"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 101 - The Green Eagle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

They weren’t that funny, he thought. He had hunted elk on the highest mountain peaks in Wyoming, and
the only difference he had noticed was that you had to do a lot of breathing to get your air.

Albert Panzer bent and picked something off the ground. "Here, don’t forget this," he said.

Ben looked at the object.

"Huh?" he said.

"You dropped it," Panzer explained.
"I did?"

"It was lying on your chest," Panzer added.

Ben took the thing. He was interested. The thing was about five inches square and half an inch thick. It
was one of those puzzles where you roll BB-shot into holes. There were—he struck a match and
counted them—ten shot, and ten holes for them. Bottom and sides were tin; the top was glass. There
was a picture of an eagle, and the holes for the shot were in that. The eagle was green, with yellow beak,
yellow talons. There was a verse. A rather goofy verse. It read:

Hand and eye, wandering,

Down and down, pondering,

Up and up, meandering,

North face,

Wins race.

The match he was holding burned Ben Duck’s fingers, and he dropped it, yelped and sucked a finger.
"That poetry?" he asked.

"It’s kind of punk poetry," Albert Panzer said.

"And it was lying on my chest?"

"Yes."

"Very remarkable," Ben Duck said.

Remarkable might not be the word for it; strange might be a better one. One sure thing, he had never
seen that puzzle gadget before. He shook it, and the buckshot rattled around and two of them fell into
holes. He said, "It’s an easy puzzle, ain’t it?" He put the thing inside his shirt, after finding it was a little too
large for any of his pockets.

There was a flashlight in one of the saddlebags. Ben used light from this to examine the ground very
carefully. Albert Panzer was made curious by Ben’s search. "I lost a dime around somewhere," Ben said.
The statement was not true. He wondered why he was deceiving Panzer.