"Doc Savage Adventure 1943-05 The Talking Devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

"Still got it," Sis agreed.

"Yonder's Kansas City," said Rotary Harrison. "When we get there we'll see what luck we have pulling a shenanigan."


THE plane which had followed the Harrisons had, they believed, picked up their trail sometime after they left the municipal airport at Tulsa. Because no plane had followed them off the municipal airport at Tulsa, they surmised the other ship had been at another airport nearby and had been notified when they left the ground.

They knew the other plane was following them. They had made sure of that by detouring slightly in the direction of Oil Hill, Kansas, where Rotary Harrison had once opened a field of gushers - that was his third fortune in the making - and the plane behind had trailed them on the detour. The other ship had always remained some miles back, practically out of sight in the distance.

Rotary Harrison's face had become rocklike when he knew they were being followed.

"Poor old Duster Jones," he said once.

Then Rotary had leaned back, letting the plane fly herself, and had remembered Duster Jones.

Duster Jones had come out of Ohio or Pennsylvania or some such place forty years ago and he had brought his hard luck with him. It had been a kind of inexhaustible hard luck, good for all the years of Duster Jones' life. Fate was particularly cruel, because she hit her blows of hard luck with platinum and diamond hammers. He made such ungodly rich strikes and he always lost them. Duster Jones had the golden touch of Midas, but his hands were greased. He never quite got hold of the riches, but always it was almost. Duster Jones became a legend in the oil fields.

Duster Jones liked Rotary Harrison. They were opposites, in a way, because it seemed that Rotary had only to turn a hand to make a fortune, while Duster could turn handsprings and wind up as poor as a mouse.

They had been very, very close friends for years. Neither of them ever did a thing, ever had hardly a thought, that the other did not know about.

Rotary believed he knew why Duster Jones had been shot between the eyes with a .22-caliber bullet.

Rotary Harrison set his plane down at the Kansas City airport. He taxied back along the edge of the runway toward the office and hangars, letting the ship move slowly.

He watched the other plane, the ship that had been following him, come out of the southwest.

He was not surprised when it did not land. Nor was he puzzled when the craft roared overhead and dropped first one wing then the other in a series of measured maneuvers.

"Signal," he said. "They got somebody here at the airport waitin' for us."

He looked back at his daughter then. He was oppressed by the feeling of danger around them, of poor old Duster Jones' death, and of mystery. He studied Sis' face. They had been through a lot together, through more than most fathers and daughters. But he found himself wishing, suddenly, that Sis was somewhere where it was safe.

"Scared, Sis?" he asked.

"Sure," she admitted. "But don't let it bother you."

Rotary grinned. "Nothing is gonna bother us. We're gonna do the bothering."

He parked his plane on the line where civilian aircraft were supposed to park. He went into the office and filled out the arrival forms and applied for the permission which the army required civilians to obtain before they could fly on to New York.

"Want to leave in about half an hour," he said. "See that my plane is refueled."

"Half an hour?" the C. A. A. man said. "Be night before you get into New York. You experienced in night flying?"

"Sure," said Rotary. "Here's my license with instrument rating."

Rotary and Sis got a cab, acting as if nothing out of the way was transpiring, except that Sis carried the rifle, which made her a slightly odd spectacle.

When the cab was crossing the Missouri River bridge into Kansas City, Rotary asked, "Got him spotted?"