"H. Beam Piper - Police Operation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

They turned, after a while, into a rutted dirt road, which deteriorated steadily into a grass-grown track
through the woods. Finally, they stopped, and the private backed off the road. The three men got out;
Parker with his Winchester, the sergeant checking the drum of a Thompson, and the private pumping[Pg
4] a buckshot shell into the chamber of a riot gun. For half an hour, they followed the brush-grown trail
beside the little stream; once, they passed a dark gray commercial-model jeep, backed to one side. Then
they came to the head of the gap.

A man, wearing a tweed coat, tan field boots, and khaki breeches, was sitting on a log, smoking a pipe;
he had a bolt-action rifle across his knees, and a pair of binoculars hung from his neck. He seemed about
thirty years old, and any bobby-soxer's idol of the screen would have envied him the handsome regularity
of his strangely immobile features. As Parker and the two State policemen approached, he rose, slinging
his rifle, and greeted them.

"Sergeant Haines, isn't it?" he asked pleasantly. "Are you gentlemen out hunting the critter, too?"

"Good afternoon, Mr. Lee. I thought that was your jeep I saw, down the road a little." The sergeant
turned to the others. "Mr. Richard Lee; staying at the old Kinchwalter place, the other side of Rutter's
Fort. This is Mr. Parker, the district game protector. And Private Zinkowski." He glanced at the rifle.
"Are you out hunting for it, too?"

"Yes, I thought I might find something, up here. What do you think it is?"

"I don't know," the sergeant admitted. "It could be a bobcat. Canada lynx. Jink, here, has a theory that
it's some escapee from the paper-doll factory, with a machete. Me, I hope not, but I'm not ignoring the
possibility."

The man with the matinee-idol's face nodded. "It could be a lynx. I understand they're not unknown, in
this section."

"We paid bounties on two in this county, in the last year," Parker said. "Odd rifle you have, there; mind if
I look at it?"

"Not at all." The man who had been introduced as Richard Lee unslung and handed it over. "The
chamber's loaded," he cautioned.

"I never saw one like this," Parker said. "Foreign?"

"I think so. I don't know anything about it; it belongs to a friend of mine, who loaned it to me. I think the
action's German, or Czech; the rest of it's a custom job, by some West Coast gunmaker. It's chambered
for some ultra-velocity wildcat load."

The rifle passed from hand to hand; the three men examined it in turn, commenting admiringly.

"You find anything, Mr. Lee?" the sergeant asked, handing it back.

"Not a trace." The man called Lee slung the rifle and began to dump the ashes from his pipe. "I was along
the top of this ridge for about a mile on either side of the gap, and down the other side as far as
Hindman's Run; I didn't find any tracks, or any indication of where it had made a kill."