"Murray Leinster - The Mole Pirate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

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The Mole Pirate

MURRAY LEINSTER

The story of the Mole Pirate properly begins neither with Jack Hill, who built the Mole, nor with
Durran, who stole it and used it to acquire more loot and do more damage than any other pirate
ever managed in an equal length of time.
The records begin with a Mrs. Frank P. Hohenstaufer, who appears only once in the entire affair,
and with Professor Eisenstein who, whatever his prominence in history, vanishes with equal
promptness from this tale.
Really, the career of Durran as the Mole Pirate was simply one long battle between himself, the
scientist-criminal, and Jack Hill, the inventor we remember as the man who made the earth-plane
possible. But the story does begin with Mrs. Hohenstaufer, however briefly she remains in it.
She was, it seems, washing dinner dishes on the screened-in back porch of her home in Wausakkee,
New York. It was three o'clock in the afternoon of June 16, 1935. The sun was hot. The radio in
the dining room droned through a news bulletin, amid sundry cracklings of summer static:

Police have found a hide-out they feel sure was used by James Durran, America's Public Enemy No.
1, for at least two weeks. Durran, formerly one of America's greatest scientists, has been living
in the most squalid surroundings, amid great privation, since be made his cynical statement of his
intention to renounce all ideas of morality and ethics for the so-called natural principle of
living for one's own satisfaction only. Durran's record to date shows that in six months he has
been the cause of eight deaths - two believed to be murders committed by him personally - and
twelve robberies. His loot has totalled more than a hundred thousand dollars, but he lives in
conditions of unbelievable squalidness.
Four members of his gang, recently captured, have been sentenced to life imprisonment and are now
in Sing Sing prison-

Mrs. Frank P. Hohenstaufer dried dishes and meditated piously. It was good that the government
required the broadcasters to emphasize the penalties dealt out to lawbreakers and not to talk
about criminals until they were caught or nearly caught. It would make young men more law-abiding.
She looked complacently through the screening. The Albany highway soared past, not half a mile
from her door. As she looked, a car slowed down and turned off to the county road. It disappeared
from view behind a clump of trees.
Mrs. Hohenstaufer looked for it to reappear with a sensation of mild curiosity. But it did not. It
remained hidden. For three, four, five minutes there was no sign of it. Then it showed again,
sweeping back up on to the highway. Into low speed, racing in second - dodging two heavy trucks
bound for Troy - and then into high, the car shot forward at its maximum speed until it became a
dwindling speck in the distance.
Mrs. Hohenstaufer blinked. That was her clump of trees. These people, these tourists, had no
respect for other people's property. Maybe they came to steal green stuff for a city apartment;
maybe some of the tiny pines and cedars that city people were making a fad of just now.
Indignantly, Mrs. Hohenstaufer took off her apron. She marched the full half mile to the wood lot
in the broiling sun, growing more indignant as she marched. She saw the tyre tracks of the car. It
had crushed ruthlessly through the tender small growths which Mrs. Hohenstaufer expected to sell
at the proper time for transplanting. She followed the tracks, growing more angry by the minute.
Then she saw a man lying on the ground. His sandy-brown whiskers and white hair looked vaguely
familiar to her even at first glance, but then she grew horrified. He was bound hand and foot. He