Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 118 - The Devil's Black Rock

VIP免费
2024-12-23 0 0 411.21KB 82 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
THE DEVIL'S BLACK ROCK
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I. DEVIL IN THE GROUND
? Chapter II. WICKARD COLE VS. THE DEVIL
? Chapter III. THE BROTHER
? Chapter IV. THE REWARD
? Chapter V. PARA
? Chapter VI. BLACK DEVIL JUMPING
? Chapter VII. QUIZ SHOW
? Chapter VIII. OLD MAN WITH A GUN
? Chapter IX. TALE WITHOUT END
? Chapter X. BID FOR SILENCE
? Chapter XI. MONK AND THE REFORM
? Chapter XII. DISASTER BY ARRANGEMENT
? Chapter XIII. PERFUME AND DEATH
? Chapter XIV. THE CLOSING OF A NET
? Chapter XV. BLACK ROCK
? THE END
? DOC SAVAGE AND HIS PALS
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I. DEVIL IN THE GROUND
DONKEY SAM DAVIS was not a handsome man. Indeed, his face frightened the babies on the street
in the town of Mile High, Arizona. There was just one street in Mile High, and not many babies, and
these babies were not easily frightened.
Donkey Sam Davis was a prospector; probably you could call him a full-fledged desert rat. However, he
did not prospect all of the time, but only when he was broke, which was quite considerable of the time at
that. He hunted gold, silver, copper, quicksilver, iron, lead, or what have you. Any old thing. Often a
square meal would have been a godsend.
Two things about his character had an important bearing on what happened when the black devil went
into the ground.
THE first of these things was the fact that Donkey Sam happened to have met Doc Savage one time.
Met was not the exact word. They did not get acquainted, and Doc Savage possibly never knew that
Donkey Sam existed—Doc was to become very much aware of it later, though—at the time. But
Donkey Sam was permanently impressed.
On the occasion, Doc was in Mile High on business. The visit was no more than a passing through, and
the only thing Doc did to arouse Donkey Sam's interest was a thing which Doc probably never knew he
did. No less than seven gentlemen of shady reputation—the whole crop of local bad men, in fact—fled
town the moment they heard Doc had arrived. The seven left in frantic haste, not even packing up.
Donkey Sam was impressed. He would have sworn not even the State militia could have run those seven
sidewinders out of town. Donkey Sam was strictly against all forms of evil himself. He inquired around
and learned that Doc Savage was a rather remarkable individual, a fellow with some unusual capabilities,
and that Mile High was not the only place where crooks were afraid of him. Doc Savage, it seemed,
made a profession of righting wrongs and punishing evildoers in the far corners of the earth. This did not
sound exactly sensible to Donkey Sam, but he checked it in the back of his mind and often thought about
it.
He had not seen Doc Savage since, but he had not forgotten.
THE second characteristic of Donkey Sam's which was to affect the course of events was his phobia
about whiskey. He was against it. He was somewhat of a Carrie Nation with whiskers. The demon
rum—curse it! This was an unusual attitude in a country where the pioneers often hauled as much redeye
as food into their towns. At one time there had been eleven saloons and one store in Mile High.
So Donkey Sam was a thorough rip-snorting fanatic on the subject of a wee nip to drink, and this had a
great deal to do with the course of events after the black devil went into the ground. Donkey Sam did not
become intoxicated and see this devil.
Intoxicated devils usually come out of the earth, not go into it. Also, one could see, hear, feel and
experience this devil without being intoxicated. It was a most extraordinary devil.
ONE other thing happened before it all started. Donkey Sam went broke.
Going broke was a periodic misfortune with Donkey Sam, it having befallen him many times. It had
happened often enough that he should have been used to it. But he had never become accustomed to the
thing. Each time he fell prostrate financially, it was as great a shock as if it had never happened before,
and invariably he was heartbroken and verging on the rim of nervous collapse. And always he threw his
pack on the donkey, Myrtle, and lit out into the desert for a stretch of prospecting.
It was too bad, but Donkey Sam had no sense with money, and it was worse luck that losing his money
always upset him so terribly.
When he lost a bank roll, his procedure was usually the same. He would begin by making a visit to
Wickard Cole.
Wickard Cole was certainly no friend of Donkey Sam.
Wickard Cole was incredibly grasping and tight-fisted with money, and a clever man where a penny was
concerned. Donkey Sam, now and then, danged well wished he had some of that eye for a dollar.
So Donkey Sam always went to Wickard Cole and asked for the loan of a grubstake.
He always got the grubstake.
True, he always had to practically sign his life over to Wickard Cole. When you did business with
Wickard Cole, you had better have your eyeteeth nailed down.
It was strange that Wickard Cole had not become a very rich man. The man acted as if he did not have
much money, and particularly he had been acting that way for the past year. It was as if, about a year
ago, Wickard Cole might have lost his life's savings. But he never mentioned anything of the kind to
anyone.
So Donkey Sam went broke. He did it by investing in an invention which proved to be only good enough
to get the loose cash out of Donkey Sam's sock.
Donkey Sam went to Wickard Cole and asked for the loan of enough beans and flour and lard for six
weeks or so in the desert, prospecting.
He got them.
Now it happened that Wickard Cole had another trait. He liked a practical joke. Usually, it was an
unkind joke that he liked.
Putting the bottle of whiskey in Donkey Sam's pack in place of a box of cigars was cruel. Donkey Sam's
one luxury was his box of cigars which he took on each prospecting trip. The cigars meant a great deal.
You have to be out in the desert, hell from nowhere, in the heat and the glaring sand, the vastness of
space and the loneliness—the loneliness worst of all—to appreciate what a little thing like a cigar now
and then can mean.
So Wickard Cole swapped a bottle of cheap rotgut whiskey for Donkey Sam's cigars, and laughed and
laughed over the joke.
FOR three weeks Donkey Sam prospected and found what prospectors usually find. Sidewinders, Gila
monsters, red ants, sagebrush, greasewood, cactus and utter weariness.
On the twenty-second day, about noon, Donkey Sam decided he'd better have a cigar or he couldn't go
on. That was how much the cigars meant. They were a symbol. You thought: Tomorrow afternoon at
four o'clock I'll have a cigar. And, somehow, it buoyed you up until four o'clock came.
He had not yet found out that he had whiskey instead of cigars.
He saw the black rock about the time he thought of the cigars—or, rather, about the time he decided he
would have a cigar.
There was not much of the black rock. Very little at all, in fact, and it caught his attention only because it
was so very black, and also because the surrounding formation was obviously a deep upthrust. That is,
some prehistoric upheaval had brought a strata of rock from deep within the earth and thrust it to the
surface. Donkey Sam had his eyes open. You could never tell what you would find in such territory.
The rock was very black, and yet it was not overly shiny. He noticed that it seemed to be in kind of a
vein, and he picked up a loose fragment. He crumbled it in his hand, or endeavored to do so, without
much success.
Harder than coal. Fully as black. Had a sheen something like a crocidolite, but of course it didn't have the
tiger's eye coloring of crocidolite. It was a little like the black stuff of cassiterite, so-called tin stone, but
then cassiterite with that formation was peculiar to regions around St. Agnes, Cornwall, England. Arizona
was a smart piece from Cornwall, England, so no doubt it wasn't cassiterite.
Donkey Sam just automatically concluded that it had no value.
This conclusion was based on no knowledge of the stone on Donkey Sam's part. Everything he had
found for years had been worthless, so he just automatically consigned this to the same category. Matter
of truth, he had no idea what the black stuff was, and he didn't care. He was too tired, too disgusted with
prospecting to care about anything.
He suddenly changed his mind when he found the whiskey in place of the cigars.
IT was an awful shock.
Donkey Sam had walked a few yards to the shade of a large boulder, and here he had unpacked the
donkey, Myrtle, and opened what he thought would be his box of cigars. Behold! A bottle of rotgut! He
was sick.
He was sick with rage. It was not insanity on Donkey Sam's part, that awful emotion he felt. It was
simply the desert and loneliness and disappointment.
He stood there with the bottle in his hand and wanted to scream, cry, curse, rave, fall down, have
convulsions, but could do nothing.
Myrtle, the donkey, ambled off.
Myrtle was an animal of fair disposition as jackasses went, but she had certain eccentricities, such as
eating the sleeve out of your coat if you didn't watch her, and that had been getting on her owner's
nerves.
“Come here,” said Donkey Sam. “Come here, Myrtle.”
Myrtle kept going.
So Donkey Sam up and let fly at her with the bottle of whiskey, and missed, and the whiskey bottle flew
on, hit a rock so that the neck was broken off, and sailed on across the landscape, spilling the rotgut.
Myrtle kept going.
Donkey Sam's rage increased.
Donkey Sam was having himself what the people who live primitive, hard, lonely lives often have. It is a
form of hysteria. It is sometimes the only kind of emotional relaxation in which they can indulge. They
suddenly jump up, screaming, tearing off their clothes—in case of Eskimos, they rush out bellowing, and
roll in the snow. Sometimes they solve the whole thing simply by just fainting. The Eskimos call this going
piblokto.
(Explorers often mention this phenomenon. It is probably no more mysterious than you and I getting mad
and kicking the furniture.)
Donkey Sam went piblokto and grabbed up his prospector's rock hammer and did his best to brain
Myrtle by hurling the hammer at her.
As far as he knew he missed Myrtle with the hammer.
Truthfully, he never was sure quite what did happen.
Except that the devil went into the ground.
It was terrific. The earth seemed to jump a foot under Donkey Sam. Ahead of him, beyond Myrtle, a
great black monster of a thing sprang up. It had no shape, or rather it had a shape that changed so fast it
was impossible to tell just what it was.
The monster of black stood on the earth like by far the most awful thing Donkey Sam Davis had ever
seen. It stood there and seemed to shake.
There was noise, too. A fabulous amount of noise, part earthquake and part dynamite, and also as if
something containing steam had burst. A hellishly conglomerate sound. Like nothing Donkey Sam had
ever heard.
The black devil went into the ground.
Donkey Sam had always been very afraid of the devil—he was convinced there was such a fellow—and
probably that was why he immediately thought of this thing as a black devil. It bore no shape of anything
with which he was familiar, so devil was probably as good an appellation as any.
It went into the earth as if it was diving, and with a great rumbling roar, and kicking up a cloud of earth
and stones as it dug itself into the ground.
Suddenly it was gone and there was only the shaking of the ground, which soon subsided, and the flying
dust and rocks, and one scared jackass and an equally scared man, to show what had happened.
Donkey Sam had been knocked down. He picked himself up. Myrtle had also been knocked down, and
when she got up she was scared. She ran, and it took Donkey Sam two days to catch her.
But before he began chasing Myrtle, he walked over and peered, with fearful caution, at the hole in the
earth. He stood there looking blankly, unbelievingly, at the hole in the earth, and growing more and more
convinced that there actually was a hellish thing that had jumped up, frightened either by the bottle of
whiskey or the hammer, and had dived into the earth with tremendous commotion. It was a hard thing to
believe, of course, but Donkey Sam's hair began to stand on end.
“Goodness!” Donkey Sam said.
The day was the seventeenth of the month, which made it a year exactly to the day since Donkey Sam
had happened to see Doc Savage in Mile High. Donkey Sam thought of this fact, or coincidence, or
whatever it was, and remembered it.
Chapter II. WICKARD COLE VS. THE DEVIL
WICKARD COLE had very blue eyes and a pale face which was large-boned and freckled and homely.
It was a face which people were always mistaking for honest because it was something like Abe
Lincoln's face in the general impression it gave. As a matter of fact, there was nothing innately honest
about it any more than there was anything generous about its owner.
But it was a face that could register disbelief very well.
He stared unbelievingly at Donkey Sam.
“You mean to tell me,” he said, “that there was a roar?”
“Yes, a great roar,” said Donkey Sam.
“And a monster jumped up?”
“High,” said Donkey Sam. “As high as a building in the city.”
“Then,” said Cole, “it dived into the ground?”
“Right into the ground.”
“You're crazy,” said Wickard Cole.
Donkey Sam shrugged. “Figured you'd think that.”
“Absolutely nuts.”
“Sounds as if, don't it?” Donkey Sam agreed.
“Or,” said Wickard Cole, “you up and drank that pint of whiskey that I put in place of the cigars.”
Donkey Sam Davis looked at Wickard Cole as if he was inspecting a toad.
“So you put that whiskey in my pack,” said Donkey Sam. “Some day you will rue that, mister. You will
sure rue it.”
Wickard Cole grinned. There was one thing about Wickard Cole—he was not afraid. Not scary. It was
said by the locals that Wickard Cole could walk across hell on a tight rope and not turn a hair.
“Just a joke,” Wickard Cole said.
“Sure,” agreed Donkey Sam. “Just a joke. Just funning. Like the boy who didn't know the gun was
loaded.”
Wickard Cole leaned forward. “Why are you telling me about this?”
Donkey Sam shrugged. “Myrtle, my donkey, ran off and lost her pack containing the supplies you had
grubstaked me. I need another grubstake, and that's why I'm in here explaining.”
“I see.” Wickard Cole leaned back, closed his eyes, and made a cigarette. He fashioned the cigarette
with his eyes closed, a little feat of which he was proud, and liked to show off. He lit the cigarette still
without opening his eyes. “You know something?” he said.
“What?” asked Donkey Sam.
“I think,” said Wickard Cole, “that I'd like to look at where this monster of yours went into the ground.”
“Think I'm a liar, eh?”
“Not necessarily.”
“You do, don't you?” demanded Donkey Sam furiously.
Wickard Cole laughed. “I would like to know whether or not you have been nibbling loco weed.”
“You want me to take you out in the desert to that place?”
“Yes.”
“Well, come on, you practical joker,” said Donkey Sam bitterly.
THEY packed their donkeys and saddled two saddle horses which Wickard Cole furnished, and went
into the desert. They traveled five days and part of the next night, and at dawn they stood at the spot
where Donkey Sam had seen the black devil.
“See!” he said. “Thought I was lying, didn't you?”
Wickard Cole said nothing. He was too impressed. He just stared.
There was no black devil around now, of course. But there was the hole which he had made, the way
Donkey Sam explained it.
The hole was a considerable thing. It was large enough to take a good part of a freight train, standing the
cars on end. It was so much more vast than Donkey Sam's excited explanations had made it seem that
Wickard Cole was knocked speechless. It was incredible!
He could see that the hole seemed to have a branch that went off to the west, in a kind of subterranean
tunnel.
“Get a rope,” said Wickard Cole.
“You goin' down in there?”
“Yeah.”
“Seems appropriate. Looks as if she might lead down to the hot place,” said old Donkey Sam.
Wickard Cole scowled at him. “You don't like me, do you?”
“Never pretended I did,” snapped Donkey Sam. “I'll get the rope.”
Wickard Cole tied two long ropes together and went down into the hole. He went carefully, and there
was no expression on his face. He disappeared into the depths. Old Donkey Sam leaned over the edge.
He saw that Wickard Cole was being very cautious, moving about with care and examining everything.
One thing surprised him. He saw that Wickard Cole had brought a magnifying glass, with which he was
scrutinizing practically everything. The man was thorough. Just the way he went around looking for
pennies, Donkey Sam reflected. He half hoped the black devil would come back out of his hole and do
for Mr. Wickard Cole. Wickard Cole seemed half afraid of the same thing, judging from the way he
moved carefully in the hole.
“Leaping horned toads!” said Donkey Sam.
Because Wickard Cole was going into the hole that led off into the earth. He was going slowly, but going.
That took courage. You had to admire the man.
Such courage almost made you fear the man a little. It was somehow abnormal. The average man would
have said: “Well, here is the hole. It's plain that something happened. But the thing has no sensible
explanation, so what the hell! After all, it's none of my business.” That is what the average man would
have said. But Wickard Cole was investigating the thing to its very nerve ends.
Wickard Cole was gone into the hole for a long time.
There was no expression on his face when he returned.
“What'd you find?” asked Donkey Sam.
“Nothing,” said Wickard Cole. “Nothing at all.”
“You still think I'm nuts?”
“It's a strange thing, this hole.”
“You still think I was nibbling loco weed?” asked Donkey Sam.
“Never mind,” said Wickard Cole. “Let's forget the whole thing.”
They returned to the town of Mile High.
IN analyzing the thing later, Donkey Sam came to the conclusion that it was the very casual acceptance
which Wickard Cole gave the thing which aroused his, Donkey Sam's, suspicions. The man was too
matter of fact after he came out of the hole. He was too calm.
If Wickard Cole had found nothing in the hole he should have acted foolish, as a man does when he finds
nothing at the end of a wild-goose chase. But Wickard Cole was matter of fact. That meant he had found
something. Something! What? What was he covering up?
Unfortunately, Donkey Sam did not become really concerned about this point until they were back at
Mile High.
Five days after they were back, in fact. Then he got to thinking about it. The thing got on his mind enough
that he fell to watching Wickard Cole. He could see, he thought, something different in Wickard Cole's
actions.
It ended up—or rather, did not end—by Donkey Sam slipping off to the local airport one morning and
hiring a plane. It was a light plane, and the pilot was not enthusiastic about venturing out over the desert
for the sum Donkey Sam was willing to pay. But he finally did it.
They landed near the hole.
Donkey Sam went over and looked at the hole, and he was astonished.
The hole had caved in. Dynamite had done the caving. Dynamite, nor any other kind of gunpowder, had
not made the hole in the beginning. But dynamite had closed it. Donkey Sam had been a powder monkey
in a mine too long not to recognize the work of dynamite when he saw it.
The closing, or filling, of the hole had been done expertly, and anyone venturing past now would not see
anything to arouse curiosity.
Donkey Sam prowled the vicinity with care, using his eyes. He was not an Indian in tracking ability, but a
man does not spend many years in the desert, about half of it trailing roaming pack donkeys, without
learning to read sign a little better than average.
There was enough sign to fully convince Donkey Sam that Wickard Cole had come back here and
blasted that hole shut. Moreover, he had come by plane.
Donkey Sam approached the pilot of the light plane he had come out in.
“You brought Wickard Cole and some dynamite out here,” said Donkey Sam.
The pilot was surprised.
“That was supposed to be a secret. I didn't know you knew it,” he said.
“Secret, huh?”
“That's right.”
“Wickard Cole paid you plenty to keep it quiet, huh?”
The pilot flushed. “That's right.”
“I ain't paying you nothing,” Donkey Sam said. He took a six-shooter out of his clothes and showed it to
the young flier. “But you're not going to tell anybody you brought me here,” he added.
The pilot looked at the six-gun. It was the kind of a hogleg Bat Masterson and Calamity Jane probably
had packed. It was ferocious. It looked at home in Donkey Sam's hand.
“For the love of little frogs!” said the pilot. “What is this?”
“A matter of silence,” said Donkey Sam ominously.
“I—sure. Sure it is.”
“I don't know what else it is,” Donkey Sam added thoughtfully. “But you know something? I keep
thinking of a fellow I once saw, and wondering if he wouldn't be kind of interested in this thing. His name
is Doc Savage.”
Chapter III. THE BROTHER
IT was another of Donkey Sam's failings, one which fortunately he did not often exercise, that he liked to
put his nose in other people's business. Or perhaps it would be more true to say that he became curious
easily. Very curious at times.
Probably the whiskey-for-the-cigars joke had much to do with it. This still rankled with Donkey Sam,
and he had taken a private and personal oath to damned well make Wickard Cole pay for that little gag.
Anyway, he took to shadowing Wickard Cole. For three days Wickard Cole did not eat, sleep, smoke,
drink, or spit without Donkey Sam being aware.
When on the next day Wickard Cole got on the stagecoach—they called it a stagecoach in Mile High,
but that was just a westernism, for it was an ordinary bus—and left town, Donkey Sam followed in a
jellopy he owned. He stayed a mile back of the dust cloud the stage left all the way to Flagstaff.
And from Flagstaff, eventually and deviously, to the State penitentiary.
Donkey Sam of course did not hear exactly what Wickard Cole said, but he observed closely, and later
developments gave him a clear picture, almost as clear as if he had overheard every word.
“I want to talk to Devlin Cole,” said Wickard Cole.
The prison official was regretful. “Devlin Cole is unfortunately not what we would call a model prisoner,”
he explained. “Only relatives would be permitted to see him.”
“I am Devlin Cole's brother,” said Wickard Cole.
DEVLIN COLE did not look like Abraham Lincoln, whom his brother resembled, if you did not look
too close. Devlin Cole looked like what he was, which was a human rat. Or a weasel.
He said to his brother, “If I had a knife I would cut your throat.”
“And if this wire partition wasn't between us,” said Wickard Cole dryly.
“What do you want, you stinker?” asked Devlin Cole.
“You might as well abandon ideas of revenge, you unmitigated cur,” Wickard Cole told his brother.
They stared at each other in very unbrotherly fashion for a while.
Wickard Cole continued, “Would a hundred thousand dollars get you out of here, Devlin?”
The other man was very still. He became somewhat pale. With utter intensity he said, “Cut it out, Wick.
Cut it out. I stole the money you had saved two years ago, and you put me here for ten years. Let's let it
drop at that. Don't ride me. Don't come around talking money like that.”
“But it would get you out?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But it would make the next ten years a lot easier to serve. So what?” Suddenly he
grabbed the wire and began to tremble.
“Wick, are you serious?”
“
Quite serious,” said Wickard Cole calmly.
“You wouldn't give a hundred thousand for a ticket to paradise.”
Wickard Cole shrugged. “I might give a nickel, though. A hundred thousand is going to be no more to me
than a nickel, Devlin. Believe me, that is the truth.”
The convict brother got control of himself with an effort. “I believe you mean it,” he muttered. “What's
the catch?”
“No catch.”
“There has to be.”
“I want some help,” said Wickard Cole.
摘要：

THEDEVIL'SBLACKROCKADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2002BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI.DEVILINTHEGROUND?ChapterII.WICKARDCOLEVS.THEDEVIL?ChapterIII.THEBROTHER?ChapterIV.THEREWARD?ChapterV.PARA?ChapterVI.BLACKDEVILJUMPING?ChapterVII.QUIZSHOW?ChapterVIII.OLDMANWI...

展开>> 收起<<
Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 118 - The Devil's Black Rock.pdf

共82页,预览17页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：82 页 大小：411.21KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-23

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 82
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注