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

Hoke McGee grinned evilly.
"We'll know just how bad it is," he said, "by along about mornin'."
Sagebrush Smith was fully aware that the Lazy Y would have its cupidity aroused by the gold dust and the box. But Sagebrush was reckless enough and salty enough that he didn't give, as he put it, "a tinker's damn!"
However, after supper, and immediately prior to sunset, he put on a little demonstration for effect. He had received seven silver dimes as change for his supper payment of gold dust, and he took the seven dimes outside, and four poker chips. He tossed up the seven dimes, one at a time, and hit two out of the seven with bullets from his six-gun, firing, however, twelve times.
"That goes to show," Sagebrush declared, "that it can't be done. Nobody can do that trick!"
Then he threw the four poker chips into the air and shot them into a myriad of pieces with four bullets from his six-shooter.
"Of course," he announced, "that last ain't no trick at all."
Sagebrush blew the smoke out of his hogleg, gave it a spectacular twirl on his fingers, and smacked it into the leather. He figured he had cooled off any ambitions anybody might have had toward the box. He was rather pleased with himself.
His bubble of pleasure got a pin stuck in it when he went back to the metal box.
A man was crouched over the box, who held a scrap of paper in one hand. With the other hand, the man was trying to pick the lock with a wire. He was intent on the business.
Sagebrush walked up to the man and drew back and gave the fellow an enthusiastic kick. Various things then happened, none of them expected.
THE crouching man squawked, sailed completely over the box, turned in the air and landed facing Sagebrush Smith.
Sagebrush then got a look at the man and had the impression that he had kicked a bull baboon.
The paper the man had been holding fluttered away into the sagebrush.
The baboon of a man sailed back over the box and hit Sagebrush Smith. Hit him, to the salty cowhand's everlasting mortification, before Sagebrush could draw his six-shooter.
The punch combined electricity and dynamite. Sagebrush saw strange lights, suspected he was swapping ends in the air, and found himself flat on the ground.
Sagebrush unleathered his six-gun and threw lead. His first bullet went into the sand, the second went toward the moon, and he wasn't sure about the next two. However, they must have come close to the apish man, because the latter turned and sought safety. He reached the tall sage and vanished by the simple expedient of bending double.
His head had cleared, so Sagebrush bounded up and charged after the stranger. The fellow had been at least a foot and a half shorter than Sagebrush, and the latter resented being knocked on his ear by such a sawed-off specimen.
However, for a man whose legs appeared to be a good deal shorter than his arms, the stranger made remarkable time.
Sagebrush did not get another glimpse of him.
The Lazy Y rannys and their husky foreman, Hoke McGee, had arrived by that time, looking puzzled and demanding to know what had happened.
"I just met," Sagebrush explained, "a spook with hair on his chest." He felt of his jaw and grimaced. "The homeliest dang jigger I ever seen!"
Following which he made pointed inquiries about whether or not the Lazy Y had hired any new hands during his absence, and because he was so plainly in an irritated mood, he got civil answers. Sagebrush became convinced that the short, apish marauder was as much a stranger to the Lazy Y men as to himself.
"Wait a minute!" Hoke exclaimed. "Two strange dudes sifted through here the day after you left. One of 'em was a feller built with kind of a thin waist like a mud-dauber and dressed fancy as Mrs. Astor's horse. Hell, he even carried a cane!"
"This galoot that erupted on me didn't look nothin' like that," Sagebrush grunted.
"Yeah, but there was an hombre with this fashion plate," said Hoke McGee, "that was dang nigh as wide as he was tall, had rusty-lookin' hair over 'im, and a face that was somethin' to stop a clock. After he left, one of the rannys looked in the dictionary under orang-outang and found somethin' that looked like 'im."
"That's my honeybunch!" said Sagebrush.
A Lazy Y cowboy chuckled. "Don't forget," he said, "the pig and the monkey them two fellers had along."
"The what?" said Sagebrush.
"They had two pets," said the cowboy. "A pig and a monkey. Anyhow, I guess it was a monkey. There was some argument about that."
Sagebrush Smith rubbed his jaw again. "This is sure a funny world."
"Those two men," said Hoke McGee, "were lookin' for some gent named Meander Surett."
Sagebrush stopped rubbing his jaw. "Huh?"
"Meander Surett, they called him."
"Why, dang it, that's the old geezer who gave me the box and gold—" Sagebrush swallowed. He hadn't intended to say even that much.
He would have done much better to have gone ahead with explanations, because Hoke McGee had made a serious error. Hoke had misunderstood the fragment of a sentence. He thought Sagebrush had said "box of gold."
SAGEBRUSH SMITH did some cogitating, after which he got himself a good-sized club and went looking for his donkeys. He had discovered that the jackasses would stand and let him catch them if he carried a club, but would run like rabbits if he was empty-handed.
Having captured one of the donkeys, the cowboy lashed his box to the back of the animal. This was work, but he didn't want to leave the box lying around, even for a few minutes; not even while he rode out to have a look at his back trail before it got dark.
Sagebrush's examination of his back trail showed him that two men, two burros, one pig and one monkey had tracked him out of the desert to the Lazy Y ranch. The two men were evidently better at hiding footprints than he was at following them, because he failed to find them before night fell.
Somewhat puzzled, Sagebrush went back toward the Lazy Y ranch house. Two men had followed him out of the desert. Not the slightest doubt of that. He frowned. He never had been quite able to convince himself that old Meander Surett had been insane. Of course, the poor old man had been mentally unbalanced during the last weeks of his life, but as for prior to that, there was a question in Sagebrush's mind. And thinking of the dying old man's wild and repeated insistence that there had been some one watching him. . . . Sagebrush got out his gun and gave it a grim examination.
"I'm gonna do some ventilatin' the next time I see either of them jaspers!" he declared.
Reaching the Lazy Y ranch house, Sagebrush unloaded the chest, and it was while doing this that something came back to him. He snapped his fingers gravely.
"Dang!" he said. "I forgot all about that paper!"
He borrowed a flashlight from the scowling Lazy Y foreman, went to the spot where he had caught the mysterious, apish gentleman examining the box, and searched industriously for half an hour before he found what he wanted—the sheet of paper the apish fellow had dropped. Considering that it was obviously only part of a communication, it was interesting:
—theories undoubtedly substantiated, the belief being held by others besides Thomas A. Edison. The Edison experiments were unfortunately begun late in that great man's career, and were interrupted by the gifted inventor's death. I mention this because the work of these scientists was the starting point for my own.
The contents of the metal case cannot be considered of anything less than world-shaking importance.
The case is of vault steel, the type which is impervious to cutting torches. It is a foot and a half deep, two feet wide and three feet one inch in length. The lock is the best obtainable.
There had originally been much more to the communication, apparently, but it ended there. This segment had been torn from the rest, top and bottom, evidently by using a ruler as a straight edge.
SAGEBRUSH folded the paper, stowed it in a pocket and went to contemplate the box. He was having an attack of intense curiosity about the contents, but unless he was mistaken, the metal case would be harder to crack than a safe.
He was sitting on the box dragging at a cigarette when hoofbeats rattled up to the Lazy Y corral. Sagebrush shifted so that his gun was handier. He needn't have bothered. It was only the Lazy Y wrangatang, who had ridden to town for the mail.