"018 (B035) - The Squeaking Goblin (1934-08) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

THE SQUEAKING GOBLIN
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson

Chapter I. THE COONSKIN CAP GHOST
THE cream-colored yacht was anchored fully a mile from the nearest shore habitation. That in itself was vaguely suspicious.
It was night and a moon hung high, spilling a silver flood of brilliant light. By that luminance, a close watcher might have perceived two men on the yacht deck, crouched in the shadow of an upper deck awning. Both held rifles, and their attitude was one of a strained waiting and watching.
Other and better coves were to be found nearer Bar Harbor, the Maine summer rendezvous of yachtsmen, but these held anchored pleasure craft of varying size. The inlet where the cream yacht lay was otherwise untenanted. It was as if those aboard wanted solitude.
The watching men maintained silence, keeping their eyes on the shore and occasionally cupping their hands behind ears. One used binoculars.
"See it, Tige?" asked a man with a rifle.
"Ain't sartin," said the one with the binoculars. "Calculate I'll know in a minute."
Tige continued to peer through his glasses at the shore, often lowering them as if he distrusted their prisms, and using his naked blue eyes that were like the snouts of two rifles seen from directly in front.
He was a lean, brindled man with something of the hawk in his face. His slab of a jaw moved regularly and the tobacco it masticated occasionally made a squishing sound.
Sumptuous, luxurious, flamboyant and befitting a king, were descriptives applying to the yacht. The craft hardly exceeded a hundred feet in length, yet she had obviously cost as much as a less pretentious vessel three or four times as long. The woodwork was of mahogany; upholstery was genuine and rich, and there was a profusion of built-in trinketsЧbars, indirect lights, radio speakers and the like.
Rugged, rocky, misshapen, a place where anything might happen, described the cove. It was a harsh crack where the stony shore had been gouged by nature, and there were no trees and little vegetation to garnish the place. Boulders were present in profusion, ranging upward to the proportions of a railroad locomotive.
The silver light sprayed by the moon made black, awesome, shapeless shadows behind the boulders, shadows that somehow were like monsters asleep.
"That be it!" Tige breathed abruptly, "I be plumb sartin!"
"Better give the signal, huh?" asked the other man.
Tige hesitated, seemed to consider while his teeth mashed at the tobacco quid; then he shrugged.
"Yeah," he muttered. "But lemme do it."
A moment later, Tige walked out on a wing of the bridge and lighted a cigarette, letting the match flame up like a torch in his fingers for a moment before he twirled it over the rail. The gesture was casual, a natural oneЧbut the match flame could have been seen from shore.
Tige strode back out of sight, dropped the cigarette on the deck and extinguished its tip with a lance of tobacco juice sent expertly through the darkness.
Perspiration droplets, not unlike spattered grease, had come out and covered Tige's forehead while he stood in plain view on the bridge. He scraped some of the sweat off with a forefinger, eyed the moist and slightly glistening digit and shuddered violently.
"Suppose they saw the signal?" asked the other.
"Damn well better have seen it, or reckon as how they'll get fired," Tige growled.
THE cream yacht might have been a floating sepulcher, so dead was the silence which held it. Tige and his companion waited, rifles nursed close to cheeks, eyes on the shore.
"How many times has it tried to get Chelton Raymond?" Tige asked quietly.
"Twice." The other stirred and the moonlight glistened faintly on brass uniform buttons and the shiny visor of a yachtsman's cap. "Thought Chelton Raymond told you?"
"He did." Tige expectorated, and did it so that there was only the noise of the liquid hitting the deck. "You better keep down. That shiny cap bill would make a tolerable shootin' mark."
The yacht officer ducked lower. "Thanks."
"Chelton Raymond gab much?" Tige inquired.
"Gab? You mean talk?"
"Yep. About this thing gettin' after 'im, I mean."
The other hesitated, as if thinking. "No-o-o. He did not talk, exactly. He just said two attempts had been made on his life, and that he was going to send to the Kentucky mountains for what he called 'a real fighting man'."
Tige's chuckle was as emotionless as paper crackling. "Us Raymonds be all fightin' men."
"Chelton Raymond sent for you, and you came," concluded the other. "That's all I know about it."
Silent for a time, Tige scrutinized the shore; the shadows were too much for him, and he shook his head disgustedly.
It would have taken sharper eyes than the gaunt mountaineer possessed to follow the exact course of the skulker ashoreЧif there was really a skulker, for a close watcher would have doubted at times that the marauder was a flesh-and-blood reality.
There was something of the phantom about the figure, a touch of the supernatural, since the form merged with the dark shadows in uncanny fashion, making no sound appreciable to the ear. An apparition might have been a-prowl.
In the lee of a great boulder the ghostly presence came to a halt, and all of its attention seemed bent upon the yacht.
The yacht portholesЧthose along the upper decks, were squarish and almost as large as windows, and several were whitened by lights ablaze in the cabins behind. Framed against a port was a head and shoulders, the lines of which indicated the presence of a man in a chair inside the cabin.
On this shadowy outline the attention of the phantom figure seemed to concentrate, and there was a dead silence, stirred only occasionally by the mushy slop of a wave piling onto the stony beach.
Then, out of the black shadow jumped a tongue of flame which could only come from a rifle fired by the ghostly prowler.
Instead of the usual rifle blast, there was only a squeak. It was shrill, almost ear-splitting, a sound such as might be made by a titanic mouse.
The figure behind the yacht porthole upset, vanishing from sight.
THE shore of the rocky cove blasted into life. The boulder shadows spewed men who had been in hiding, men who gripped guns, waved flashlights and yelled.
A flash beam sprouted a glaring wedge which waved and sought the spot where the rifle flame had licked. It came to rest upon a remarkable figure.
There was a ghostly quality about the form outlined by the flash, coming, perhaps, from the dead, immobile grayness of the face. The sunken holes where the eyes should have been, the rigidity of the mouth, gave it a corpselike aspect.
Most striking was the garb of the figure, for the clothing was that of a frontiersman of another century. Moccasins were of beaded deerskin; the trousers were buckskin, the blouse of doe, beaded and fringed. A powder horn was slung over a shoulder. A belt supported bullet pouch and a sheath containing a long-bladed knife.
Standing high like the headgear of a Cossack, lending an unnatural height to the strange apparition, was a coonskin cap, the tail dangling down behind.