"056 (B028) - Repel (The Deadly Dwarf) (1937-10) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Doc Savage whipped to meet her. "Who?"
The girl eyed the bronze giant, and for a minute seemed to go absent-minded. But for that matter, men had been known to do the same thing when they first saw Doc.
Doc repeated, "Who?"
"A pale-looking man!" the girl gasped. "I saw the thing and photographed it, then ran to get him to look at it, so people wouldn't think me a liar!"
"Pale-looking!" Monk exploded. "That's Long Tom!"
The girl shuddered. "We got to where I saw it, and something jumped us! It knocked me out. I didn't get to see what it was. When I came to, the pale man was gone. So was my camera!"
Doc Savage said, "Show us the place!"
It was quickly evident that the girl had about run herself out. She was slower even than Ham, who might have been fast, except that he invariably went around any bushes that might damage his immaculate clothing.
Doc Savage picked the young woman up. He carried her across a shoulder until she gasped, "I can't see anything!"
Doc shifted her to an erect position, which she maintained by holding his head. She looked soft, but there was a hardness about her that was almost metallic. She gave directions in a voice which, once the rasp of breathlessness was gone from it, showed culture.
She explained what the thing had looked like when she had first seen it. It was the same thing she had described to Long Tom, a mass like glass, or transparent jelly, that was slowly taking on color. A monstrosity of a shape of no known earth thing.
The small party reached, finally, the big singed palm with the pitiful cluster of blackened coconuts at its top. She pointed.
"As you can see," she said, "there is nothing here."
Doc Savage said, "Spread and look for Long Tom."
FIVE minutes later Monk found Doc Savage moving slowly back and forth through the jungle and over stretches of rock—mainly over the stretches of rock. Most of the surrounding terrain was composed of stone. It was a poor spot to find footprints.
Monk looked at the ground. "You're wasting time here, Doc. We found where this thing dragged Long Tom into the lava."
"You mean the parallel marks from where the girl said she last saw Long Tom in the neighborhood of the lava?"
"Yep. Them marks could have been made by a man's heels dragging. I looked close and found bits of brown leather scraped off on the rough rock. Long Tom was wearing brown shoes."
Doc Savage was silent for a time, his flake-gold eyes traveling over the expanses of naked rock which would retain no footprints.
"Where is the girl?" he asked at last.
"Ham is taking care of her," Monk said.
They hardly joined Ham and the girl before big-fisted Renny and long, bony Johnny arrived. The pair looked as though they had something on their minds.
"Our comiciliary ambulations were ascendant!" Johnny said. "We—"
"This is no time for them words!" Renny boomed. "Doc, we found that native who tried to hold Monk up. He did not get away."
Doc Savage said, half questioningly, "He was under that huge boulder which rolled against the mouth of the ledge."
Renny blinked. Johnny swallowed. "You knew that?"
"Suspected it," Doc admitted. "He was senseless, there was no time to get him under cover, and the rock came to rest here it could have crushed him."
"He was under it," said Johnny. "We dug him out."
Renny blocked and unblocked his big fists and said, "And I suppose you know what else we learned?"
Doc Savage said, "You mean that he was not a native, but a white man who had dyed his skin and curled and dyed his hair?"
Renny and Johnny swapped blank looks.
"I'll be superamalgamated!" Johnny murmured. "How did you know that, Doc? We almost didn't find it out ourselves."
"The features, the finger nails, the coloring of the eyes, were not those of a native, even a Polynesian," the bronze man explained.
"Wonder who he is, and what he was up to?"
"We will see what we can learn about him," Doc Savage said.
Chapter 5. THE THING ON THE BOTTOM
THE dead man had lived in the bungalow that stood alone on the edge of Fan Coral City. He had rented it after landing from a steamer five weeks before, a quiet, taciturn fellow, inclined to be sullen. He had mixed not at all. No one had dreamed he was not a native with money.
Doc Savage, Monk and Ham entered the dead man's house. There was a question whether they had the legal right to do this, although Doc had a paper, a kind of commission, from the government which had a protectorate, so-called, over Fan Coral. The paper had been given Doc for a past service, and was supposed to entitle him to almost any kind of coцperation.
"The place has been ransacked!" Monk declared, staring around.
Unless the dead man had pulled out bureau drawers, ripped up the floor mattings, dug holes in the roof thatch, and emptied all the food containers in the kitchen onto the floor, Monk's deduction was good.
Doc said, "Done not more than half an hour ago." He pointed out that a puddle of syrup was still spreading, and pickles from an emptied jar were still damp.
The bronze man did not probe into corners, turn objects over, or otherwise act as if he were searching. But Monk and Ham stood back and watched, expectant. They had seen him work before. They had seen Doc walk past as many as five chessboards, crowded with men, and when the pieces were swept off, return and place each not only in its correct square, but facing just as it had been.
Doc Savage went outside abruptly. There were three palms in the yard, all big ones, laden with coconuts. More coconuts were on the ground. A sign said:
THESE COCONUTS PRIVATE
KEEP AWAY!
There were, at a conservative estimate, a couple of million coconut trees on Fan Coral, most of them free to anybody who wanted a nut. The sign was either the work of a miserly crank or it had a purpose.
Doc Savage began picking up and shaking coconuts. He must have done that to at least two hundred before he found one that did not gurgle. He broke it open. It had been sawed in half and cleverly glued back together.
The contents was mostly money, with a few papers. Doc read the papers, principally the newspaper clippings and wanted circulars.
"The dead man was Bert Banner, alias Bert the Blood, alias a lot of things," the bronze man said. "He is wanted for three murders in the United States, two in Australia, and one in China. The items about the Shanghai, or China, crime bear the latest date."
"He must have been hiding out here," Ham said.