"046 (B052) - The Vanisher (1936-12) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Doc backed from the window, turned right through the most convenient door, and stopped to keep from stumbling over a body.
The body was that of Sigmund Hoppel. A heaving of the massive chest, a writhing of thick fingers showed that it was not a dead body.
Doc scooped the man up. When he was moved, Hoppel groaned and finally got one eye open.
"I've been mangled, positively!" he said thickly. "I am the next to dead!"
Doc said, "Where are the others?"
"I wouldn't know," groaned Hoppel. "My head! They knock on him with a damned gun when I am look in other direction! Good night—listen!"
They listened, although it was hardly necessary. They could not have helped hearing. Guns were banging. Men yelling.
"Somebody else has joined the fight!" Hoppel gulped.
Doc Savage and Hoppel looked cautiously for a window, but before they found one, the fight had reached its culmination. One crowd of combatants was in flight.
It was the latest entrants into the scrap who had been whipped. Doc got enough of a glimpse of them to recognize them. The convicts!
The humpback, their leader, was with them!
McGinnis, who had been Doc's prisoner, was one of the crowd.
The convict raiders must have struck suddenly, and they had accomplished something. They had taken some prisoners.
The prisoners seemed to number three. They were tied up with lengths of cloth, probably window draperies, and gagged abundantly, which made it difficult to identify them.
Hoppel said, "Your man Ham, mine friend De Faust, and dat bummer, Max Landerstett. Dat is who they have tied up."
Doc said nothing, but watched. The fleeing convicts and their prisoners were running down the hill toward the wharf. Their destination became apparent.
They were making for the cabin cruiser. The humpback led the retreat, bending low, for there was still shooting. It was impossible to tell, even in broad daylight, whether the unique creature was man or woman in gender.
They all got aboard the cabin cruiser, cast off the springlines and the craft surged with them out onto the calm Potomac.
THE other men, the fellows who had been found in the penitentiary cells so inexplicably, kept up a rattling fire that was ineffectual, and the cabin cruiser got out of range.
"I am not happy!" Hoppel groaned. "Now they will turn on us!"
He had made a good conjecture. The men scattered, and a fusillade of bullets came in the direction of the house, making a great deal of ugly noise.
Hoppel gulped, "They are taking her up where they left off! Poy, Oh poy! Them other fellers, that humpback and his convicts, just ran in, grabbed their prisoners and ran away again!"
Doc Savage said nothing in reply. The bronze man seemed to be deliberating. Unexpectedly, his faint, small trilling note came into being, ran up and down the musical scale and trailed away.
"Come on!" the bronze man rapped. Without waiting for an answer, he knocked glass out of a window with a chair and dived headlong outside. An instant later, Hoppel landed alongside with a loud spat, as if a big piece of liver had been dropped.
"Me, I think we are crazy!" he gasped.
The men who had been substituted for the convicts in the penitentiary cells began shooting more rapidly. The bullets made rodent noises over the heads of Doc and Hoppel, but could not reach them because of the slight bulge in the lawn around the house.
"Them fellers," growled Hoppel, "sure belonged in the jail cells where they were found!"
Doc began to crawl away from the house.
"You get us killed!" Hoppel warned.
Doc said, "It is possible that we will get killed quicker if we stay."
Hoppel trailed Doc, muttering, "Sometimes I am a mystery even to myself. Why I follow you, I don't—"
The earth gave a great jump under them. The side of the house came sweeping over the earth, mashing down shrubbery, like a big white monster trying to lie down on the two men.
Doc grasped Hoppel, leaped madly, and got clear. Dust, smoke and flame climbed high into the air, carrying wreckage, which began crashing back to earth.
"Bomb," Doc said simply.
Hoppel swallowed several times, and no color came into his face. At last he said simply, "My!"
THE shots, which had stopped with the terrific explosion, resumed. Lead came snapping through the shrubbery where Doc and Hoppel lay, and Hoppel seemed to find his tongue.
"Dummers!" he squawled. "What you think you are do to me?"
The shooting promptly stopped. The men who had been dong the firing began to run away from the vicinity.
Hoppel gave Doc Savage an open-mouthed stare. "Did you done see what I just did?"
The bronze man said nothing.
"I tell them to stop," Hoppel muttered. "They did. Am I suprised? Poy! Next, you think I am their boss!"
Thin-wailing sounds came from the north, where Alexandria lay. The noises were vaguely like the night sounds of a distant coyote pack, except more long-drawn.
"Police sirens," Doc said. "The shooting has caused some one to call the State police. Our enemies heard the sirens."
Hoppel nodded.
Noise of automobile engines reached their ears, and it took no stretch of imagination to realize the raiders, the men who had just fled, were taking to cars in which they must have arrived quietly. The cars went away at a high rate of speed, taking a direction opposite that from which the police sirens were approaching.
Chapter 12. THE VANISHING SAILORS
HOPPEL complained, "They are getting away! We don't want that, do we?"
Doc demanded, "Want to stay and watch your house?"
"There is so much left to watch!" snorted Hoppel. "Nix."
Doc said, "Come on!" and ran out of the elaborately landscaped grounds. A bridle path ran near the estate, and they got upon that and ran. Behind them, the wreckage of Hoppel's house had caught fire, and smoke, a dirty dark-brown in color, was bulging upward.