Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1947

by The Sleuth Patrol (v1. 1)

  The ground over which Troop Fifteen toiled grew, if anything, more difficult. The rich, soggy earth gave special strength and luxuriance to the bushes and trees, and the foliage was so thick as to seem like a tropical jungle, while the mud underfoot became like a sheet of glue inches deep. Sherlock fancied that the swamp was a deadly and intelligent personality that had arrayed itself on the side of the fugitive Corey James, and that it had hands under the mud to clutch and hold the feet of the searchers. A mile of weary trudging and diligent searching brought them at last to the top of a little ridge, free for the moment from the swamp muck, but with even denser and damper wilderness showing just ahead. Here Mr. Palmer blew a blast on his whistle, summoning them all to a conference.

  “Right now, our three hundred and sixty Scouts are strung out on the rim of a circle two miles across and a little more than six miles around,” he informed them. “We’ve thinned out to where the space between each two Scouts is almost thirty yards. If Corey James was able to cripple along as far as that, hurt and bleeding as the doctor says he was, he won’t be too far beyond the circle now. But I’m going to give new orders.”

  “Divide command?” suggested Sherlock.

  “Right. I’m not able to call to you all at once. Each leader of a group of four will take charge, and I’ll stay at the center of the troop’s position, generally behind Doc Watson’s four. Go back to where you were before I assembled you, and keep slogging ahead.”

  Leading his own unit back to the left of the sector, Sherlock quickly decided on a policy and issued orders. “I’ll keep the extreme right,” he announced, hoping he did not sound too self-important. “I’m doing that to be sure of keeping contact with the Scouts of the Troop to the right of us. Max, you stay next to me. Chuck Schaefer, on the left of Max, and Pete beyond Chuck. Keep your ears open for any word that Doc Watson’s four may pass along, either from Mr. Palmer or from the center of operations. And don’t forget to keep singing out as you move, so that we know where we all are with reference to each other.”

  “You still insist that Corey James has dragged himself into that miniature Everglades?” said Max, peering into the thick tangle that showed ahead of them. “I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a crocodile had swallowed him whole, that or a man-eating dinosaur. If any prehistoric monster had survived to the present day, this little paradise of fever pools and mosquitoes would be an ideal cozy nest for it to relax in.”

  “The only thing prehistoric around here is your halfbrained idea of humor,” Sherlock snubbed him bleakly. “Shall we ignore the interruption and move ahead, gentlemen? Time’s awasting, and Max is the one who’s wasting most of it, as usual.”

  “What a born leader of men!” rejoined Max. “If I said what I really think of our Patrol Leader, I’d probably be court-martialed and banished to Siberia. Not that it wouldn’t be a better place than this swamp. Pass out the water wings, Sherlock, and let’s swim bravely on. Let’s go!”

  Again they headed into bog and brush, more difficult than before. The way was as soggy and sweaty as ever, and the task of searching it, square yard by square yard, and of keeping in touch with the Scouts to left and right of them made their progress far slower. At length another laborious mile had been accomplished. Glancing through a space among the thick, wet branches toward the sun overhead, Sherlock judged that it was nearly noon. By now there was a good sixty yards between Scouts, a big gap even for firm, level footing and an unobstructed view. The constant calling back and forth to maintain contact took a yell at the top of one’s lungs, and used up all the breath and energy left from the hard marching. Sherlock, for all the hails of his comrades, felt like a lone jungle wanderer as he fought stubbornly through a vine-tangled thicket, with roots in mud so sticky and deep that for a moment he thought his shoes would be pulled bodily off his feet. He won his way to a little clearing beyond, and paused to catch his breath, shin deep in water. He had time to realize how bad the mosquitoes were at this point, and to wonder if they were not even worse around the wounded and weakened Corey James.

  Just then he heard a wild yell from his left. That would be Max Hinkel.

  “Hey, Max!” he yelled back. “What is it?”

  A moment of silence, then the crash of brush and weed-stalks. Max was working his way across to Sherlock, as fast as he could. Sherlock took a few steps in the direction of the noise, and called out again. Max answered, and after another struggle came floundering and gesticulating into sight.

  “I—I—” he panted.

  “Catch your breath, bother brother, and speak up so that a civilized person can understand you,” said Sherlock, determined for once to get the start in any exchange of repartee. “What seems to be the trouble this time? A harmless little mite of a garter snake? A poor innocent grasshopper flying in front of you? Or have you simply gone jungle-jolly, the way troops used to go temporarily in the wilds of New Guinea?”

  “I’m not kidding this time, Sherlock,” said Max, beckoning furiously. “I—come on, I’ll show you.”

  He turned and headed back the sloppy way he had come.

  Sherlock frowned, but hurried after him. “Don’t tell me you’ve found Corey James!” he yelled after his friend.

  “Maybe,” was all that Max could say. “Come and look.”

  “Maybe, he says!” groaned Sherlock and, exerting his tired muscles, caught up to a position close behind the other Scout. Together they slipped and scrambled through the mud and undergrowth, into a clump of the thickest and dankest timber of all. Max stopped and pointed.

  Sherlock saw a footprint. A man’s footprint. The print of a slim middle-sized foot, just the kind of print that Corey James would make.

  THE TRAIL THAT WENT BACKWARD

  “Well,” Sherlock said. “So you weren’t fooling, after all.”

  He stooped down and gazed intently at the print. It had been driven deep into the mud, just below a long, thick branch of a big tree. But, deep though the print was, the water that filtered in from the damp soil surrounding it had not yet filled it. That meant it must be a fresh track, perhaps no more than minutes old. And beyond it showed another track, and another. They led into a narrow sedge-rimmed path that went on ahead and out of sight.

  “Let’s go and rally the rest of the bunch around,” suggested Max, regaining some of his lost wind. But Sherlock took off his Scout hat, mopped his brow and gave a quick negative shake of his black-thatched head. The gesture disturbed a cloudy veil of humming, stinging insects.

  “No,” he decided, putting on the hat again. “Don’t you remember what Mr. Palmer said? He may have angled off anywhere. It’s best for everybody to keep moving straight ahead, including us. We’ll follow on this trail until we learn more. Anyway, if these tracks mean Corey James—and who else could they mean ?—he’s near here, and in bad need of help. First aid, and water. Got a first aid kit?”

  “I have,” said Max. “An old army one. And a canteen, too.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  So saying, Sherlock took the lead along the path. “Look how close together these tracks are,” he said. “Corey James must have been staggering. He’s ordinarily pretty spry, from what I saw of him, and he’d take a fair stride.”

  “Ah, the brilliant boy detective,” breathed Max in mock deference. “Lead on, master mind. Your humble stooge will follow.”

  Sherlock was too intent on the tracks to reply, scornfully or otherwise. He saved his own breath and followed them along the path. They led straight and plain for a few yards, then around a curve to a new stretch of trail that gave the boys a clear glimpse of a stream. As they approached they could hear the current. It ran fast and probably deep, full of mud that made it opaquely brown. The tracks led to where a log lay across the water, forming a makeshift bridge.

  Sherlock hesitated, prodding the end of the log with his toe, to test its firmness. Then he hopped up on the log. It stirred and teetered beneath his weight, and he was sickeningly aware of how slippery the swamp journ
ey had made the soles of his shoes, but he kept his balance and successfully inched his way across the log.

  “Coming?” he called to Max from the other side.

  Max shook his head emphatically. “Not me,” he called back. “I’m no tight-wire artist like you. I’d fall off and never be heard of again.”

  Sherlock stepped down from the log to the muddy far bank, and peered thoughtfully at the trail that resumed its run beyond through more dripping vegetation. His characteristic frown of mystification popped out on his face at what he saw, or what he did not see. Carefully he examined the leaves and reeds to left and right of the path.

  “What’s the matter?” Max wanted to know. “Have you lost touch with the tracks?”

  “I seem to have done just that,” said Sherlock slowly. He faced Max across the swift-running water. “There aren’t any tracks at all over here.”

  Max’s eyes widened almost to the size of saucers. He studied the shaky log that did duty for a bridge. “Sherlock! Do you think—”

  Sherlock lifted a quick hand to keep him from finishing. “Let’s not stop here and make guesses. Get going to the left of here. Pass the word along as soon as you can make the others hear you. Get hold of Mr. Palmer and any others you can, and tell them what we’ve found. It may be the end of Corey James’ trail, right here in this muddy ditch.”

  Max opened his mouth to make another comment, but, surprisingly for him, closed it again without speaking. He turned and pushed his way through the thicket that bordered the trail, as fast as his mud-covered shoes would allow him. Sherlock, standing and listening, heard him call out after a short while, then again at a greater distance. It would take Max a struggling journey of many yards to make contact, Sherlock realized. Then more time and energy would be spent in making a report to Mr. Palmer and other adult leaders, and more time on top of that to lead them back. Meanwhile, the fate of Corey James might depend on what could be done at once.

  Alone, with what looked like a tale of tragedy half- told by the signs around him, Sherlock felt nervous. His first impulse was to strip off shoes and outer clothing and enter the stream, searching for what might be there. But his Scout training told him that this might well be the worst of follies on his part. He was solitary. The waters were narrow, but swift and murky. He could not tell where the bottom was, or whether there were possible snags or other natural snares. After a moment he mounted the log once again and recrossed it, slowly and carefully, and at the other side stared as before at the tracks that had led him there.

  Close together, deep and clumsy. What had forced Corey James, lost and injured and weak, to dare the precarious log-bridge ?

  Yet again he could hear Max calling, this time faint and far off. It was maddening to wait and do nothing. Sherlock knelt in the mud beside the track that was nearest to the log. Water filled it to brimming fulness, and no more could drain in from the surrounding muck. Sherlock’s habitual wonder and self-question made him poke a hand into it.

  At once he pulled the hand out, as though something had stung it.

  “Impossible!” he chided himself aloud. After a moment he groped into the water-filled track again, more carefully this time.

  His fingers explored with alert movements, just as they had explored for him in the haunted house during the darkness of the previous terror-filled night. His first impression, that he had condemned as impossible, had been true. The toe of the track was deeper driven than the heel.

  Sherlock scrambled, regardless of the eternal mud that stuck to the knees of his trousers, to the next water- filled track on, the back trail. This, too, he examined with his fingers. He exclaimed softly as he found what the water hid, and then he moved to the track beyond. Here, again, the toe of the track was deeper sunk into the mud than the heel.

  Rising, Sherlock straightened to his full height, muddy and tired, but tingling with new and greater excitement. A deep toeprint meant—yes, running. Once before he had examined the tracks of Corey James, and had pointed out to Doc Watson that the deep toemarks had meant running. That was at the alley across the street from Sig Poison’s. But this time, was Corey James running? If so, why? And if he had run, why were his tracks so close together. If he had had the strength left in his wounded body to run—

  “But did he run?” demanded Sherlock of himself, speaking out loud again. “Maybe—maybe—

  “Of course!”

  He hurried back along the line of tracks to where they began, under the big tree. “Why didn’t I stop to think this all out?” he scolded himself. “I guess I’m still a Tenderfoot at heart, no matter how well I passed my First-Class tests, no matter how many merit badges I have!”

  He paused by the first track, the one that Max had spotted and called him to look at. Carefully he eyed it, then turned his gaze upward into the branches of the tree above him. It was a maple, and one of its stouted branches projected almost horizontally overhead. Then again he studied the track. It was not yet full of water.

  “That’s it! That’s everything?'

  Sherlock flexed all the muscles in his young body and sprang upward, as high as his unsteady footing and mud- clotted shoes would let him. His fingers caught and clasped the big branch. With another effort he swung himself into the tree, crouched a moment and studied the other branches. Usually one big limb meant another one somewhere on the same trunk; yes, Sherlock saw one, thrusting straight out in another direction, fully a dozen feet long.

  Scrambling, Sherlock made his way to it, hooked his hands around it near the base, and let himself hang down at full length. Then he began to swing along underhand, like a monkey. Foot by foot he made his way toward the outer end of the branch, which sagged further and further beneath his weight, lowering him groundward. Almost at the end of it, he had pulled the branch down so far that his toes stirred the dense tangle of weeds and grass below. He let go and dropped to earth. The branch, relieved of his considerable poundage, sprang back up to its normal position. As it did so, the twigs at its end caught his hat and snatched it away. But Sherlock was in no mood to pause and climb back after his property. Already his eyes were probing here and there after what he expected to find, what he must find.

  Then he saw it. Another track, and still another beyond it, made by the same shoes that had made the tracks on the path. The water that had trickled into them was even shallower than that in the tracks he had just quitted beside the maple trunk.

  He followed them, forward this time, into the thick clumps of brush where they led.

  Sherlock’s mind was blotted clean of all things except the evident nearness of the trail’s end. Pushing his way through a matted belt of dwarfed trees and prickly bushes, he trod on a patch of extra-slippery mud, lost his balance and fell sprawling.

  “Okay, Scout boy,” said a voice that was at once soft and deadly. “Take it easy. You can get up, but get up slowly, and when you’re up, stand still. Don’t move without my leave, or this gun will go off at you.”

  Sherlock obeyed, and stood facing the speaker.

  “I know you,” went on the voice. “Somebody said to call you Sherlock for short.”

  “Hello, Mr. Corey James,” said Sherlock.

  COMPLIMENTS FROM A CRIMINAL

  They stood face to face, the man and the boy, in the heart of the thicket. Corey James grinned, but only with his mouth and oversized teeth. His eyes were as bright and hard and staring as the muzzle of the revolver he pointed at Sherlock.

  “What’s got you so surprised, Sherlock?” he sneered. “This gun? I know your pal the cop took one away from me, but I kept another in a hollow log near that house hide-out of mine. Being automobile-minded, I know how smart it is to have a spare handy.”

  “It’s not the gun,” said Sherlock slowly. That revolver- muzzle looked as big as a cave, the sort of cave that might hold a hungry beast of prey ready to spring out and destroy its victim. But he did his best to keep from trembling and to hold his voice steady as he spoke. Somehow he knew that he must kee
p Corey James talking.

  “Not the gun,” he repeated, “but you. You don’t look hurt or in trouble at all.”

  It was true. Corey James’ clothing was muddy and rumpled from traveling in the swamp, but he stood steadily on his feet, and his grinning face was neither drawn nor pale, as the face of a wounded man would be. Corey James chuckled.

  “So even you were fooled? That makes me feel better, one way and another, I figured you for as smart, or smarter even, than any grown-up copper that might be hunting me. I wanted ’em to think I was hurt and easy to get, so as to make ’em careless. I took time in the night to wallow in front of the house. I stuck my finger with a knife and squeezed out as much blood as I could, to look like I’d lain there wounded. Then I wiped off the knife and left it for a sure clue to make ’em think it was me who’d fallen there. But I wasn’t hit. That bullet passed whole inches away from me. If I have to plug you, I’ll not miss anywhere near like that.”

  “You wouldn’t dare shoot me,” said Sherlock.

  “I wouldn’t dare not to,” flung back Corey James. “If you tried to raise some kind of Scout boy howl for your nosey pals to come this way, I’d drop my first hunk of lead into you, and then open fire on them.”

  “My nosey pals, as you call them, are due here any moment,” Sherlock told him. “More of them than you can fight off with one gun.

  “Oh, no. I know what happened, I saw you. You sent off your one buddy when you were by the stream, and you were all alone when you backtracked me to here. How did you manage to find out what I’d done?”

  He was willing to talk, and Sherlock was willing to keep him talking. “I figured you’d walked backwards to make a false trail,” said Sherlock at once.

  “Say, Sherlock,” and Corey James’ grin above the revolver grew broader and uglier, “they teach you Scouts lots of cute stuff, don’t they ? And you’re ’specially smart. You’re so smart that you’ve gotten yourself into an awful jam. No, I told you to stand still.”