"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 139 - Weird Valley" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

“Sure, I'm serious. Anyway, it's the truth. I guess that's what you mean.”

“If you're lying, we're going to find it out,” Monk warned.

“If! If!” The old man snorted. “Why say if? Just say you know I'm lying, why don't you?”

Monk told him patiently, “Look, Pop, we're giving you the benefit of the doubt, at the expense of making
fools out of ourselves. So why not coöperate?”

“Coöperate how?”

“Tell us just who you claim to be, and what's on your mind.”

The old man popped a hand on a knee. “By cracky, why didn't you say that before! That's what I came
here to do. Now you two kids just sit back and listen.”



HIS proper name, said the old gentleman, was Christopher Brown, and he was born in Colonial Salem in
the year 1654. These were the days when old puritanical Salem was at its worst, when the burning for
witchcraft was in full sway. Christopher Brown had apparently been a young man who sowed a wild oat
or two, and was a non-conformist, as well as a practical joker.

His practical joking got him into trouble at the age of twenty. This was the year 1674, on November 24,
when he was charged with holding conversations with the Devil. This was all an outgrowth of a plain lie
which he had told as a joke.

“What made me maddest,” said Methuselah Brown, “was that what really got me in the mess was saying
that the Devil appeared to me as a gentleman, a fellow in genteel clothes and with decent manners. That
really set those old Puritan witch-chasers up on their ears. The result was that I had to get busy as heck,
tell another bunch of lies, and convince them I was fibbing in the first place. They took this witchcraft
seriously in those days.”

He warmed up on the subject.

“Why, the year before, in 1673, a poor girl named Eunice Cole was tried on a charge of associating with
the Devil. There was a whole cycle of Devil-meets-girl about that time, and—”

“How clearly do you remember all this?” Ham interrupted.

“Clear enough. Why?”

“With enough distinctness to describe Salem as it was in those days, and the people who lived there?”

“Sure.”

“Put on your hat,” Ham said briskly. “And if you're not lying, we'll darn soon know about it.”

Monk trailed along downstairs. Doc Savage's office was on the eighty-sixth floor of one of the prominent