Boystown, p.15
Doc Savage - 153 - Trouble On Parade, page 15
153 - Trouble On Parade
By Robeson, Kenneth
Table of Contents
Doc Savage 153 - Trouble On Parade
by
Kenneth Robeson
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
THE END
Doc Savage 153 - Trouble On Parade
by
Kenneth Robeson
Chapter I
IT seems to be a fact that one of the things people most enjoy doing is approving--"pointing with pride" is the phrase--the great accomplishments of the human race, the race which has discovered radio, vitamin pills, crooners, war, airplanes, six-dollar theater seats, appendix operations, taxes etc. etc. But once upon a time a scholar, who was also a witty man, said: "Man is an emotional animal who sometimes stops to think."
Stopping to think is the profession of scholars and scientists, who get salaries for it. These gentlemen are--a surprising number of them--quite modest men, since it is mysterious and awe-inspiring to realize, as they soon must, that it may take them and succeeding thinkers perhaps another hundred thousand years to invent a mechanism as marvelous as, for example, a common cheese-eating variety of mouse. To say nothing of an emotion, for an emotion is nebulous, being probably a sort of bio-chemical product--even the garden variety of emotions such as fear, joy, grief, hate, love, reverence.
Fear is a primary emotion. A baby, the scientists have proved, is born with only two primitive fears--the fear of loud noise, and the fear of falling. It has, at birth, no other instinctive fears. Taken from its crib, the baby will reach impartially for striped candy, cobra snakes, fire, Uncle Dan's shiny timepiece, dogs, canary birds, dynamite and strangers, which proves that the baby is born with another emotion--curiosity. His curiosity stays with him and develops as do his other emotions, but unlike the others, his curiosity usually gets him into a lot of trouble.
IT was on a hot Wednesday afternoon in August that the pilot of a Boston, Mass., Halifax, Nova Scotia, passenger seaplane gave a display of what was almost phenomenal eyesight, followed by normal curiosity.
Not all August afternoons in the Bay of Fundy are hot ones, but this one was particularly so. And it was an unnaturally still afternoon. The sea below the plane, absolutely calm, resembled a great expanse of shining glass, as blue as a policeman's uniform where the water was deep, shading to various other colors such as mink brown, and dying grass green where the sea bottom came up in reefs and shoals.
The plane was flying quite low, not much higher than five hundred feet, because there was no headwind and the sea was calm enough to make a forced landing anywhere in case of mechanical failure.
Slim Stinson, the pilot of the plane, suddenly gouged his co-pilot in the ribs and pointed. "Whoeeee!" he said.
"What was it?" the co-pilot asked.
The plane was making good about a hundred and sixty miles an hour, so that whatever the pilot had seen was now left behind.
The pilot did not answer the co-pilot's question; he was taking the radio microphone off its hook. Into the microphone he said, "Canada Union-American from Flight Seven. Have sighted man swimming in the sea, nearest land twenty miles. Asking permission to land and rescue. Sea calm. Over."
DOC SAVAGE, a passenger on the plane, had been endeavoring to put himself to sleep with self-hypnotism. He had heard that this could be done, but he had never been able to do it, and he wasn't having any success now. He had both eyes closed tightly when the plane lifted one wing, beginning a banking turn. He stubbornly resisted opening his eyes, although he could think of no good reason for the plane making a sharp turn at this time.
Presently he did open one eye. The stewardess was standing beside him. The sign that said FASTEN YOUR SAFETY BELT was lighted.
"We are landing," the stewardess said. "Keep your seat. Nothing is wrong."
The stewardess passed on to reassure the other occupants, and by the time she returned Doc Savage had taken a look out of the window, and he had a question.
"If there's no trouble, why are we landing on the open sea?" he wished to know. "The pilot has sighted a man swimming, and we are landing to rescue him."
The stewardess lingered, willing to pass out more information. She was quite pretty, and she had been giving Doc Savage more than his share of service, overdoing it enough to embarrass him. He felt he was being pursued, suspected the other passengers were grinning slyly about it, and he couldn't think of anything he could very well do about it. He wished the stewardess hadn't been so damned pretty, then he wouldn't have been as disturbed.
The stewardess gave him a smile which, although he was trying to be as cold as a fish, made his toes vibrate. "The poor fellow must have been on a boat which sank," she said. "The nearest land is about twenty miles away."
"That would be a long swim." "Wouldn't it, though?"
She gave him another smile, this one about as soothing as an application from a blow-torch.
"I understand you are a flier yourself," she added.
"Not by profession," he said, wondering if he was going to hold out.
"I know what your profession is." "You do?"
"I read about you in a magazine."
He damned the magazine mentally. He resolved to look before he boarded the next plane to make sure it didn't have a man-eating stewardess.
At this point the co-pilot saved his life by thrusting a head out of the control compartment and shouting for the stewardess to stand by with a life preserver.
THE pilot made only a fair landing, making the pilotage error known as "dropping her in." Evidently he had been deceived by the glassy surface of the sea, and his error lay in not taking the accepted precaution of heaving overside some object such as a life preserver to use as a reference point. But they got on the sea safely.
The plane taxied toward the swimmer.
The swimmer ploughed through the cobalt-blue water, using an easy-looking overhand stroke, ignoring them. Doc Savage was able to watch him, and he wondered what the swimmer was doing with a red muffler tied under his throat. The fellow was paddling south, which was the direction he had been heading all the time, but as the plane drifted close, he stopped and trod water.
The pilot opened a hatch and climbed out.
"Hello, there," he said.
The swimmer lifted a hand in acknowledgement, but didn't say anything.
Everyone on the plane gaped in amazement. What they had mistaken for a red muffler tied over his head and knotted under his throat was a profuse and fiery red beard. The fellow was a sun-browned giant with an awe-inspiring amount of muscles. He seemed to be dressed for what he was doing, wearing nothing but swimming trunks, and around his middle was a belt to which seemed to be attached a number of waterproof pouches.
"We'll throw you a line," the pilot called.
The swimmer appeared surprised.
"Why?" he asked.
This stumped the pilot for a moment, but he recovered himself and explained, "To haul you aboard with."
Doc Savage was looking with fascination at the amazing red whiskers which the swimmer possessed, reflecting that they must be at least two feet long.
The swimmer was contemplating the pilot thoughtfully.
"No, thanks," he said.
"We've got to have something to pull you aboard with," the pilot said.
"I don't see why," said the owner of the red whiskers.
"How do you expect to get on the plane, then?" demanded the pilot, who seemed to be becoming exasperated. "I don't," said the swimmer.
The pilot scratched his head, thinking this over.
The fiery-whiskered swimmer grinned pleasantly and began quoting poetry. He said:
"Hope tells a flattering tale.
"Delusive, vain, and hollow.
"Ah! let not hope prevail.
"Lest disappointment follow."
AN astonished silence fell over the plane, lasted some moments, until the co-pilot broke it by saying softly, "Well, I'll be damned!"
The pilot said, "You mean you don't want to be rescued?"
"That's right."
"Why not?"
"Don't need rescuing."
"The nearest land," said the pilot sharply, "is twenty miles away." "Twenty-two and five-tenths miles," the swimmer corrected.
The pilot scratched his head some more, then said, "I don't get this." "How disappointment tracks the steps of hope," the swimmer remarked.
This was obviously another quotation, and Doc Savage dug around in his memory until he recalled that it was a quote of L. E. Landon. The other one, the poetry, had been from The Universal Songster, by a Miss Wrother, indicating that red-whiskers was versed in lesser-known literary works. Doc frowned at the fellow, examining him for signs of insanity.
The pilot, trying a different method, made his tone conversational and asked, "Mind telling me your name?" "Not at all," said the swimmer. "I'm Disappointed Smith."
"Where you headed for?"
The possessor of the crimson chin foliage shook his head.
"That's my private business," he said.
"You'd better come aboard," the pilot urged.
&
nbsp; "No, thanks."
"Are you afraid of airplanes?"
"Nope."
"Mind waiting around a minute?" the pilot asked.
"I got plenty of time."
The pilot re-entered the plane, came down the aisle and stopped before Doc Savage. "Mr. Savage, I just remembered that you're a doctor, and so you might be able to tell me whether or not that guy is nuts. Is he?"
Doc Savage looked at Disappointed Smith once more. "He acts and sounds sane enough. But the catch is that what he is doing and saying doesn't fit in with our ideas of what a man found swimming twenty miles from land should do and say."
This wasn't conclusive enough for the pilot. "Is he batty?"
"It would depend on whether his reasons for being where he is are rational ones." "Can't you tell whether he's crazy?"
"By looking at him for five minutes from a distance of thirty feet, and looking at only his head, at that? I'm not a magician."
The pilot took another look through the window. "My God!" he gasped.
The flame-bearded giant had calmly unfastened one of his waterproof pouches from his belt, opened it, and was consuming a sandwich which he had removed therefrom.
A silence fell, the pilot appearing to be baffled as to what measures to take next, and no one else aboard having anything constructive to offer. The pilot was in charge of the plane, anyway, and it was his headache.
SUDDENLY the pilot growled, "I'm going to take that guy aboard whether he likes it or not." He scrambled outside.
He shouted, "Listen, you, cut out that foolishness and come aboard."
As though surprised at the violent tone, the swimmer hastily swallowed the portion of sandwich he was chewing and eyed the pilot. Presently he delivered another quotation.
"Mean spirits under disappointment, like small beer in a thunderstorm, always turn sour," he quoted.
The pilot wheeled angrily to the stewardess and said, "Grace, hand me the line off that life preserver, and I'll lasso the fool."
The lassoing was unsuccessful, although the red-beard seemed to enjoy it. He would sink each time the rope looped toward him, to bob up a few feet away uncaptured and grinning.
The pilot turned ugly. He was armed, as are most pilots carrying the mails. He whipped out a revolver, leveled it.
"Now get aboard!" he ordered. "Or do you want to be shot?"
Doc Savage, to his disappointment, missed what immediately followed. The ugliness in the pilot's tone startled him, he thought the man sounded as if he actually might shoot the swimmer, which would be uncalled for, and Doc was trying to get a look at the pilot to see whether the man was really going to commit a murder. So he didn't see what the swimmer did. But he saw the results.
There was the sharp slam of a shot. The pilot dodged wildly, pitched inside the plane, but not before his natty uniform cap had sailed off his head.
Doc turned his gaze to the swimmer. The bearded young man--and he had to be young with that marvelously muscled body--was calmly sacking the revolver which he had used to shoot the pilot's cap off his head. He drew the sack opening tight with a waterproof zipper arrangement, hung it at his belt, and calmly dived.
It was possible to follow his progress through the water. He swam to the plane, and in a moment his fist pounded angrily on the hull. Then he was shouting:
"Get out of here and leave me alone, or I'll start shooting holes through the bottom of this airplane."
The pilot hurriedly picked himself off the cabin floor, scrambled forward into the control compartment, and in a few moments the plane took the air.
Once in the air, the plane made a climbing turn and passed back over the swimmer, who lifted one arm and gaily waved them a farewell. He was holding some object in one hand; one of the other passengers gasped that this was the gun, but Doc Savage rather thought it was a small thermos bottle which might contain hot coffee.
The remainder of the flight as far as Yarmouth, became a sociable junket, contrasting to the dignified earlier part of the trip from Boston, when almost none of the passengers had spoken to each other. The ice was now broken; everybody wanted to talk about the herculean red-headed and red-bearded and short-tempered swimmer.
Doc Savage participated in the discussion; he couldn't very well avoid it, because his opinion was frequently being asked. He discovered that everyone aboard knew his identity, the stewardess having broadcast the information.
What did he think? Did he consider the swimmer demented? If sane, why was the flame-whiskered fellow paddling his way across the ocean? He couldn't be sane, could he?
A fat man in the fish-buying business said slyly, "This inexplicable incident couldn't be connected with your profession, could it Mr. Savage?"
Doc said he didn't suppose so, and suddenly he felt that several other passengers suspected the incident had happened because he was aboard the plane.
Discouraged, he took to his seat and avoided more talk. He no longer felt one of the crowd. He suspected the passengers regarded him as someone who went around dragging thunder and lightning, like a dog with a can tied to its tail.
He thought about his reason for going to Nova Scotia, and could see nothing about it that promised excitement.
It was quite simple. He was going to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, to buy some boats and make a bit of change. Boat-buying was not his business, but a man named Si Hedges had telephoned him that he, Hedges, had obtained a number of first-class, small, war surplus steamships, and that he would re-sell them to Doc at a figure which would make him some money. Doc Savage was not acquainted with Si Hedges, so the offer had puzzled him until Hedges explained that Doc had once done a considerable favor for Hedges' brother-in-law, Wilbur C. Tidings, and that Hedges would like to repay the debt. Hedges wasn't, he explained, giving away anything; he was merely giving Doc an opportunity to make some money. Doc remembered Wilbur C. Tidings, the brother-in-law, recalled the favor he had done Tidings, and Hedges sounded sincere. So here Doc was.
Nothing mysterious about his coming to Yarmouth.
THE airline must have thought the story of the red-whiskered swimmer, Disappointed Smith, would make favorable publicity, because newspaper reporters were on hand when the plane reached Yarmouth. The pilot was photographed, the bullet hole in his cap was photographed--he had recovered the cap--and the photographers expressed disappointment because the stewardess hadn't been more actively involved, then photographed her anyway.
Doc Savage, pleased at not being the focus of publicity, let himself be filmed, and answered the reporters' questions, really something unusual for him to do. He was in a mellow mood, since he did not feel himself concerned.
No, he wouldn't say definitely that the swimmer was crazy. Yes, the fellow was really a muscular giant. Yes, the man had been carrying his lunch. Indeed it had been an unique experience. Yes, indeed.
It was a fine sunlit afternoon, the reporters were intelligent and polite, and Doc was able to excuse himself after he had answered their routine questions, including the statement that he was in Yarmouth to buy boats.
