"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 002 - The Land of Terror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Jerome Coffern waved an arm at the bronze man.

Doc Savage saw him and waved back.

Jerome Coffern hurried forward. He walked with a boyish eagerness. The path he traversed took him through
high, dense shrubbery. The bronze figure of Doc Savage was lost to sight.

Suddenly two ratty men lunged from the shrubs.

Before Jerome Coffern could cry an alarm, he was knocked unconscious.



THE blow which reduced the white-haired chemist to senselessness was delivered with a bludgeon of iron
pipe about a foot long. The smash probably fractured distinguished Jerome Coffern’s skull. He fell heavily to
the concrete walk, right arm outflung to one side.

"Put the pipe on top of the body!" hissed one ratty man.

"O. K., Squint!" muttered the other man.
He placed the iron-pipe bludgeon on the chest of prone Jerome Coffern, thrusting one end inside the famous
chemist’s waistcoat so it would stay there.

The two rodentlike men now retreated a pace. They were excited. A trembling racked their bony, starved
hands. Nervous swallowing chased the Adam’s apples up and down their stringy necks. The rough,
unwashed skin of those necks gave them a turtle aspect.

Squint dived an emaciated claw inside his shirt. The hand clutched convulsively and drew out a strange pistol.
This was larger even than a big army automatic. It had two barrels, one the size of a pencil, the other a steel
cylinder more than an inch in diameter. The barrels were placed one above the other.

At prone Jerome Coffern’s chest, Squint aimed the weapon.

"H-hurry up!" stuttered his companion. The man twitched uneasy glances over the adjacent shrubbery. No
one was in sight.

Squint pulled the trigger of the strange pistol. It made a report exactly like a sharp human cough.

An air pistol!

That accounted for the two barrels, one of which, the larger, was in reality the chamber which held the
compressed air that fired the gun.

The missile from the air pistol struck the center of Jerome Coffern’s chest.

Instantly a puff of grayish vapor arose. It was as though a small cloud of cigarette smoke had escaped from
the chemist’s body at that point.

No sound of an explosion accompanied the phenomena, however. There was only the dull impact of the air