THE SUICIDE SLAYING
The storm on the horizon threatened with hollow thunder for the rest of the night, but did not materialize. Morning sun brought silence to the owls—they had not resumed their hooting for nearly an hour after the visit of the monsters. Meadowlarks, bobolinks, and thrushes greeted the dawn. The rays of the sun turned into glistering jewels the dew which dappled the leaves and grass.
Doc and his men inspected the plane. It lay in shallow water, close inshore. One wing was askew, almost ripped off. The stout metal fuselage was dented, crushed. Propellers were bent.
“They sure wrecked the bus!” Monk exploded.
Doc Savage went over the ship, seeking clews. But if there had been signs of any, the lake water had removed them.
He studied the size of the holes which had been beaten in the fuselage. They were nearly large enough to permit a man to crawl inside. The thin alloy metal had parted under the impact of great blows as if it had been paper.
“The things have an almost fantastic strength,” Doc commented.
He gave his attention to the tracks which were imbedded in the beach sand and in the softer woodland loam.
“The prints seem to have been made with a substance as unyielding as steel,” he declared. “A flesh-and-blood foot would show some change in configuration.”
He went over the scene thoroughly. Deep in the tangled brush beyond the camp, whence had charged the monster which had flung the rock, Doc found a clew. It proved that their visitants of the night had not been metal robots of titanic proportions.
The clew was a crimson fluid. The red stuff was spilled over leaves, and across the grass for a short distance.
The monster had apparently snagged itself on a limb.
Doc Savage spent half the morning going over the vicinity. Satisfied at last that he was going to unearth nothing, he scrutinized the remains of Bruno Hen’s cabin. He spent an hour at that job, but found nothing of value.
They visited Carl MacBride’s cabin, and Doc went through MacBride’s belongings. The inspection revealed that Carl MacBride had no near relatives.
“That’s a relief!” muttered homely Monk, who had entertained visions of the unpleasant task of informing some one close to Carl MacBride that the man was dead. Such jobs usually fell upon Monk.
Doc and his party went back to their camp-site, packed their equipment in tump-line rigs, and set out to walk the five miles to Trapper Lake.
* * * *
They covered half of the five miles, and came upon a grassy glade surrounded by a dense growth of conifers. The group were crossing this when Doc flung himself face downward.
“Drop!” he rapped.
The others had only time to sag their jaws in astonishment before a short, shrill whistle knifed at their eardrums.
Every man flattened; they knew that sound. It meant the passage of a high-powered rifle bullet. The grass was almost knee-high. Prone in it, the men could not be seen at a distance of more than fifty feet.
“Spread out, brothers,” Doc directed. “He’s liable to try random shots into the grass.”
“How’d you locate him, Doc?” Monk called.
Not getting an answer, Monk angled over to find Doc, with the intention of putting the question again. But the bronze man was not to be found.
Doc, at the moment, was scores of yards away. He traveled swiftly, almost against the ground.
Another bullet made a loud buzzing sound through the grass.
Doc’s discovery of the rifleman had been no accident. For the previous mile of their progress, the bronze man had noticed a marked lack of bird life. To his trained eye, this indicated some one was moving ahead of them and had frightened the feathered creatures away. Accordingly, he kept his eyes open.
He had sighted the bushwhacker’s rifle as the fellow aimed.
The rifleman had a plain white handkerchief tied over his face.
Doc gained the edge of the clearing. Not until he was well into the conifers did he arise. A mighty Nemesis of bronze, he circled to flank the attacker.
He was unsuccessful. The rifle wielder, suspecting his shots had missed, had fled. He could be heard plunging through the brush.
Doc Savage, heading across to intercept the man, found his path barred by a great thicket of brambles. Large trees grew out of the thorny maze. Their branches almost interlocked in spots.
Scarcely slackening his running pace, the bronze man hurtled upward in a great leap. His hands clamped a low limb, and the momentum of his leap carried him over. With an acrobatic agility he landed atop the limb, maintaining a perfect balance.
He remained there so briefly, however, as to seem not to pause at all. He swung up and out, caught another limb, and repeated the process until he stood among the topmost branches.
He glided out on a bough and sprang into space. An onlooker, not knowing the tremendous quality of the bronze man’s muscles, would have felt he was committing suicide. Doc’s hands found the branch of another tree. He went on through the aerial lanes.
His progress involved Herculean exertion, but he was probably traveling as swiftly as the fleeing rifleman.
Beyond the brambles, Doc dropped to the earth. He was on his quarry’s trail. His path led through tangled brush, through thickets of stunted evergreen.
They descended a sharp slope. A sluggish stream appeared, wide and shallow. At one point, a log had fallen across the water. The bushwhacker’s trail led directly to the log.
Doc Savage reached the log and stopped.
The water beneath the log was only a few inches deep, and it overlay unpleasant-looking sand. This sand was riled, disturbed.
At one point, great bubbles were rising and bursting.
* * * *
Quicksand! And the bubbles arising might mean some one had fallen in. Or it might mean that Doc’s quarry had dropped a rock into the treacherous sand, in an effort to pull a trick.
Doc’s eyes ranged the log. It was covered with a green moss. This was undisturbed. The bushwhacker had not walked across; and nowhere was the quicksand stream narrow enough to leap.
Doc gazed around. There were no limbs to which the fugitive might have sprung to hide his tracks.
The opposite bank of the stream was a wall of brush and small trees, and beyond lay thick timber. To gain refuge, the bushwhacker would have had to take wing.
The fellow was in the quicksand. No doubt of it!
From Doc’s clothing came the silken cord and grappling hook which he so frequently found of use. He doubled the cord twice, and took a loop around the log.
Monk and the others came up. They were scratched; their clothing was torn. Ham’s immaculate garb hung in tatters. They had evidently had a tough time with the brier thicket.
“Hey, Doc!” Long Tom yelled in horror. “You ain’t gonna go into that stuff, I hope!”
Doc did not reply. He knotted the ends of the silk cords around a wrist and tied them securely, allowing just enough line to prevent his arm sinking below the surface.
The giant bronze man dropped into the quicksand. As he had expected, the stuff was very loose and liquid. This accounted for the quick disappearance of the bushwhacker.
Doc churned about. He had no trouble sinking in the stuff. The difficulties would come when he sought to extricate himself.
His feet soon found a yielding form. He worked at this, and got it clamped between his knees.
Then came the laborious job of hoisting himself. It was a terrific task, even for Doc’s matchless strength. Very slowly—his rising was hardly perceptible to the eye—he lifted himself and his prize.
Great tendons, which were normally part of the symmetrical mold of his arms, stood out in tremendous fashion. His arms might have been corded with steel bars. Perspiration rivulets wriggled down his bronze skin, and mixed with water which covered the quicksand.
The sand made unlovely bubbling noises. Doc’s men waited on the bank above. Monk had to be restrained from wading out into the quicksand, with the idea that he might be of some assistance.
At last, Doc lifted the bushwhacker free of the quicksand. He carried the fellow out and laid him on the bank. The man’s handkerchief mask was gone now.
It was Caldwell, the slayer of Carl MacBride. A knife hilt stood out from his chest.
* * * *
In a dazed fashion, the gaunt Johnny fumbled with his monocle magnifier.
“The knife—this fellow was murdered!” he gasped. “Is he the same man who fired upon us?”
“The same,” Doc replied.
“Weren’t there any other tracks around?”
Instead of replying, Doc stood erect and ran across the log which spanned the quicksand. He entered the thick bushes on the opposite bank. There he found the explanation of the knife in Caldwell’s heart.
Tracks! There was the print of a large foot encased in pac-type shoes. The maker of the print had stood for some time.
Doc followed the pac trail of Caldwell’s killer. It was a short procedure. A hundred yards to the right, the quicksand brook joined a larger stream. The murderer had entered a canoe.
Doc worked up the stream, then down. He studied the fish, for the water was clear, trying to ascertain in which direction the finny denizens had been frightened to cover by the passage of the canoe. It was not this, but the absence of turtles from logs, that gave him his clew. The killer had gone downstream.
Doc set out in that direction.
A low pop-pop-pop came from ahead—an outboard motor.
Ten minutes later Doc gave it up. He could not hope to overhaul a canoe fitted with an outboard.
He rejoined his men. They had the contents of Caldwell’s pockets spread out on the grass. These consisted of a penknife, cartridges for a rifle, a case of cigarettes, and a sheet of yellow paper which had evidently been torn from a grocery wrapper.
Three words were written on the paper:
THE DEATH MILL
“What in blazes do you reckon that means?” Monk demanded.
They left the body of Caldwell where it lay. As a death shroud, Monk and Ham contributed what the brier thicket had left of their coats.
It did not take them long to reach Trapper Lake.
“Not such a hot-lookin’ town,” Monk decided.
Changing the subject impolitely, Ham pondered aloud, “But why was Caldwell murdered?”
“Probably because we knew his identity,” Doc replied.
“But he was masked when he shot at us.”
“We saw his face when he killed Carl MacBride in New York,” Doc reminded. “That made him a liability to his gang. He was a definite individual for whom we could hunt.”
“Wonder if Pere Teston killed him,” pale Long Tom muttered thoughtfully.
Doc did not reply.
They worked their way through the business section of Trapper Lake. This was spread along a single street.
Doc entered a general store. In slightly over a minute, he was outside again.
“You fellows wait here,” he directed.
Ham waved his sword cane. “But what——”
He withheld the rest. Doc Savage had already vaulted a wooden fence and set out across lots.
In the general store, Doc had asked about a spot called The Death Mill. This place, it seemed, was an old grist mill on the outskirts of town. The ominous place had been deserted for years, it seemed, ever since the former owner had been caught in the grinding stone and crushed to death. Hence the name—The Death Mill.
Doc sighted the dilapidated structure. Mischievous boys had knocked planks off the walls; the roof had shed shingles, as if it had the mange.
Doc took to roadside brush as he drew near. He circled the mill warily, for he could hear sounds from within—nervous pacing.
A man came to the ramshackle door and stood looking out. It was fat Griswold Rock, who had vowed he was on his way to Europe when Doc had last seen him!