By a freak of chance, it shot directly at its own pit. Doc Elton stood there grimly awaiting it, hoping that it would take him with it when it struck; but Bing Morgan picked him up and tossed him out of its path in time to save his life.
The machine cut through the concrete wall as though the obstruction had been made of cheese. Then it reared up for a terrific moment on its crushed rear wheels, and sailed over the pit to land on the ambulance drive. For a few minutes dust and smoke obscured the scene as the wreckage caught fire. Then Doc Elton emerged from the fog, bearing Pinkie’s limp form.
“He’s dead and I did it!” Doc was crying. But Pinkie was not dead. The gas tank, nearly emptied, had acted as a cushion, and aside from bruises he was all right. To prove it he sat up.
“Hello, dad,” he said weakly. “I beat Stubby after all.”
Doc had learned his lesson. He wanted to get down on his knees and apologize to his son—and apologize to Stubby Burns, too. For thoughts of vengeance had forever been erased from his mind during those trying moments when he felt that he had sent Pinkie to his death. To cover his emotion, he mechanically reached in his pocket and produced his pipe. It was the one Pinkie had given him on his birthday. As Doc held it by its bowl, its gleaming aluminum stem jutted out like the barrel of a gun. Pinkie stared at it for a moment.
“Dad,” he asked suddenly. “What did you do with that gun?”
“Why, I gave it to the clerk at the hotel like you suggested,” said Doc in surprise, “But now let’s go home to Los Angeles and quit this crazy racket. It’s too dangerous.”
“Nix,” said Pinkie. “I really learned to drive today. It’s great. I’m in this business to stay. I beat Stubby today, and I’ll do it plenty times more.”
“Crash-shock,” said Doc sadly. But he was proud of his son now.
THE FIGHTING FOOL, by Perley Poore Sheehan
CHAPTER I
The way Shattuck slid around that rock would have done credit to a fox. But, even as he did so, he knew that he was trapped. There was no other cover near. The rock had concealed him from the camp he’d been stalking. When he’d heard those voices from the rear his quick shift of position meant he’d be seen from below.
The people in these hills had eyes like hawks—eyes like those of their own hunting eagles.
In any case, he was out of rifle range from the camp. That lay about a mile below, in a hidden little valley. He’d been looking at it for the past two hours as he slowly approached it from above. In the high thin air of the mountains the camp lay microscopic—it had been like looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope, everything minutely clear, but too microscopic to be studied.
And he had to study his moves—did Shattuck.
All he knew was that he was somewhere in the midriff of Asia—Himalaya country— Pamirs—Hindu Kush; that one of those gossamer billows of blue and white off there to the north might be the Tien Shan—that is, the Heavenly Mountains, as the Chinese called them.
In a general way, he was headed for China.
China to Shattuck almost meant the United States. He’d passed his boyhood there—in Canton, Shanghai, Tientsin—where his father had lived and traded.
No other countries open to him at all! And perhaps not even China! A man without a country! He had no papers, no relatives. He could hardly think of a living soul who could link him up with his past—who could actually swear that he was Pel Shattuck—Pelham Rutledge Shattuck—and not some international tramp who’d merely appropriated that name.
Like a wild animal caught in his dangerous position he blended himself as best he could with the gravel and dead grass at the foot of his rock and there lay completely still.
For a time the voices he had heard were stilled. He might have been seen. Or the intruders might have spied some other game.
From where he lay, without other movement than that of his eyes, Shattuck could view the camp—or the better part of it—through a crotch of his sheepskin coat. No excitement yet!
Whatever happened, he’d have to go into some camp again pretty soon anyway.
He wondered where he was—wondered who these people were.
* * * *
These were some of the questions that had kept him on the scout ever since running away from Juma’s camp. The trouble with Juma’s camp was that Juma had a daughter, a girl named Mahree. And not even a man who has got himself in bad with governments will do certain things that a girl might propose.
“Khabadar!”—a voice near-by had spoken.
It was a word of warning. It hadn’t been addressed to himself. But Shattuck knew that he’d been discovered.
His mind worked quickly. There was no friction even to thought in the thin air of these high altitudes. Down in the camp just now he’d seen a man staring up in his direction. He could guess the rest. The man had signaled to the hunters on the mountain.…
It wouldn’t do to let them take him for a wolf or a bear.
Shattuck began to whine a bit of song that he’d learned in Juma’s camp—just a bar or two— then stopped short.
As if by accident he thrust his foxskin cap beyond the edge of the rock. No shot was fired.
He left the cap where it was and took a look from the other side. He saw four men—two of them elderly, with beards, and all of them slant-eyed. The quartet were fanned out and had their rifles ready, evidently in a maneuver to surround him.
“Let us drink tea,” Shattuck offered, in one of the last phrases he’d picked up in Juma’s camp.
It was an invitation to a parley, an offer to talk—they’d get the purport of it whether they understood his speech or not. He recovered his cap. He stepped from behind his rock with his own rifle ready.
“Who are you?” one of the bearded elders asked.
His language wasn’t like the Kirghiz dialect of Juma’s people, but it was close enough to it to be understood.
“Ameriki,” Shattuck answered.
He smiled and raised his right hand in salutation. He’d dropped his rifle into the crook of his left arm but he’d be able to use it, he guessed, if he had to.
The four stared. They were a wild looking lot, dressed in sheepskin and felt. The two elders, those who were bearded, had their left ears pierced and ornamented with large turquoise earrings. None of them looked as if he’d been washed or had had his hair cut since the day of his birth.
As for that, Shattuck felt that neither had he himself.
The four converged closely as Shattuck approached. There was an air of tenseness about them that Shattuck didn’t like. They were like strange dogs closing in on a dog they’d selected for a kill.
In an instant Shattuck had swung his rifle back to ready again and had them covered—ready to fire from the hip.
The movement was so swift that they were caught unprepared. He gave them a quick survey, then addressed the elder who carried the best weapon—that alone was enough to indicate he stood higher than these others.
“Let the guns fall,” he ordered. “Quickly! Then, maybe, we shall talk like friends.”
CHAPTER II
There is a sort of universal language, more of looks than of words or gestures—the sort of communication that had already thrown Shattuck on his guard. In the same way he could grasp the thought of these four now as they let their weapons fall.
“Here is a mad fool! We’ll get him later!”
Shattuck pushed the four guns into a pile with his foot. One was a modern sporting rifle— English, he surmised. The others looked like copies of older models—clumsy imitations, but effective enough, such as might have been made in Lhassa or Kabul.
Even with his eyes down he surprised a movement from one of the younger men.
The emergency was so sharp that Shattuck spoke up in English.
“Do you want to die?”
The young man had started to signal the camp in the valley. He’d done so already, perhaps. With their telescopic eyes most of these hill-men could flash signals or re
ad them across amazing distances.
There was a lull, then the leader of the four spoke up.
“Huzoor—”
That was vernacular, an address of respect; but the rest of it was coming in English—as slowly, as creakingly, as a door forced open on rusty hinges, but English.
“Excellence, we mean you no harm; and I take it that you mean us no harm.”
“Who are you?”
“Your servant, Tsarong!”
The humility was too great to be sincere. Shattuck looked the old man in the eye. The gaze that met his was veiled and shrewd.
“Who are your people?”
“Just a few poor Changpas.”
Changpas! People from the Chan-tang!
As the meaning of this simple statement flashed into Shattuck’s mind it was all that he could do to suppress a start. Even so he divined an answering start in the eyes of the old man.
The Changpas were Tibetans—the people of the tang, the desert plains of Tibet’s Far West. It was an affair of Tibet and Russia that had got Shattuck into trouble with the Cheka, the Soviet Secret Service.
Shattuck smiled pleasantly.
“Sit down, Father Tsarong,” he invited; “and tell your friends to sit down. Thus! You four sit down with your backs to the camp and I’ll sit here in front of you. Like that, should you see any other of your people coming from behind me, you can signal them not to shoot—as they might miss and shoot you instead.”
Old man Tsarong hesitated.
“We are unworthy of that honor,” he said. “Only our lord, the general, is worthy such an honor.”
“What you say is perfectly true,” Shattuck replied. “Send for him.”
“Send for him! He is the governor of the entire Chantang!”
“Father, do as I say. Tell him you’ve met an earth demon who knows everything. I know all about those Russian arms you’ve come to this valley to get. Dorje-Pamo, the pig-faced goddess, told me about them herself.”
The old man was stricken.
He mumbled an order and the three others— including the other elder himself—were for setting off together. But Shattuck stopped the rush. Only one was to go, and he was to be the best runner among them.
As the runner started off down the mountainside, Shattuck could see that there was already some alarm in the camp. A string of yaks, horses, sheep and goats had begun to straggle in from behind a shoulder of the hill, driven by women and children.
“Are you not, then, English?” Tsarong asked.
“Ameriki,” Shattuck replied.
He could see that the word meant nothing to the Tibetans. To them all white foreigners were English—that, or possibly Oross, Russian.
The three Tibetans sat in front of him and below him at a respectful distance, facing him, their backs to the camp. Shattuck also had folded his legs and seated himself on the ground, the four surrendered rifles piled in front of him and his own weapon across his knees.
The queer thought came to him that he was no longer an outcast and a man without a country, after all. He was now as a king seated on a throne.
The throne was a mountain. He had an arsenal. He had subjects who looked at him with awe, speculating, like other subjects, on the divinity of kings.
There was something about the vast panorama that surrounded him, that stimulated this thought—stimulated it to the point of sheer craziness. Yet, hereabouts, there were still legends of Alexander the Great, of Ghengis Khan and Kubla Khan and Tamerlane.
There was a persistent legend that from this part of the world would come the next great King of the World.
The three Tibetans were watching him. He was watching them.
“I am Pelham Rutledge Shattuck,” he announced slowly.
He was making the announcement for himself as much as he was for them. It sounded strange to hear his own name spoken like that, even by his own voice, here in this Himalayan space. It was like some sort of a mantram—a spell. The name went vibrating off into the blue of Central Asia.
The Tibetans looked puzzled, even old Tsarong.
“Shattuck! Get that?”
There was a respectful murmur.
“Repeat it,” Shattuck told them. “Shattuck!”
They tried it—first Tsarong, the linguist, then the others. They also seemed to think that it was some sort of a spell.
“Sha-dak!”
“Sha-dak!”
“Sha-dak!”
It might have been a spell, at that. As they pronounced it the name became a Chinese word meaning “trouble”: Shadak.
They were repeating it with honorary titles added:
“Shadak-la!”
“Shadak-beg!”
“Shadak-khan!”
“My God,” Shattuck muttered. “That’s who I am, all right!”
In the silence of his thought it was as if an echo of silent thunder had come rolling back upon him out of space, calling him by a name to which he was fated:
“Captain Trouble!”
CHAPTER III
It may have been what some would have called just a coincidence, but as that new name of his vibrated in Shattuck’s thought with a queer sensation of something magical about it, a din broke out in the camp below.
“Shadak!”
It sounded like trouble. It was a din of horns and gongs, drums, a shouting. The whole camp, it seemed, dogs included, had begun to turn out with its full capacity of noise.
Shattuck never winced. He’d become used to a lot of things since his escape from the Cheka in Samarkand. He’d become used to a lot of things before that.
He’d gone to Russia as a mining expert— especially as one who spoke Chinese—expecting to be sent to Manchuria. Instead of that, through some error, perhaps, he’d found himself switched to Bokhara. The error, it turned out, was that he’d been falsely accused of pro-Japanese activities. It was true that he’d lived in Japan for a while.
In Samarkand he’d broken open some boxes which should have contained some overdue mining machinery. The machinery turned out to be machine-guns instead, and destined for Chantang.
Suddenly, it had become desirable that he leave the country. He was on the Cheka’s black list. He’d always wanted, anyway, to see Afghanistan; and the devil was there in the person of a former Afghan wazir, Michmander by name, to speed him on his way.
Michmander knew of certain lost mines in the Hindu-Kush. It was knowledge that had to be kept, of course, from the thieving government at Kabul, the Afghan capital.
Shattuck was willing.
* * * *
He stuck to Michmander in a trek that took them into mountains not marked—except vaguely and incorrectly—on any map. And they’d had a small army of cutthroats and all-round soldiers of fortune with them before they were through—Shattuck himself the only white man in the lot.
They’d penetrated to the depths of that great upheaval known as “the Purdah Lady”—“K-2”— a mountain as veiled and as hard to get to, that is, as a lady shut up in a harem.
And there they’d had a battle with wild natives who were armed with spears and long-handled hatchets.
It was a great battle.
Shattuck had seen almost all of it. And he must have done his share, for the last thing that Michmander—he who had led him into this mess—ever said to him was to call him a fighting fool.
Michmander—having been exiled from Afghanistan long ago—had passed enough time in America to have picked up some American slang.
He was laughing as he said it, in the thick of the fight, and trying to reload his automatic—a difficult job because he’d lost a couple of fingers; and Shattuck himself was swaying on his feet and covered with blood.
“You fighting fool!”
One of the few supreme compliments ever paid to any man; for, just as Michmander said it, a long handled hatchet came swishing down and split Michmander’s head like a melon.
How the fight ended Shattuck didn’t clearly know. Anyway, there were parts
of it that he was willing to forget.
But he had a vague idea that he’d lived for a while in a cave where long ranks of stone gods a hundred feet high looked down on small brown men bearing saucerlike lamps.
After that, there followed months—it might have been years so far as he knew then—of wandering, always wandering and always amid mountains.
When he emerged from this daze or trance it was to find he’d been adopted by Juma, the Kirghiz chief, who was almost blind. He cured Juma’s blindness by simple cleanliness and an application of boracic acid. He’d worked up the wash himself from borax he’d found in the bed of a dry lake.
In the meantime, he’d found out that he had been barred from India. The Government of India was taking no chances with tramps who’d messed things up in both Russia and Afghanistan. Yet he might have told those folks at Delhi about those boxed machine-guns had they let him in.
Or again he might have stayed on with Juma. He liked the old man and Juma had given him a rifle and ammunition, considerably more valuable than their weight in gold.
But the girl Mahree—fifteen, slender, full-breasted, with eyes like a fawn’s—had broken an apricot in two and offered him half.
* * * *
The din from the camp had assumed something like order and processional movement, swelling louder, coming nearer— horns and gongs, clanging cymbals, that tumult of shouting. The voices of women and children split through all this now and then with a shrill like that of fifes.
There were, Shattuck judged, three or four hundred persons in the mob. Most of the noise seemed to come from a solid phalanx of men in the center. It wasn’t long before he could see that these men were roughly uniformed in long red robes. At first he thought that these men were masked. But in a little while he could see that what he’d taken to be masks were simply their own blackened faces.
Somewhere he’d read about those blackened faces—the fighting monks of the Tibetan lamaseries. Even their name popped up. He repeated it:
“Dok-dokpa!”
He kept his air of unconcern. But he decided that, at the first show of battle, he’d seize old Father Tsarong over there, and hold him as both shield and hostage.
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