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

The man's screams were ghastly.

Rotary seemed to encounter an accident. The loose end of the rope - it was a cowboy lariat - with which the man was fled, became tangled, apparently, with one of the seat supports. The man was stopped and dangled helplessly just outside the plane door.
"Danged rope got caught!" Rotary bellowed.

He fought as if to free the rope. He did not succeed.

"Got a knife, Sis?" he yelled. "Gotta cut this hombre loose."

The screaming of the man dangling outside the plane, the propeller wash smashing against him with cold horror, became articulate words.

"Please!" he screeched. "Don't! I'll do anything! Anything!"
Rotary sneered at him.

"Brother, you'd just tell me more lies," he said. "Sis, hand me that knife."

The man blubbered and screeched that he hoped to die if he was lying. He was about as scared as a man could become and remain rational.

"Oh, all right," Rotary said with seeming reluctance.

He yanked the prisoner back inside.

"Just one little fib and out you go," he warned the man.

The plot - the terrorized captive told Rotary Harrison - was a large thing, and it probably extended into foreign countries. There were millions of dollars involved, and there had been one murder executed and others were planned.

"The killing of Old Duster Jones was that murder?" asked Rotary grimly.

It was. But that one had been done by a man called Butch, who had been sent out from New York City for the job. Butch was a fellow who looked as meek as a rabbit, a regular milksop man in appearance, but a fiend who had the bloodthirsty instincts of a weasel.

"Why was Duster killed?" asked Rotary fiercely.

"He found out too much," the man explained. "Or at least I gathered that was what it was. It seems Duster was in a honkatonk one night and heard two men talking. He bought the men drinks and got them tight. He got their tongues loose and went riding with them in the night, and at the end of the ride he had learned enough to be dangerous to the plan."

Rotary scowled and demanded, "Why are they trying to knock off me and Sis?"

"Because," the man explained, "they are afraid you know too much."

"What makes them think that?"

"Your decision to go to New York."

Rotary Harrison was astonished. He was going to New York, as a matter of truth, on what he believed in his heart would be a fruitless attempt to raise money. He had to have the money, because without it the whole structure of his oil enterprises would collapse.

"Why am I going to New York, do they think?" he asked the prisoner.

"To see Doc Savage. To tell him what you know."

Rotary hid his amazement. "So they think that," he said.