"062 (B062) - The Pirate's Ghost (1938-04) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

THE PIRATE'S GHOST
A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson

Chapter I. OLD ONE OF THE DESERT
"SAGEBRUSH" SMITH was undoubtedly not the first Smith who got into trouble without expecting it.
However, Sagebrush Smith managed to confine his troubles to the ordinary ones of a cow-puncher until the advent of a certain fifteenth day of March. This fifteenth of March followed the fourteenth, which was the day Sagebrush Smith got fired. He got canned off the Lazy Y spread for giving the round-up boss, "Hoke" McGee, what he called "a bust in the snoot" over a trifling matter of who had put a deceased rattlesnake in Sagebrush Smith's bedroll.
Sagebrush was scared of rattlesnakes, also of red-eye whisky and women. However, these three items, of all the things Sagebrush had encountered in his twenty-four years of life, were the only things he had ever been scared of. He certainly wasn't afraid of Hoke McGee.
Sagebrush Smith was a long, gangling young man with a freckled hide, and he had no cares. He was not, fortunately or unfortunately—depending on the outlook—very ambitious. There was, in fact, only one thing he really wanted to do, if he ever got around to it: he wanted to see a fellow he had read about, a man named Doc Savage. He just wanted to have a look at this Doc Savage. He had never told any one about the yen. He figured they would think it kind of silly.
Having been fired, and having offered, in a warm moment, to unravel cartridges with Hoke McGee or anybody on the Lazy Y who wanted to unravel them, Sagebrush Smith slapped his Texas saddle on his Roman-nosed pinto, thonged his warbag and slicker on the back, and rode. He rode "slick-heeled"—-without spurs—for his paint bronc didn't need spurs. The cayuse was next thing to a broomtail, and plenty spirited.
Some one had said there was a job repping to be had over beyond Tule Canyon, at an outfit near Sugar Loaf Butte. Sagebrush thought he might as well see. To get there, he would have to ride down into the north arm of Death Valley, over the floor, and out again. He filled his water bag at a spring about sundown, and set out across Death Valley by dark.
In the first four hours of night riding, he shot the heads off twenty-six rattlesnakes, but only half the head off the twenty-seventh.
"Boy, howdy!" Sagebrush Smith remarked. "I'm slippin'!"
That, of course, was a modest understatement. He wasn't slipping. Except for a slight technicality, he had shot the heads off twenty-seven rattlesnakes, shooting in brilliant moonlight at targets, none larger than a silver dollar, which were moving.
Then a person or persons unknown reciprocated by shooting Sagebrush Smith's bronc through the tail.
THE tail shot was a freak. Sagebrush Smith felt at once that it was an impossible shot, reflected as much when he picked himself out of the Death Valley sand. Sagebrush was about to flop down in the sand again for caution's sake, but thought of the sidewinders and remained on his feet. He'd take his chances with bullets.
The paint pony left there as if it had a destination somewhere beyond Wyoming. The reins, Sagebrush remembered with disgust, were knotted over the jughead's neck, so he wasn't likely to stop going.
"The water bag!" exploded the cowboy.
The water bag was on the saddle! Sagebrush watched eagerly, hoping the bronc would buck the water bag off. The pinto was an enthusiastic bucker, with a style noted for getting rid of things, including, occasionally, the saddle. But the piebald didn't buck. The horse loped over a sand dune and vanished.
When Sagebrush Smith looked around, he saw more sand dunes, plenty of them, a few heat-discouraged whiskers of mesquite, and some tall black mountains which appeared about two miles away. The mountains, he knew, were thirty miles distant. About two days of the kind of walking he would have. No one ever walked two days in Death Valley without water. He was already thirsty.
A fresh bullet arrived about that time. It cruised past somewhere overhead.
"The first one was too good," Sagebrush remarked. "And this one is too poor. There's somethin' locoed here."
He drew his six-gun and fanned two lumps of lead in the general direction of the moon. Then he listened.
Two shots answered, and the lead of the second one missed him so far that he could barely hear it sing, and the former was not much better.
"Nobody," opined Sagebrush, "could be that bum at lead-slingin'."
He had the cowboy habit of talking to himself, a failing born of the fact that for too much of his life he had been his own audience.
He banged off his gun again.
A bullet replied, and it missed him as far to the left as the others had been to the right.
"Somethin' is sure rotten in Denmark," the cowboy concluded. "Whoever is turnin' loose them blue whistlers ain't shootin' straight because it, him or her, can't shoot straight."
Having thus decided, he concluded it was safe to advance, and likewise very advisable. He had to get water, or the big black birds with the raw, red necks would have a man to eat.
Sagebrush advanced. He got his boots full of sand, his exposed hide covered with 'skeet scratches, and had his hair lifted assorted times by sidewinders. Twice, scorpions did their best to sock stingers through his boots into his legs, but failed because he was wearing good twenty-dollar Justins built for service.
"Damn all deserts!" he said feelingly.
Then he came upon the old man.
THE old man was wanting to shoot somebody. He had his rifle in his hand, a frantic fear and a grim desperation in his bloodshot old eyes, and awful agony working in the wrinkles of his old baboon face.
He wore scuffed old leather boots, laced khaki pants, a rag over one shoulder that had been a shirt, and he had an old body that looked as though it was made out of rake handles. He kept shooting little gouts of blood out of his mouth.
Sagebrush Smith slipped around a mesquite clump and jumped in the middle of the old man's back. When he saw the kind of thing he had jumped onto, he got off again.
He got down beside the old duffer and straightened him out on the sand and put the rifle to one side. He wet his handkerchief with water from a canteen the old man had tied to his belt and wiped off the old fellow's wasted face.
"Golly, pop, I'm sorry," he said.
The old man looked steadily at Sagebrush Smith and bubbled a little as he breathed.
"I was afraid you wouldn't make it, Doc's man," he said. "I kept hearing them shooting at you. Just one shot at a time. The shots kept getting closer. I knew they were trying to pick you off before you made it."
Sagebrush Smith, who was as shaggy as a young jackass on the outside, and about as handsome, had a likeable, kindly nature; and he wanted to humor an old man who was half mad and dying in the desert.
"I fixed 'em," he said.
The old man of the desert looked Sagebrush Smith's long, gangling young frame up and down.
"Doc's man," he said, "I'm glad to see you."
Being called "Doc's man" had Sagebrush Smith puzzled. He finally figured it out and decided that the old fellow thought he had come from the doctor.
"Buck up, old-timer," he said. "Stick out your horns and show some sand. You gotta last until I can take you to the doctor."
"You came to take me to Doc?"
"Yeah. Betcher boots."
"Won't do no good," the old man said. "I've got cancer. I've had it two years, and I haven't got any insides left to speak of."
SAGEBRUSH SMITH got up on his feet rather quickly, because he couldn't have stayed there on his knees without feeling sick. He stamped his boots in the powder-fine sand and jammed his hands in his pockets, then took them out again and peered around for something to get his mind off the dying old man. Mentally, he added a fourth item to the list of things he was scared of: a man dying slowly.