Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1947

by The Sleuth Patrol (v1. 1)

  “Hey!” yelled Max at the top of his lungs. “Hey, in there! Come on out! It isn’t polite to keep guests waiting!”

  Doc’s own powers of speech returned to him. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he yodelled.

  Max, drawing in his breath, achieved a rebel yell. “Yieeee-heee!” he whooped, high and clear, and the hollow rang and quavered with the echoes.

  The closed front door was torn open, revealing a great rectangle of blackness, like a monstrous pool of ink. That was enough for the two serenaders, who spun on their heels as though pulled around by a spring, and raced back the way they had come. Doc, for all his bulk, Doc got away fast, gaining the path of retreat a pace ahead of Max. Max, glancing back, was slow in following, and that glance showed him a figure he remembered only too well, a figure gigantic, dark and dreadful. The figure had a voice, too. It roared at them, something deep- pitched and furious. Then it lifted its big dark right arm. Red fire sprang from the end of the arm, a report sounded in the night, and something passed over the heads of the two fleeing Scouts, snapping like a whiplash in passing.

  A bullet! They were being fired on by the dweller in the house!

  Max looked back no more. He had not the time, for he heard the thud of great feet behind him as the giant thing sprang down from the porch and gave chase. Quickening his own pace, Max caught up to the slower Doc in a dozen swift leaps, though Doc himself was probably running faster than ever before in his life.

  “Thirteen—” Max heard Doc pant as he ran. “Fourteen—fifteen—sixteen—”

  Doc was counting the paces back to the log. Max had momentarily forgotten to do that, and thankfully ran close behind his comrade. From behind came the noise of the heavy-footed pursuit. It seemed to shake the earth, like the swift foot-slogging of a charging bull elephant. Big and heavy as their enemy was, it was not slow. Max was sure it was gaining on them, for all their efforts.

  Then, just ahead of Max, Doc seemed to soar into the air like a plump partridge. He was hurdling the log.

  Max leaped in turn, clearing the obstruction, and with a new burst of speed flashed past Doc and ahead on the narrow path. Bare seconds later they heard a sudden cry of shocked surprise, then a heavy crashing fall among leafage. The gun spoke again, though this time no bullet sang murderously past. Their pursuer had fallen over the log, and had discharged his pistol in falling.

  There were more yells behind them, words that neither Scout felt any safer for hearing addressed to himself. They did not stay their pace for the privilege of hearing more. On they ran, out of the hollow, along the rock- paved open stretch that gave upon the road, and then turned and headed in the direction of camp. Doc glanced back once, saw no chasing shape of a giant, and sprang into the thickest brush at the roadside. Max was after him like a homing rabbit. The two lay still, trying not to breathe any louder than necessary, and neither stirred for a full minute.

  But nothing followed or searched. Finally Doc squirmed back to the edge of the road, pulled aside a spray of leaves, and thrust his head out to study the open. He saw nothing, and crept into the clear. Max and he headed quietly down the road toward their camp. A good half mile lay between them and the trail to the haunted house before they paused and at last found the courage to discuss what had happened.

  “That gun,” Doc murmured in awe. “He was certainly ready on the trigger, though he was big enough to hunt lions with his bare fists. I’m glad he didn’t have light enough to aim by.”

  “He aimed quite close enough as it is,” replied Max, with equal solemnity. “That bullet zipped by close enough to knock my glasses off, almost.” He took the glasses from his cork-blackened nose and wiped them tenderly, as if to congratulate them on their escape from such a fate.

  Max, the irrepressibly gay-natured, quickly recovered enough of his normal temperament to emit a chuckle. “What a fall the big buffalo took, and how he hated it! Did you hear him yipping about it? He said a couple of things I’ll bet he wouldn’t want to have written down as his last words. One thing’s certain, he was solid enough, judging by the heavy footsteps and the way he tumbled and sloshed around, to be human, heavyweight human, and not a ghost.”

  “We did a trifle of yelling ourselves,” rejoined Doc, his own spirits rising. “We must have sounded like one of those old-fashioned country shivarees I’ve heard about. Sherlock can’t beef any about our not cooperating.”

  He broke off and stopped dead, facing back the way they had come.

  “Sherlock!” he repeated. “Listen, Max, we didn’t wait for him!”

  “No more we did.” Max’s high humor vanished at once. “He didn’t say what he was up to back there, what he was going to do, not anything.”

  “What has become of Sherlock?” demanded Doc.

  The quiet night gave him no answer.

  WHAT BECAME OF SHERLOCK

  To the boy in the dark jersey and sooty-black face, crouching in the deepest patch of shadow on the porch, the whole incident of the gun-bearing ghost was at least twice as exciting as it was to Max and Doc.

  As the door burst open and the huge figure emerged to rush at the two noisemakers, Sherlock rose silently but quickly to his feet. A moment later the chase along the trail had begun, punctuated by the first shot from the pistol, like a starter’s gun at a race. Sherlock immediately ran along the creaking, complaining boards to the still-open door, and popped inside like a rabbit into a burrow. The room into which he passed was black even by comparison with the outer night. All he could guess was that it was big. He paused for a moment, just inside and to the right of the open doorway of the house.

  His expectation had been that the mysterious dweller in the house would harry his comrades for some moments, giving him time to make a quick examination of the house, or part of it, without discovery. Ready in his hip pocket was a flashlight, and he was reaching for it at the very moment when the big stranger tripped over the log so sagely arranged across the trail by Doc and Max. Sherlock heard the accidental shot, the clumsy flounderings, and the roars of startled anger. His own quick mind half-supplied what had happened out there on the trail, and he smiled in the black interior of the house. Then the smile vanished, without anyone having seen it.

  For he heard noise farther in the house, and above the point where he stood. There were stairs at the back of the big front room, and feet were coming down them, feet lighter and surer than those of the giant who had run outside.

  The haunted house, then, was inhabited by more than one creature of mystery!

  The feet of the newcomer had reached the floor of the room where Sherlock stood trembling. They raced across that floor in the direction of the door. For a sickening instant Sherlock thought that he had been discovered, and was being rushed. He tensed his muscles to give what battle he could manage. The rush was not for him, but for the open door scant inches away. In the gray dimness of the opening a body showed briefly on the way through. Then, out on the porch, a voice:

  “Hefty! What happened?”

  Sherlock thought he had known the sound of that voice somewhere. But three brief, shouted words were not enough to tell him where or when.

  From farther away came a deep, harsh reply: “Yeh, here I am! Fell down over sumpin’, caught myself in these brambles. Ow! They’re sticking into me!”

  The lighter feet went down the porch steps, with the swift confidence of good physical coordination. Sherlock wondered if this smaller man might not be more dangerous, when all was said, than the giant called Hefty. Up the trail sounded the two voices, questioning and replying. More rustlings, more exclamations of pain. The second comer was helping his big companion untangle himself. Sherlock moved gingerly toward the door, bent on escape. But already he was too late. The voices, still discussing, were coming back, and their owners would be able to see any figure come out of the house. And the moonlight there was strong enough to shoot by. Sherlock stifled a groan of concern, and stayed where he was.

  “Hefty,” said the voice
Sherlock had half-recognized, “you’ve got nerve, you’ve got muscles, you’ve got weight. But I can’t say you’ve got brains.”

  Now Sherlock knew who was speaking—Corey James, the would-be swindler who stole the beans at Sig Poison’s, the man he had glimpsed at the end of the false trail of zigzag tire tracks in Oatville!

  Corey James was continuing his scornful remarks: “Whatever gave you the idea to shoot first and think second? Many and many a good man’s gunsmoked himself right into a nice jam that wound up in the state prison, with a sledge hammer in his hand and years of dividing big rocks by two and then by four and then by eight.”

  “Well,” grumbled the deep voice of the giant called

  Hefty, “what would you have done if you’d been downstairs in my place?”

  “I’d have looked out and seen who they were and what they were trying to do.”

  “Oh, I know that,” said Hefty. “They were kids, the same kids that were around here last night, playing they were ghosts. I’ll bet they’re through playing ghosts anywhere near here.”

  “Maybe they are,” conceded Corey Jarnes as the two came to the porch steps and paused there. “But I’ll bet you right back that they aren’t in any frame of mind to keep quiet about it. Tomorrow they’ll talk to some pals, grown-up pals, or I miss my guess, and before sundown tomorrow night there’ll be a visit of those pals here. Maybe even by police.”

  “If any cop comes nosing around me—” began Hefty truculently.

  “Don’t finish that silly remark,” interrupted Corey Jarnes sternly. “I know exactly what you’re going to say. You think you’d like to wait right here and shoot it out. That’s the worst possible thing we can do. If any cop comes nosing around, as you put it, he won’t find us here to be nosed. As soon as it’s dawn and we can see our way clear without headlights, we’re going to get out of here.”

  “With everything?” demanded Hefty.

  “With everything.”

  There was a heavy creak, as Hefty sat down on the porch steps outside. Sherlock kept his frozen silence next to the door. He had to. His mind, however, was furiously working. “With everything,” Corey Jarnes had said. What did “everything” mean? What other frightening secrets did this old house contain ?

  “It would have to be a kid that would mess things up for us,” Hefty was mourning. “The farmers around here have plenty of hard work to keep them busy. And I figured that the ghost stories about the place would scare kids out. I never figured any ’teen-ager would butt in, especially at night.”

  “Give those lads credit,” rejoined Corey Jarnes. “They had nerve, all right, and plenty of it. I heard them come right up on the porch.”

  “Not them,” objected Hefty. “They were in the yard when they started that blubbering and yellings. I was sitting right inside the door, and looked out and saw them. Neither one was on the porch.”

  “This was before they yelled,” Corey Jarnes told him. “I was lying on the cot in the front room upstairs. I could hear the boards creak, and figured it was you on the porch, maybe a little lighter on your tootsies than usual. But you say you were inside. So it was the kids, I tell you, up here and maybe trying to peek in at a crack.”

  Sherlock, for all his taut worry, still had the Scout sense to blame himself. That noise on the porch Corey Jarnes was telling about had been his own movement, that he had thought to be so noiseless and stealthy.

  “Think they saw anything?” Hefty asked.

  “How could they? Not a ray of light inside, unless you disobeyed orders and struck a match.”

  “I didn’t,” said Hefty quickly.

  “Well, come on back into the house, and keep quiet.

  I tell you those kids have got plenty of nerve. Maybe even enough for one or other of them to sneak back and see if he could find out anything.”

  The two mounted the porch. The noise their feet made on the boards covered Sherlock’s own soft footfalls as he backed quickly along the wall away from the door. He narrowly avoided a collision with an old straight-backed chair. Skirting that danger, he came to a corner, and slid close to the other wall to a point where his hand touched the jamb of a door that must lead to some inner room.

  Then he stopped again.

  The two men entered. Hefty spoke in his grouchy rumble:

  “Got any tobacco, Corey? I left my pouch upstairs in my pocket.”

  “I’ve got plenty of tobacco, but don’t you light any pipes down here,” warned Corey. “How often do I have to repeat that? Didn’t I say that maybe one or both of the kids might come part way back to spy? A match struck in here would light us up like a Christmas tree for him to see.”

  “That’s easy fixed,” argued Hefty. “I’ll just close the door, and—”

  “No pipes, I tell you.” The rasp in Corey James’s voice showed plainly that he was the boss in the haunted house. “The boards at the windows aren’t set anywhere near tight enough. Light would shine through the cracks. You smoke too much, anyway. Your nerves are bad. Look how you started shooting about an hour before you could possibly start thinking.”

  “Aw, knock off,” snarled Hefty, almost rebelliously. “If I’m so dumb, why did you team up with me?”

  “Maybe because you’ve got one little monkey-sized brain that tells you I give the orders.”

  Hefty moved across the room and sat heavily on the chair which Sherlock had nearly stumbled over a few seconds earlier.

  “That’s right, at least,” he admitted, still in a bad humor. “You sure do give the orders. And I do the work. Most of it, anyway.”

  “The physical work,” said Corey Jarnes. “You’ve got the muscles for that. But now and then I have to remind you that muscles are all you’ve got, or you’d try to start thinking for yourself. I can’t explain to you just how and why thinking is harder work than muscling, and so I won’t try. Just take my word that it is. As it is, we fit fine together, my brains and your beef. We’ve already started to get rich.”

  Sherlock, still standing beside the inner door, continued to explore it with his groping hand. He found that it was closed, and that the knob was within reach of his present position. It wasn’t a knob, really, but the handle of an old-fashioned latch. Closing his fingers around the latch-handle, he froze again, waiting for an opportunity to carry out the new plan that formed in his mind.

  Hefty dragged his chair nearer to the open front door, cleared his throat raspily, and spit out on the porch. “We started to get rich,” he echoed. “Yeh. Sure. This was a perfect setup, a quiet place away from everywhere, with plenty of room inside to do what we want to do, and no neighbors at hand, only a bunch of hayseeds on farms farther away, that know from nothing. I hate to give it up, Corey.”

  “But we have to give it up,” replied Corey Jarnes. “Remember that I’ve got one strike against me, over in Hill- wood. I don’t want to be arrested and dragged up before the same judge, or any other judge who’ll check with him. Because then I’d be sent up for double time, even if I beat this rap. Anyway,” and Sherlock heard him yawn, “we’ve made a good start on a bankroll. We can finish building it somewhere else. Bring what we have here with us, we can slide along back country roads to another district I’m acquainted with, about two days west of here. I know the right guys operating there, and they’ll let us come in with them when they see what we’ve done and can do.”

  “But we’ve got four cars on hand,” objected Hefty. “And we can’t take but two, you driving one and me the other.”

  “Then we’ll take the two best. The others we’ll tear apart and keep the tires, the best parts and so on, and load up the two we drive. Second-hand parts are worth a mint these days.”

  To Sherlock this exchange of conversation was half mystifying, half informative. Even in his grave situation of danger, he found himself trying to fill in gaps between the things he began to understand. It was like a jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces left out. What the “work” of the pair was began to be apparent. It had to
do with automobiles, for had not Corey Jarnes spoken of stripping all cars except their “two best” for parts that would be “worth a mint” ? And this business promised to make them rich, and had to be conducted in grimly secret surroundings. That convinced him of what he needed little conviction, that Corey Jarnes and his big friend Hefty were criminals. Beyond that, how could he find out more? By escaping, first of all.

  Under cover of the talk, Sherlock had stealthily pressed down the latch of the door, so that the panel swung noiselessly inward for several inches. At once he put his other hand through the open space and took hold of the latch on the other side. Waiting a moment for the voices to resume and so cover what sound he might make, he pushed the door still wider, until there was enough of a gap for his body to slide through edgewise. He moved into blackness still deeper than the front room, even as the front room was darker than the outer night. Perhaps, he took time to think, he was entering a closet or a windowless storeroom. With the same painful care and silence he had been able to practice from the first of this adventure, Sherlock slowly swung the door shut, and let the latch fall into its slot.

  And the latch clicked against the iron of the slot, a click that, to Sherlock, sounded like the ringing blow of a hammer.

  “What was that?” demanded Hefty at once, from the front room. “Strike a light, Corey.”

  “No lights,” Corey Jarnes said again, starting to lose his temper. “How often do I have to repeat that? I told you there might be spies.”

  “I tell you I heard something,” said Hefty.

  “Probably me.”

  “No, here on the other side of me. Not your direction at all. I think there’s something in here with us. Say what you want to, Corey, I’m going to have a look.” “Wait a second,” snapped Corey Jarnes. “Get the front door shut, at least.” Sherlock heard the slam of the heavy portal. “Now go ahead. No, wait! Don’t turn on that flashlight yet!”