THE STONE MAN.
A Doc Savage Adventure.
by Kenneth Robeson.
Chapter I. BAD MAN FLEEING.
SPAD AMES was a man who was an authority on certain subjects, and concerning the matters on which he was posted, he knew just about everything that was to be known, which was undoubtedly fortunate, because otherwise they would have hanged Mr. Spad Ames a long time ago.
His specialty was avoiding the law.
His specialty certainly was not stone men. Not only was he not posted on stone men; he would not have believed such stuff. Spad was a realist.
He would have looked at you with those cold lobster eyes of his and said, doubtless: "Stone men-ah, get t"h.e.l.l away from me! That"s crazy talk."
The phenomena-the word phenomena was a mild description of it too-came to Spad Ames"
attention in a round-about way, and when he was not expecting anything like men of stone. As for the additional developments, which were hair-raising enough to make the stone-man business seem believable by comparison, Spad wasn"t expecting those, either.In keeping with his habit of knowing much about certain subjects, Spad Ames had calculated that the United States Border Patrol plane for that part of the Arizona-Mexico border would be safely grounded in El Paso on Friday. This was not entirely guesswork on Spad Ames" part; he had taken a precaution of pouring acid into the gasoline tank of the Border Patrol plane, so that engine valves and pistons would be eaten into a useless state.
But the Border Patrol dealt unkindly with Spad Ames, and double-crossed him by transferring another plane, a new and fast craft equipped with two machine guns, to that portion of the Mexican Border Patrol.
It was two o"clock in the afternoon when this new type Patrol craft sighted Spad Ames" plane.
"The dirty blankety-blank sons of black-eyed toads," was the mildest thing that Spad Ames said during the next few minutes.
Waldo Berlitz was less voluble, not being a fellow who talked a great deal. Waldo was a thick man and a wide one, and extraordinarily handsome, except that one of his ears was missing. A Mexican gentleman had removed the ear with a sharp knife a year or two ago, during the natural trend of a discussion about the Mexican"s missus. A man less of a gentleman than the Mexican would have inserted the blade between Waldo"s third and fourth ribs.
Waldo Berlitz was the other half of the smuggling combination of Spad Ames and Waldo Berlitz.
"How fast will this thing fly?" was all Waldo had to say.
Not fast enough, it developed. The Border Patrol craft was a late job, and it began overhauling them.
"There is a cloud over west," Waldo said, pointing. "We better get in it and unload."
Spad Ames nodded grimly. He was scared.
PART of their cargo-two cases of narcotics-would not have been such a problem. The narcotics were in powder form, and they would have spilled the incriminating stuff overboard, thus ridding themselves of the evidence.
The refugee-the, other part of their cargo-was a different proposition. They needed a cloud to get rid of him. The refugee was a poor fellow from Austria who hadn"t been able to obtain a visa to enter the United States, so he had paid Spad Ames a thousand dollars to be smuggled in. The refugee crouched in the cabin, pale and somewhat airsick.
The cloud was not large. White and fleecy, it hung all alone in the hot vastness of the Arizona sky. It was somewhat like a lost sheep.
Spad Ames dived his ship into the cloud.
"Work fast," he yelled at Waldo.
Waldo said to the refugee: "Get down on the cabin floor." As the refugee obeyed, Waldo struck him with a monkey wrench, hitting several times so that some of the contents of the upper part of the refugee"s head stuck to the wrench.
With great speed, Waldo then rolled the refugee"s body through a trapdoor in the floor of the plane. The trapdoor had been put there for the specific purpose of jettisoning cargo according to the old Number One rule of smuggling-first get rid of the evidence. Waldo also hurled the wrench overboard.There was good reason for Waldo"s speed. They needed to get the job done while their plane and the pursuing ship were hidden in the cloud.
The cloud was even smaller than it had seemed, and with sickening unexpectedness, the two planes popped out of the other side.
The pursuing Border Patrol got an excellent view of the body falling from Spad Ames" craft.
An officer even leaned from a window of the Border Patrol ship and took pictures of the scene with a miniature camera. The photograph would show the falling body, and the identification numbers of Spad Ames" ship.
Spad Ames opened and shut his mouth. For suddenly he was sick with terror. Trapped, not for smuggling, but for murder!
Waldo came back and sat down and asked: "Do they use a gas chamber, the electric chair or the rope in Arizona? I"ve forgotten."
If Waldo was trying to be funny, it was a raw time for a gag, Spad thought.
Spad Ames was a long man who slouched when he walked and frequently glanced back. He had a weather-beaten red face, an unusually high forehead-sign of receding hair, not brains, although he had brains, too-and in addition to the cold lobster eyes, he had a mouth so lipless that, when seen from a distance of a few yards, he appeared to have no mouth. Spad was a bad actor himself, but sometimes he was afraid of Waldo Berlitz, who gave the impression of never seeming to think the way a normal man should. Nothing Waldo planned to do ever seemed to worry him, and he never appeared concerned after he did it.
Spad Ames banked around and sent their plane back into the clouds. The Border Patrol ship fired on them, its machine guns thrusting out long whiskerlike processions of tracer bullets which came disturbingly close.
A cloud game of hide-and-seek then lasted about half an hour.
Spad Ames would have liked to flee toward Mexico; he got no chance. And finally when a faint bank of clouds appeared, far to the north, he made for that refuge in desperation. Luck, which distributes favors evenly to saint and devil, gave them a long start on the Border Patrol plane; their pursuer wandered around in the cloud for some time after they left before sighting them and taking chase.
Spad Ames peered backward, then batted his throttle open to the last notch.
"How many horsepower is this motor?" Waldo asked.
"Six hundred and sixty horses," said Spad. His face was the color of a concrete road.
"Come on, horses!" said Waldo.
The clouds got closer, and so did the Patrol ship. The latter climbed slowly, then suddenly dived, and its machine guns shook their iron rumps and cackled.
The storm of lead caused some of the instrument panel to jump out in Spad"s lap. But the plane kept flying. It got into the clouds.
These clouds were thin, and the Border Patrol ship managed to follow them for all of three hours, part ofwhich time they flew back and forth and up and down, and the rest of the time flying straight ahead at full speed.
Finally, they lost the Border Patrol plane.
"Where are we now?" Waldo asked.
"How would I know?" Spad Ames snarled. "The compa.s.s was shot to pieces."
SPAD AMES was in a bad temper in spite of their escape from the Border Patrol officers who had photographed them committing a murder. For a few moments, he had been elated. Then he had noticed that the needle of the fuel gauge was knocking against the pin on the empty side.
Waldo tried placidly to light a cigarette, but the bullet holes in their ship let in such a draft that he could not make a match function.
"Oh, well," he said, and discarded the cigarette.
The engine faltered in its roaring. For a few seconds, it sounded like a motorcycle. Then it stopped.
"What goes on?" Waldo asked.
"Get the parachutes!" Spad Ames barked. "We"re out of gas."
The plane went whistling down out of the clouds in a long glide while Waldo ambled back to get the parachutes. Waldo returned empty-handed.
"Full of holes," he reported.
"What?" screamed Spad.
"I said," explained Waldo, "that our parachutes were hit by a burst of machine-gun bullets from that Border Patrol plane, and they"re full of holes. You can use one of them if you want to. I don"t think I will."
Spad Ames" mouth worked, but he was too sick with terror to get out words. He could only level an arm, indicating the terrain below.
An aviator"s nightmare. At first glance, there did not appear to be a spot where a hawk could have landed, much less a plane. Everything was straight up and down, and came to points. There did not, from this height-the height was rapidly growing less-appear to be a shred of vegetation anywhere.
"We"re over the Grand Canyon badlands somewhere, it seems to me," Waldo said.
The colors of the earth were mostly yellow, pale orange and chocolate.
Spad Ames banked clear of the spiked tip of the first peak. He avoided other peaks. There seemed to be miles of canyon s.p.a.ce below him, although undoubtedly it was no more than two or three thousand feet. There seemed to be fog down here, and compared to the fairly bright late afternoon sunlight on the peaks, the gloom was that of night, or of an infinite cavern. At least, it was an unpleasant place-and a strange place for fog.
It was horrible. The human body is so const.i.tuted that it does not actually sweat blood, which was probably a good thing for Spad Ames. He would have perspired himself dry of the vital fluid."Spad-" Waldo said.
Spad Ames was surging up in the bucket seat and straining against the safety belt like a man being electrocuted. He couldn"t say anything.
"-pick a soft spot," Waldo requested.
Waldo scrambled back in the cabin and scooped up cushions and the ruined parachute packs and fashioned a crash pad in front of himself, a preparation which he had barely completed when the plane began knocking itself to pieces on the rocks.
SPAD AMES had been knocked senseless a number of times during his h.e.l.l-colored past, and on each of these occasions his period of blankness had been made hideous by nightmares of being shoved into a gas chamber of type used in some states to execute criminals. He had once witnessed such an execution, and apparently it had given him a permanent case of the subconscious creeps.
Now, when Spad Ames regained his senses and realized that his mind had been a blank, and not haunted by gas-chamber nightmares, his first frightened conclusion was that he had died. The fact that his eyes were seeing only complete darkness heightened the possibility that he was now a disembodied soul.
"h.e.l.l and d.a.m.nation!" he snarled.
Sound of his own robust profanity made the situation more real. He reached out, and found twisted metal with his fingers. He seemed to be lying under a portion of the mangled plane.
There was sand underneath. He dug with his hands, made room to use his arms, then heaved. Metal grunted, whined and shifted a little. He kept trying. Some time later, he managed to crawl out.
There were matches in his pockets, so he struck them and searched, but did not find any trace of Waldo Berlitz. However, part of the plane was buried deep in the sand.
"Waldo must be mashed under there," Spad muttered. "Serves the dirty buzzard right."
Spad Ames had never liked Waldo Berlitz, and he"d held a suspicion that the feeling was mutual.
Spad wandered away for a few rods, trying to ascertain in exactly what surroundings the plane had crashed. He could see stars overhead, but apparently there were great sheer walls everywhere else. The air was dry, and rather hot. Nothing whatever seemed to grow in the vicinity; at least, Spad Ames did not stumble over anything in the darkness that resembled a growing plant.
When he came back to the plane, he saw Waldo Berlitz at once. Waldo was sitting on a rock, examining a black arrowhead by the light of a match.
There was something strange about Waldo"s manner.
Chapter II. STONE MAN BURNING.
THE sand was soft-the plane had fallen in the bed of a canyon-and Spad Ames managed to approach without making any particular sound until he could look at the arrowhead which Waldo was inspecting.
The arrowhead, about the length of Waldo"s longest finger, was thin and streamlined. It had striking perfection of line. Its color was black, a peculiar polished kind of black.
Spad had intended to speak up and ask why the infernal blazes Waldo had gone off and left him, Spad, pinned under the wrecked plane. But he held his words. Waldo, unaware that Spad stood behind him,was showing a distinctly peculiar curiosity in the arrowhead.
The match went out, and Waldo struck another with almost frantic eagerness. Indian arrowheads were plentiful through the West, and Spad had seen Waldo kick a number of them contemptuously with a boot toe in the past. So Waldo"s absorption in this particular arrowhead seemed strange.
"It stopped the river," he muttered.
This remark did nothing to enlighten Spad Ames. He stood there, puzzled, watching Waldo turn the arrowhead over and over in his hands and peer at it as if the thing were some kind of a puzzle.
"It stopped the river," Waldo repeated to himself.
Then he began to swear. Waldo was cursing his inability to understand why the arrowhead had stopped a river, Spad Ames realized, and this did not contribute much toward clarifying the growing mystery.
Spad Ames decided to ask questions; he stepped around boldly into the match light. Waldo yelped in astonishment and the nervous jerk of his fingers sent the match arching in the darkness.
"You"re kind of jumpy, ain"t you?" Spad suggested.
"I-uh-" Waldo said, swallowing.
It was the first time Spad had ever seen Waldo speechless.
"By the way," Spad continued, "what is that thing you were looking at? Arrowhead, isn"t it?"
"Oh-just a piece of rock," Waldo said, far too quickly.
"You generally do a better job than that of lying, Waldo."
"It was only a rock."
"Let"s see."