"Doc Savage Adventure 1935-12 The Fantastic Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

"Hard alee!" Monk squalled. "Engines reversed!"

The fantastic red light went out.

"Did you see?" Ham gasped in the silence that followed. "There must be two dozen ships, big and little, wrecked all around us."

"And the devil only knows where we are," Monk gulped. "I'm gonna back this boat, turn around, get outta here an' wait for daylight."

"A whole graveyard of wrecked ships," Pat gasped. "Red lightning that smells of sulphur!"

Pat's voice sounded, it seemed, rather cheerful.

"You always did like trouble, didn't you?" Monk grunted at her.

"And mystery," Pat added. "I eat it up."

There must have been a tide that carried the Seven Seas to one side, or something. They were in reverse, exactly retracing the course they had been sailing, when it happened.

A curling wave lifted the bow of the Seven Seas high in the water and hurled it down. The yacht shuddered with a wrenching shock that knocked Monk and Ham sprawling on the wet deck. There was a nightmare of grinding and scrapings as steel plates were wrenched from the hull by jagged coral.

Caught fast on the submerged reef, the craft did not rise with the next wave. She heeled half over instead, with a groaning of tortured steel; and the wave washed in an avalanche of water over the deck.

Ham and Monk were battered against the anchor winch. They staggered up, half drowned, to claw their way toward the bridge.

"Aid Pat, if she needs it," Monk bellowed. "Me, I'm goin' for Habeas Corpus!"

Habeas Corpus was Monk's cherished pet pig. He never went anywhere without the animal, much to Ham's disgust and frequent infuriation.

A streak of light, blue-white, darted from the Seven Sea's bridge, knifed across the rock-fanged water.

"Turn that searchlight off," Ham shouted to Pat, as he went down again under a drenching cross-wave.

"It'll help us see to swim ashore," Pat protested.

"It'll draw sharks," Ham snapped, as he caught the life preserver Pat threw him.

"So you're afraid of sharks," Pat said.

But she switched off the searchlight and joined Ham at the submerged rail. Monk appeared on deck an instant later with the squealing, kicking armful of razorback hog that was Habeas Corpus.

Habeas Corpus had a snout like a wood-rasp, flopping coal-scuttle ears, long ungainly legs. The special life preserver which Monk had previously fashioned for Habeas did not improve his appearance. It added to his buoyancy, however. Monk jumped into the water with the wet pig.

"That hog'll draw sharks," Ham yelled.

"Habeas, he fights sharks!" Monk roared back. "Come on!"


PAT and Ham went overboard, Ham still holding tightly to his slim black cane which was almost as much a part of him as his shirt. The cane was in reality a formidable weapon -- a sword cane. Its innocent-appearing exterior sheathed a length of gleaming steel, the point of which had been impregnated with a chemical capable of producing almost instant unconsciousness.