"071 (B066) - Mad Mesa (1939-01) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

The other three men dashed forward.
But before they reached the van, the engine gave a louder roar and the thing leaped. A leap was the only way to describe the way it moved. It seemed to jump—into the crack.
There was a crash. A burst of gory red flame as gasoline exploded. Then smoke.
And then screams. Awful, agonized screams. Shrieks of death—in Heek's voice.
The three gunmen stopped as if embedded in invisible ice.
"Heek!"
"Heek didn't get out of the truck!"
The death shrieks took only a short time to come to an end.
A man croaked again, "Heek didn't get out!"
"The door on that side was hard to open," another muttered. "He musta forgot that!"
For moments they were held petrified, the accident having gone off in their faces with the unexpectedness of a gunshot. Then the same idea hit them all at about the same time. Get out of here! Leave the spot before anything else went wrong.
They ran like wolves caught in a sheepfold.
Behind them, red flame and yellow-black smoke continued to boil out of the great fiery crack into which the truck had plunged. There was the smell of burned rubber with the natural sulphur stench of the smoldering coalfields. There was a screaming whistle as the truck spare tire let loose.
But in time, these sights and sounds and smells ceased, and there was nothing to show that a truck had gone into the crack except the tracks of the vehicle, which of course would be plainly discernible with daylight.
Deep in the crack, where the superheated gases came out from smoldering coal that underlay the surroundings, in the very depths of the crack where there were rocks that glowed always whitehot, and other rocks that had melted and become lava, there was a dirty-looking, semi-liquid mess.
Heek had been right. No one would ever recognize that mess as a big van which had contained Doc Savage, his five aids, and a waitress whose fingers itched for money—and Heek himself.
It only looked as if someone had junked an old jalopy by rolling it into the crack.
Chapter VII. TWO TRAILS TO TROUBLE
THE three killers ran until they remembered that their fast pace would seem strange if anyone heard them, after which they walked. There was not much talk. They had seen death, and the sight had taken their words.
Once one of the men cried out in horror. That was when an owl said,
" Huh-huh-hoo-o-o!" and the sound seemed like nothing that could have been. The night was as black as a bat's idea of Valhalla, and such was the state of their minds that the men used their flashlights sparingly. They were cold with horror. They felt as men always feel when it is too late, particularly too late to do anything about a murder. At this moment, they would have paid high for the chance to live their lives over.
And so they came to a filling station, where they conferred; then one man went ahead into the station, leaving the others behind. He made a telephone call. The man tried to be funny.
"Dr. Joiner's operation," he said, "was a success."
His mirth sounded like a rattle of skeleton bones.
"You sound," growled the voice of the black-gloved man known as Dr. Joiner, "like a buzzard that has just laid a square egg."
"Heek got killed."
If there happened to be a telephone girl listening in on that conversation, she probably never forgot the profanity she heard.
Later, the man who had telephoned went back to the other two.
"The boss blistered the paint about what happened to Heek," he said.
"It wasn't our fault."
"I know. I told 'im that. He finally said he guessed it was worth what happened to Heek to get everything back in running order."
The other two shivered.
"I'd hate to think," one muttered, "that anything was worth my neck."
"They fight wars over nothin'," the other said thoughtfully. "But you take us—we're gonna get more outa this than a lotta people think they're gonna get when they're fightin' their wars."
The third man snorted disgustedly.
"If you two philosophers will follow me," he said, "we'll go find a depot and wait for the first westbound train."
"What about Tom Idle's sister?"
"We pick her up and take her with us. The boss says we'll hold her, on account of we can threaten to hurt the girl and keep Tom Idle quiet."
The three birds of a feather descended the road into a valley and found a village railway station. They sat in the station and waited.
Doc Savage could see the three men through the depot windows.
DOC waited in silence until Renny joined them. The big-fisted engineer had gone to ask train times.
"Holy cow, there's no westbound train for almost two hours," Renny reported. "They'll just sit there for that time."
"Let us get everybody together for a minute," Doc Savage suggested.
They moved away from a sidetracked boxcar, from which concealment they had been watching the depot, and crept silently to a spot in a brush patch a hundred yards away, where a sheep went, " Ba-a-a-a!"
"
All right, Monk," Doc whispered.
Ham said, "Monk sounds very natural as a goat, don't he?"
"That wasn't a goat," Monk hissed. "It was a sheep."
"You put too much of your own personality into it, then," Ham assured him.
Johnny and Long Tom shushed the pair of perpetual quarrelers. Doc Savage and all five assistants then gathered in a close group.