THE candy-shop proprietor was an advertisement for his business—rotund, pink, cherubic. He looked
like a piece of his own candy. His temper, however, was a green persimmon.
"You owe me, mister," he said fiercely, "for the jar of candy in which that owl was thrust."
Doc Savage asked quietly, "What did the man look like?"
"What do I care?" the man snapped. "He looked like Abraham Lincoln. He carried a ski pole. What
about the candy?"
"The man fled, I understand," Doc said.
The proprietor turned purple. "He was a crook." He reached under the counter. "I will thank you to tell
your friends not to bring these around!"
He slapped a large revolver down on the showcase.
Doc indicated the gun. "Which man dropped that? Or was it dropped?"
"The man with the ski pole dropped it," snapped the proprietor. "He tried to get it out when he saw the
other man. It fell from his fingers and skidded under the counter. He did not seem to think he had time to
recover it. He fled."
"Thank you." Doc took the gun.
"What about the candy?" yelled the other.
An assistant manager of the building dashed up, full of apologies to Doc Savage and with a bile-filled
look for the candy man. Doc Savage, as the assistant manager well knew, was probably the most
important tenant in the building. He also owned the structure.
DOC SAVAGE went back to his headquarters and, in the recreation room, found Monk walking around
and around the owl.
Monk pointed at the owl. "This thing’s neck is on a swivel. I walk around and around him, and he keeps
turning his head."
Doc Savage placed the revolver on the table.
"That owl’s neck must be wound up like a rubber band in a model airplane," Monk said.
Doc examined the gun. It was good, but there was nothing to identify the man who had carried it.
Ham said, "Doc, did the man have a ski pole?"
"Apparently."
"Just one?"
"Yes."
"I wonder," Ham said, "why he had just one ski pole?"
Monk said, "Maybe he carried it for the same reason you carry that silly cane."
Ham ignored the suggestion. "The fellow was in trouble, Doc. He was coming to us. The other man, the
one with the diamonds and the Rolls-Royce, intercepted him. The man with the ski pole had to flee for
his life."
Doc Savage nodded slightly. "That must be what happened."
"Why the owl?" Ham asked.
The owl himself proceeded to ask that question in a way that stood their hair on end.
The revolver lay on the table. The owl flew to it, landed beside the gun. In a leisurely way, but as if he
knew what he was doing, the owl turned the gun around.
"Dumb cluck," Monk said. "He thinks that gun is something to play— Hey! Look out!"
The owl clenched a claw over the hammer, squeezed and cocked the gun. Generations of forebears who
had picked up their living with their claws had given the owl strength to spare in his claws. He cocked the
gun without difficulty. Then he pulled the trigger.
The gun exploded with the tremendous report that guns always make in a room.
The bullet broke the glass out of the window.
The owl calmly flew out of the hole he had made, and away.
Monk made fighting-off-the-impossible movements with his hands.
He said, "That night chicken shot off that gun as if he had a human mind!"
Chapter II. JASPER
DOC SAVAGE jerked open a drawer and got a pair of binoculars and went to the window. He said,
"Grab two portable radio outfits and get downstairs. We are going to catch that owl if we can."
Monk and Ham hastily dashed into the laboratory—the laboratory comprised most of the
headquarters—and snatched up radios. The outfits were about the size of the so-called "personal" radio
sets, but these were complete transmitter-receiver outfits which would function on short wave for a great
distance.
The fact that chasing an owl was a silly thing to do did not occur to Monk and Ham until they were
downstairs.
"If it wasn’t Doc’s orders," Monk said, "I would think somebody had lost his mind around here."
Ham said, "Doc sounded serious."
Monk rubbed his jaw. "That owl did act funny, at that."
The radio outfits which they were carrying said, "Go south from the main entrance of the building. When
you reach the corner, advise me."
Monk and Ham hurried outside. The cold grabbed them instantly. The wind had a biting vigor and a
hurried force. It seized their coat skirts and popped them against their bodies. It tried to pull the breath
out of their lungs with icy fingers.
They had dashed out without their overcoats.
Monk said into his radio, "We’re at the corner, Doc."
"Look up about ten stories," Doc Savage said. "There is a ledge. The owl alighted there."
Monk and Ham squinted upward. Ham leveled an arm. "That’s your night chicken there, isn’t it?"
Monk nodded, said, "He isn’t mine," and into the radio, advised Doc, "We see him. What now?"
"Keep an eye on the bird," Doc Savage said. "After he gets cold, he may be easy to catch."
Monk asked, "Doc, why so anxious to catch the owl?"
The bronze man did not answer immediately. Instead, there was a small trilling sound from the radio, a
noise that caused Monk to stare at the instrument with interest. The trilling, low and exotic, was a thing
Doc Savage did without thinking, when he was mentally excited.
Finally Doc said, "There is a possibility that the owl is a key to something very important."
Monk wanted to go further into the subject, but he was prevented from doing so by a sudden gasp from
his side.
Ham did not do the gasping. Their pointing upward, and the intensity with which they were watching the
owl on the ledge, had stopped a crowd of curious pedestrians. The weather never seems to be too cold
for a New Yorker to stop and ogle something that someone else is ogling. Already, there were at least
fifty people around them, and a woman was sobbing and moaning that it was a baby up there on the
ledge and that it was going to fall any minute.
The gasping was caused when the owl flew off the ledge. On spread wings, the bird came downward.
Now and then, he flapped his wings. He seemed comfortable, unmindful of the cold, at home in the wind
that seemed about to turn to ice.
Also, the owl had a destination. A car. The bird flew to the machine. A window was down, and a hand
reached out and took the owl inside.
Monk reached the car and thrust his head inside.
Monk took a good look, said, "Blazes!"
The kid said, "What do you want, knob nose?"
HE was a round apple of a youth who looked as if his name should be Fritzie Katzenjammer or
something like that. He was fat enough to be uncouth in a pair of skin-tight Fauntleroy pants, out of which
his stockinged legs stuck like black sausages. Twelve would catch his age. More or less. But not much
more or less.
"What did you call me?" Monk asked.
"Knob nose," the boy said. He examined Monk’s face. "I can think of other names."
"Kid," Monk said, "you better not—"
"Kid," said the youth, "is a varied word. The word kid means a small wooden tub, an indentured white
servant, a hoax, the young of such animals as the antelope, the goat, and the roe deer, if under one year
old. Originated from the Scandinavic—Germanic word kizzi."
Monk swallowed. "Yeah?" he said.
"If you don’t believe it, look it up in the dictionary, frightful face," said the shaver.
"What are you doing with that owl?" Monk asked.
The tike scowled at Monk. "None of your business, octopus countenance," he said.
Monk was an extremely homely fellow. One did not have to meet him in a very dark alley to have the
eerie feeling that an ape had gotten loose. Monk was not ordinarily sensitive about his extreme, but rather
pleasant, homeliness. But the fat boy was beginning to get Monk’s goat.
"Gimme that owl, you little punk!" Monk growled.
He reached for the owl. The boy jerked the owl back. This disturbed the owl, who decided Monk’s
hand was the most suitable object for his displeasure.
There was a brief interval of howling, commotion, after which all combatants separated to take stock of
themselves. Monk’s hand looked as if a cat had tried to dine. Two owl feathers were floating around in
the car. Ham was holding his sides with mirth. He thought it was very funny.
The boy was indignant. "What do you mean, treating Owasso that way?" he demanded.
Monk indicated the owl. "Is that Owasso?"
The boy nodded. "Owasso is a type Bubo virginianus, a cousin of Bubo ignavus which is common
over Europe and Asia north of the Himalayas. The species is sometimes called the eagle owl."
"He’ll he a hairless owl if he takes hold of me again," Monk said.
Something occurred to Ham and he inspected the boy thoughtfully.
"You see anything of a man with a ski pole?" Ham asked.
"Pole," said the boy, "comes from the Latin word, polus. Various kinds of poles are a point of a sphere,
a place where a force is concentrated, the vertex of lines in that plane that belongs to a given linear
complex, morphologically or physiologically differentiated areas of an axis, a point where a function
complex variable becomes infinite so that the reciprocal of the function is holomorphic in the immediate
neighborhood of the point— Are you listening, dog face?"
Monk indicated the boy. "Ham, how old would you take it to be?"
Ham scrutinized the boy. "Twelve," he said. "Which would be eleven years, eleven months, twenty-nine
days too old."
"What do you two beans want?" asked the boy.
Monk indicated the boy again. "Ham, is it human?"
"You two make me die laughing," the boy said. "Will you get your No. 12s off the running board of this
car, and let me drive on?"
"You’re not old enough to drive this car," Monk advised.
Ham stepped back, stared at the car. "Hey, this is a police machine."
"Sure," said the kid.
"Where did you get it?" Ham asked. "I suppose your dad is a cop?"
"I snitched the car," said the boy. "If my old man was a cop, my old woman would have drowned him
when he was a pup."
Ham and Monk exchanged looks. "Nice spriggins," Monk said. "He steals police cars."
"I’d be able to stand him," Ham said, "if he told us something about that owl. Where did you get the owl,
boy?"
"You see that man yonder?" The boy pointed. "He gave me the owl. Go ask him. Tell him little Jasper
sent you."
The man indicated was an average-looking fellow, staring into a show window.
Monk and Ham walked toward him.
The car started behind them. They turned. The unusual boy was driving away. He drove recklessly, in a
way to make hair stand on end.
"I got a hunch," Ham said, "that little Jasper pulled one on us."
The man the boy had pointed out told them, "Owl? I know nothing about any owl. I am a bookkeeper
employed by a hat company on the sixth floor of this building. I just came down to lunch, and I have been
working since early this morning without leaving my desk. I can prove it, too."
"Just let it go, brother," Monk told him. "Just forget all about it."
MONK and Ham contemplated each other unhappily. "Doc will not have any paroxysm of joy about
this," Monk said. "That kid pulled us in, what I mean."
"He poured us right down a hole, all right," Ham admitted.
"Did you ever see such a kid before?" Monk asked in amazement.
"Seeing him was not half as much as hearing him," Ham said. "Did you hear that guff he rattled off about
owls?"
"If the owl was his, maybe he’s read up on owls."
"He had read up on the word, pole, and the word, kid, too," Ham reminded. "Some brat, little Jasper."
"He beats me," Monk admitted. "He couldn’t be more than twelve years old. And he was rattling off stuff
there that I never heard of. Sounded to me as if he had committed the stuff to memory out of the
dictionary and the encyclopedia."
Ham was silent. He was also thoughtful. He ran his fingers over the cane he carried—it was a sword
cane—abstractedly.
"Remember the owl, Monk?"
Monk eyed his clawed hand. "Heck, I’m not likely to forget that chicken."
"The owl was smart."
"He had sharp claws, too."
"I mean the way he fired that gun up in headquarters."
"Aw, shucks, that was just a trick someone had taught him. I bet it was that sassy brat’s work."
Ham chuckled, and the chuckle turned into a hearty laugh.
"What’s so uproariously funny?" Monk asked him.
Ham straightened out his face. "Just the idea of us standing here and discussing an owl and a kid as if it
were a life-and-death matter. It’s sort of wacky, don’t you think?"
Monk said, "For some reason, Doc seemed excited. Do you remember Doc ever getting excited over
something that was not important?"
Their radio outfits—they were carrying the gadgets under their arms—said, "Monk, Ham, go a block
west and a block south." It was Doc Savage’s voice. "There is some kind of commotion there."
The commotion consisted of a wrecked car—the machine the sassy boy had been driving—piled against
a pole. Its caved-in radiator was steaming; its windshield lay in pieces in the snow. There were two
policemen and a couple of hundred curious onlookers on the sidewalk and hanging out of windows in the
neighborhood.
A man was telling one of the cops what had happened.
"A small boy was driving this car," said the man who had seen it, "when a man tried to kill him. The boy
seemed to know he was in danger. He drove the car toward the subway, skidded it into that pole,
jumped out and ran into the subway."
"Describe them," directed the officer.
"The man had a wooden ski pole," said the observer, and the boy had an owl."
Monk nudged Ham. "Doc was right," Monk muttered. "There is something going on. And it’s not as
funny as it looked to us a minute ago."
Chapter III. THE GALLANT MAN
JEFFERSON SHAIR left his apartment at four o’clock that afternoon. He was carrying his steel ski
pole, his favorite pole, the mate to which he had lost in an unexpected avalanche, while he was cutting
across a mountain slope on his skis in a steep schuss the week before.
Because it was only four o’clock, Jefferson Shair believed that he might be able to obtain a mate for the
pole in a ski shop in the neighborhood. Previously, he had not known there was a large ski supply shop in
the immediate vicinity. He had obtained the information from the telephone classified directory, something
he had not thought of doing before.
He left his brownstone house in the Seventies but stopped on the steps to look around. He whistled twice
and made enticing clucking noises.
"Here, Owasso," he called hopefully. "Come, Owasso! Nice owl."
There was no sign of Owasso, the owl.
摘要：

THETOO-WISEOWLADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2002BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI.THEOWL?ChapterII.JASPER?ChapterIII.THEGALLANTMAN?ChapterIV.GIRLGETSOWL?ChapterV.DEATHFOROWASSO?ChapterVI.DEATHFOLLOWSTHEOWL?ChapterVII.DEATHISAQUESTION?ChapterVIII.BLOODONHISHANDS...

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