"044 (B077) - The South Pole Terror (1936-10) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

The skulker remained sheltered for a time after the cars had departed. Caution was apparently the motive for this. The Cheaters's mob might have scouts lurking about to keep an eye on the scene.
But apparently they hadn't, and after a bit the blot of shadow moved, faded with other patches of murk, then vanished entirely from the vicinity.
A short time later and some distance down the gloomy street, glass broke on one of the grills that admitted to a sewer flood drain. It was a peculiar flat bottle, and a shoe ground the fragments to bits so that they all dropped out of sight.
A bit later in the evening, a police patrolman chanced to stop near the drain, and twirling his club, absently looked down. He saw a peculiar glow and studied it for some time, even getting down on his hands and knees to peer through the grating. He never did quite decide what he had seen.
Long before curiosity was consuming the officer, however, the clerk for a cable company discovered on his counter a cablegram, together with the exact amount of tolls required for its transmission. The clerk had not seen who had left the message, and it was not signed.
The cablegram was marked urgent, so no time was lost in getting it on the wires. The missive was transmitted by teletype to a transatlantic radio station on Long Island, and from thence it went by air to England, and arrived, in the course of a very short time, at the hotel room of the addressee.
The addressee was a gentleman bearing the good Anglo-Saxon name of William Harper Littlejohn.
Chapter IV. THE MYSTERY AT SEA
"PRETERNATURAL eventuation is an amaranthine potentiality," said William Harper Littlejohn, upon receiving the cablegram.
Which was by way of proving that the gentleman in question never used a small word when he had time to think of a big one. He might simply have said the unexpected can always happen.
William Harper Littlejohn, otherwise known as "Johnny," was best described as a long suit full of bones. He came about as near being a walking skeleton as the human anatomy can achieve. The top of his head was extraordinarily large. His clothing naturally did not fit him. A monocle was attached to his lapel with a ribbon.
The monocle was not there for foppish reasons, however; the bony person needed it frequently to look at strange rocks and ancient hieroglyphics.
William Harper Littlejohn was one of the world's most learned archaeologists and geologists. He was in London translating some old tablets for the English national museum.
He opened the cablegram and read it. Then he upset a chair charging across his hotel suite sitting room.
"Renny!" he howled. "Read this, you big-fisted hunk of bone and gloom!"
Which proved what some people did not believeЧthe man did know a few small words.
He handed the cable to the occupant of one of the two bedrooms. A long, puritanical, utterly gloomy face was about all of this individual that could be seen, for the reason that he was in bed and covered. He glanced over the missive.
"Holy cow!" he said. His voice was like the growl of a big bear in a deep cave.
He read the cablegram again.
"Holy cow!" he said, much louder this time. Then he arose from the bed, and wearing an expression of a man going to a funeral, walked over to the door, and calmly knocked the stout wooden panel out with a single blow of one fist.
This was not a remarkable feat, considering that each of his fists consisted of an approximate gallon of bone and gristle, properly hardened. The rest of him would weigh in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds, none of it fat, but his fists were so large they almost seemed deformities.
"I knew something nice would happen to me when I went to church Sunday," he said.
He still wore the look of a man going to a funeral. This, contrarily enough, meant he was vastly pleased with what the world was offering at the moment.
They both read the cable once more.
BOARD LINER REGIS SAILING FROM SOUTHAMPTON TO-NIGHT STOP LEARN WHAT YOU CAN ABOUT A MAN NAMED THURSTON H WARDHOUSE
"It is not signed," rumbled "Renny," whose full name was Colonel John Renwick on the roster of the International Society of Master Engineers, of which he was a charter member. His favorite act was to slam his great fists through the solid panel of a heavy door.
"A signature would be a superfluosity," said William Harper Littlejohn.
"Holy cow!" boomed Renny. "So it would, Johnny. So it would. Let's start checking on this liner, Regis."
The bony Johnny went to a telephone, and after an expenditure of many words, large and small, hung up with a disgusted expression.
"The liner Regis sailed thirty minutes ago," he said.
THE liner Regis was one of the newer ocean greyhounds of the smaller, faster type. She made the run between Southampton and New York in fast time.
However, the expediency of modern life has demanded that every measure be taken to hurry the transmission of the mails, so it was customary for a seaplane to fly out to sea a number of hours after the Regis sailed and drop the late mail aboard.
On this occasion, however, the mail plane landed on the calm sea off the bows of the Regis, and two passengers were taken aboard by a lowered lifeboat.
The grizzled skipper of the Regis was not happy about the slight delay which this transfer occasioned. He confronted the two strangers.
"This is irregular!" he snapped. "Why in Hades couldn't you chaps have taken a later boat?"
Bony Johnny and big-fisted Renny, not wishing to anger the skipper, looked properly serious.
"It was very important for us to get aboard," Renny boomed.
"Who are you?" demanded the master of the Regis.
They told him.
The skipper's attitude changed instantly.
"I am sorry," he murmured. "Doc Savage has a group of five men who have aided him in his peculiar life's work. You are two of them?"
"That's right," Renny agreed.
"And, of course," added the skipper, "you will want to get to New York for the funeral."
"Eh?" thumped Renny. "For what?"
"For Doc Savage's funeral."
Renny and Johnny stood as if stricken. It was the first they had heard of what had happened in New York. They tried to speak, but words somehow slipped them.
The kindly master of the Regis, not realizing he had broken the news, said, "Perhaps you would like to see the extra edition of our shipboard newspaper which was put out on Doc Savage's death?"
"Y-yes," Renny said, thickly, "we'd like to see it."
They read it in the cabin which was turned over to them. The story had come by radio, and it was complete, if abbreviated as to space. They said very little while they read it. They were silent for a long time afterward.
Then they asked for separate cabins. It was a strange request. But they wanted to be alone with their grief. They looked like a pair of ghosts when they ate breakfast together the next morning. They seemed to be able to think of nothing to say.