The sheriff, p.9
Doc Savage - 011 - Brand of the Werewolf, page 9
"Doc, where's a camera?" Monk demanded loudly. "I want Ham's picture as he looks now! The newspapers would go for it!"
Ham glared indignantly.
The business of reaching Alex Savage's woodland retreat they had found to be no small task. Doc had searched for an airplane, but the only craft available had been an old two-seater biplane. Locating the owner shortly after dawn, Doc bought the decrepit ship outright.
By dint of howling and groaning like a dying thing, the old crate had proved it could take three of them off the ground at once.
Lack of landing fields near Alex Savage's cabin had been another obstacle. To complicate things, a thick fog had been sweeping in from the sea. It had taken three hours of flying to even locate Alex Savage's cabin. Once he had found it, Doc could discern no sign of life about the place.
Doc had been forced to land something like ten miles from the cabin, directly inland. Four trips had been necessary to carry his friends and their load of baggage.
Now, they had been fighting their way through the wilderness for some hours.
"Holy cow!" Renny boomed. "Do you reckon they ever got your telegrams into this country, Doc?"
"I understand the mail is brought up the coast by boat," Doc told him. "Telegrams would probably come in the same way."
"If we only had Doc's big plane!" Ham groaned.
The ship to which Ham referred was Doc's enormous speed plane, a bus capable of descending on land or water. This craft now reposed in Doc's hidden hangar on the Hudson River in New York City. With it, a landing on the little bay in front of Alex Savage's cabin would have been a simple matter.
Doc had not used the plane to fly to Canada simply because he wished to get away from speed and bustle during his vacation.
For some time they had been following a small river. This stream flowed at a terrific pace, a great fiat, moaning green serpent which shook white spray off its back at frequent intervals.
The river, Doc had determined from the air, emptied into the tiny bay on the shores of which Alex Savage's large cabin stood.
"Look!" Doc said abruptly. He leveled an arm.
Fog was crawling through the brush like lazy smoke; the vapor lay like a gray mold on the sky, stifling sunbeams and making the day almost twilight. In the creamy illumination, the object which Doc indicated was barely discernible.
It was a fresh grave, marked by a cross.
AS they drew nearer, it became apparent that the cross was ponderous, reaching above Doc's shoulders. It was of wood, roughly hewn.
"The grave is only a few days old," Long Tom offered. They all walked around to get a look at the inscription on the cross, burned into it on a place where the wood had been chiseled flat.
ALEX SAVAGE
"My uncle!" Doc said sharply.
Silence wrapped the little group for some minutes. Their faces were grim. Discovery of the grave had been a shower of cold water on their spirits.
That Alex Savage was blood kin to their bronze chief, accounted for part of the gloom settling on the group. Ordinarily, they were inclined to sail grandly through all sorts of perils, taking the occurrence of a death as an unpleasant thing which was part of the game.
But this was different. For a little while, as they stood there, adventure seemed somewhat to lose its tang.
"Do you suppose--" Homely Monk made a vague gesture. "I wonder if the death was natural?"
No one replied.
"He had a daughter, Patricia Savage," Doc said at last
The sartorially inclined Ham seemed to have forgotten both his ragged garments and his good-natured enemy, Monk.
"Let's move!" he muttered. "Graves always get my goat!" They left their depressing find. The grave was on a level shelf of ground. The gray fog hung all around like waterlogged curtains. Doc surmised that the spot overlooked the sea, for the way soon dipped sharply downward, and they could hear the mushy splashing of waves.
They scrambled over rocks, shouldered through brush. Behind them, the river moaned, but they eventually left that sound behind.
The fog, growing more dense, swirled about the men like the clammy tentacles of some fabulous colossus. No birds sounded in the trees. There was no perceptible wind, but waves continued to make low splashings in the distance. The splashes came at regular intervals, and no doubt were the result of a ground swell. In the thick fog, these sounds might have been the shuffling steps of some spectral wanderer.
"I don't care a lot for this place!" Monk announced.
"We're getting near the cabin," Doc said.
Monk glanced up sharply. He wondered how Doc had learned that. He decided the bronze man had recognized landmarks.
The truth was that Doc's sensitive nostrils had caught certain faint odors--scents which the others had missed. Doc's olfactory organs were of almost animal keenness, for training them was a part of the daily exercise routine which he took unfailingly.
The vague odor which he had detected was mainly that of gasoline. Also, there were certain flower scents alien to the region, which probably came from a woman's dressing room. Too, there was the faint odor of wood smoke. The smoke tang was old--not such as would come from a blazing fire.
Within the next hundred yards, the cabin came in sight The sumptuous nature of the rustic establishment created a sensation.
"Holy cow!" Renny ejaculated. "This is quite a place!"
Doc said sharply: "There's nobody here!"
Again the bronze man was voicing what his amazing senses had told him. His ears, sharp beyond those of an ordinary human, had detected no stirrings of life.
The front door of the cabin gaping open, they went in.
A man lay face up on the floor. A length of staghorn stuck upright from his chest--the hilt of a knife!
GLIDING across the floor, Doc Savage studied the dead man.
"An Indian!" he said.
Then he made a brief examination. "A half-breed, I should have said. He died, as near as can be told, about the time we were having all our troubles on the train."
Doc indicated the wrinkled condition of the dead man's lower garments. "The fellow got soaked to the armpits just before his death. His clothes show plainly that they dried on his motionless body. That means they were wet when he was killed, and dried later."
Doc removed the beaded moccasins from the corpse. There was more than a spoonful of bright, clean sand in each slipper.
To the trousers on the corpse was sticking smears of an amber-colored, sticky gum. There was more gum on the lifeless fingers.
To the gum on the trousers clung bits of bark; and to the gum on the hands stuck, not only bark, but tiny feathers and lint.
If the gum and the stuff clinging to it informed him of anything, Doc Savage did not remark on the fact at the moment.
Long Tom, the electrical wizard, looking slightly more unhealthy and pale than usual, asked: "Who is he?"
Doc shook his head in a slow negative. He walked through the other rooms. Everywhere there was evidence of a thorough search--furniture ripped apart, bedding torn and scattered, rugs jerked up. The stuffed, snarling head of a bearskin rug had been chopped open.
"The cabin was searched twice," Doc announced after his scrutiny.
"Twice!" exclaimed skeleton-thin Johnny, puzzled. "How do you figure that?"
Moving into the kitchen, Doc indicated a smear on the floor. It resembled molasses which had been spilled, and had become as hard as glass. An overturned can near by showed where the stuff had come from. This can bore a varnish label.
"Look at the label," Doc advised. "Notice how long it requires for that varnish to dry."
After he had looked, the dapper Ham said: "Twelve hours."
"Exactly. It is now perfectly dry, but it was spilled during the search. That means the hunt occurred at least twelve hours ago."
Doc went into a bedroom. A gasoline lantern lay on the floor. Its fuel-reservoir base had been split open. The floor about the wreck of the lamp was wet with gasoline.
"You fellows know how fast gasoline evaporates," Doc said. "That gas was spilled less than an hour ago. The second search was more thorough. They even split open the lantern base."
Johnny adjusted his spectacles which had the magnifier lens.
"I've been noticing things, too," he announced. "The breed lying dead in the front room is a servant. I noticed clothes which would fit him. These were in a small room in the rear--obviously a servant's room. There were woman's garments in the room, too. That means he had a wife."
"She's a very large woman, too," Doc agreed. "Her clothes were big. She's an Indian, judging by the bright colors she affects. Apparently she and her husband were the only servants on the place."
"What about the daughter, Patricia?" Renny rumbled.
DOC did not reply immediately. He roved into a bedroom where feminine garments littered the floor. He ended his wandering at a wastebasket which had been overturned, and which had held--among other trash--rumpled cleaning tissues. These were the paper napkins young women use to remove facial creams.
Picking up one of these tissues, Doc crushed it between his sensitive, metal-bard fingers.
"It was used this morning," he said. "That means the young woman was present that recently."
"But where is she now?" Renny boomed. "And where is the fat servant?"
Renny was asking questions as if he thought his bronze chief had been present at whatever had happened here in the cabin. Renny knew from past experiences that Doc could come upon a scene such as this, and, because of his weird ability to read vague dews, get a story which came uncannily near being the truth.
"I'll show you," Doc said, thereby proving Renny had not been too optimistic.
Doc beckoned the group outdoors. He pointed to tracks in the soft earth. It had evidently rained at dawn, or shortly afterward. And distinguishable in the dirt were footprints of three men and two women. One of the women had worn moccasins, the other low-heeled, hobnailed boots.
"The two women have been kidnaped," Doc said bluntly. The five aides swapped blank glances. How Doc could look at a set of footprints and tell there had been a kidnaping was beyond their deepest understanding.
Pointing, Doc said: "Notice the tracks show where one of the men shoved the girl--shoved her hard. It was no playful push. He would hardly have done that if the girl was going with them willingly."
Renny waved acknowledgment with his big hands. "You win, Doc."
"The kidnapers were our friends who escaped in the black monoplane," Doc continued.
The five men were fairly accustomed to this sort of thing--Doc's habit of plucking gems of information out of thin air. They had seen him do miracles on more than one occasion. But they could not help looking a bit stunned.
"Holy cow!" Renny rumbled. "I don't see how you can tell that, Doc."
"These tracks were made by the same men who attacked me when I started to follow the trail of luminous arrows from the train," Doc replied. "Those men were members of the gang who escaped in the plane."
He dropped to a knee and inspected the footprints more thoroughly. Then he reiterated: "I am sure of it! Not only the size, but certain worn patches on the soles exactly coincide."
"O. K., O. K.," Renny muttered. "All we need to know now is where the two women prisoners are being held."
"That will take some trailing," Doc replied.
The trail following was an easy matter for a few yards. Then, in the center of a great litter of rocks, the prints vanished. Nowhere could they be seen.
"They began leaping from rock to rock," Doc decided. "They can't do that forever. We'll circle--"
SCATTERING, Doc and his men ranged the vicinity. They did not spread so widely but that they could hear each other call, however.
Shortly, Long Tom cried loudly: "Come over here, you guys! I ain't got the trail, but I've got something else!"
The unhealthy-looking electrical wizard was standing near a dense thicket of spruce. At his feet, brownish stains colored the rank woods grass.
"Blood!" he exclaimed dramatically.
"Thoroughly dried," Doc agreed after a close scrutiny. "Part of it was washed away by the rain last night."
The bronze man swung slowly around the spot, eyes on the ground. Several times, he stopped and parted the grass. The rain had washed away signs, leaving few that could be read. To eyes less than superbly trained, the stretch of forest presented absolutely no clew. Penetrating the spruce thicket, Doc spent some time in it.
He came out of the spruce and said: "In there was where the breed was murdered."
"Yeah?" Monk grunted.
"Maybe I should have said, from in there was where he was murdered. The knife must have been thrown. Signs show the breed came out here to meet some one. Evidently, whoever he was meeting got him with a knife thrown from the thicket."
"Any chance of trailin' the killer?" Renny demanded.
"No. The fellow was careful to follow rocky ground coming and going. The rain last night wiped out what few tracks he did make."
Monk had been inspecting the rain-faded prints around the bloodstain. Laboriously, he was finding the tracks which Doc had discovered almost at a glance.
"The two women evidently found the slain Indian," the homely chemist declared. "They carried him to the cabin. Here're the tracks. One set was made by boots, the other by moccasins."
Monk glanced over his shoulder. He wanted to see if Doc would verify the deduction. Monk started. His eyes flew wide.
Doc Savage was nowhere about!
Doc's five friends showed no excitement over the bronze man's disappearance. Doc had a disconcerting habit of vanishing on certain occasions. Doc had merely glided into the brush, of course, but his going had been so silent as to seem spectral.
By the time his absence was noticed, Doc had covered scores of yards. He traveled swiftly until he was a full quarter of a mile from the cabin. Then he swung in a Wide circle.
The bronze man seemed to undergo a strange change. He became animal-like in his searching for the trail. He utilized not only his eyes, but his sense of smell as well. Much of the time, he traveled on all fours. Occasionally, when desiring to move swiftly, or to clear a tangle of brush which no man could have penetrated without infinite labor, he sprang upward and swung along, with the prodigious agility of a monkey, from one tree limb to another.
IT was a tangle of spider webs which finally showed Doc the trail.
The webs had been torn from their anchorage by some passing body, and hung dangling. A few yards from that point, Doc found a footprint. It was small; unmistakably feminine. He did not touch it, did not span its proportions with his fingers. But he knew it was the footprint of the girl who had been seized from the cabin.
It was somewhat uncanny, the ability, which Doc had acquired by long practice, to judge size by eye alone. Like Doc's other unusual accomplishments, there was nothing supernatural about this. It was an accomplishment perfected by his remarkable routine of exercises.
This routine occupied two hours daily, and in it was a process where he cast small white balls on the ground repeatedly, calculating just how far apart they had fallen. Careful measurements Verified his judgment.
Doc followed the trail. It was not easy. The kidnapers had taken pains to conceal their path. They trod rocky ground wherever possible. They entered a small stream, followed it fully two hundred yards; here, water had washed away the tracks.
At one point--an eddy where the water was stagnant--Doc found a faint haze of mud still suspended. It had been stirred up by the passing of his quarry. This proved they were not far ahead.
Going became more difficult. The trail mounted sheer slopes, dived into rocky gulches. Stony boulders and ledges were steadily underfoot. The stuff would not retain footprints.
The wild western country produces certain individuals who are known as "sign readers." These are expert trackers, and are employed to trail thieves, find lost live stock, and kindred other jobs. So expert do these men become that they can look at a stretch of ground and see a clear trail where another man can distinguish nothing.
Had a sign reader been watching Doc Savage now, he would have been driven to conclude himself a veritable amateur. For it was in actuality no trail at all which Doc followed. The stony earth retained no prints.
Doc ranged back and forth, his strange golden eyes photographing everything in his mind's eye. He discerned certain bugs and small lizards loitering about the rocks. In other places, these were not in evidence. It was plain they had been frightened to cover.
