“The devil won’t be displeased either,” D’Artagnan grinned. “We’ve sent him a half dozen excellent additions to his staff.”
THEY were approaching the gate and Phillip saw a sentry standing in the road, waving them to a stop with a flashlight.
“Stop,” Porthos said suddenly. “Let me handle this.”
Phillip stopped the car. The heavy gate was shut and there was no way out unless the sentry ordered it opened.
“Come here!” Porthos bawled to the sentry.
The sentry approached the side of the car.
“No one is to leave,” he said crisply. “We have just received those orders from the castle.”
“What’s that?” Porthos said. “Don’t mumble, fool! Step closer so we can hear you.”
The sentry stepped to the side of the car and stuck his head into the rear tonneau. Porthos’ great hands closed over the man’s neck with the pressure of a vise. The sentry struggled for an instant, then was still.
The night was perfectly quiet.
“Of course everything is all right,” Porthos bellowed loudly. His voice carried far in the silence. “Your apologies are a little late, Herr Dumkopf. You will find that it is not conducive to your good health to question field marshals as if they were corporals. Have that gate opened within three seconds and no more of your stammering.”
The sound of the gate creaking open, broke the silence.
D’Artagnan grinned with delight at Porthos.
“I didn’t think you had that much deceit in that ox-like body of yours,” he whispered.
Porthos threw the body of the sentry to one side as Phillip gunned the car and roared through the open gate and onto the dark road.
“Turn left,” Marie said suddenly. “We cannot go back to Paris. The route to Switzerland is to the left. In Switzerland we will all be safe. I have connections along the route that will assure us a safe trip.”
Phillip swung the car to the left and drove swiftly down the dark road, away from Paris.
They drove in silence for several minutes, but there was an uneasy tension in the car that was almost physically tangible.
D’Artagnan said suddenly, “Stop the car, little Phillip.”
“Why?” Marie cried.
Phillip brought the car to a quiet stop. The night was black and by the faint light of the stars they could make out the rugged landscape of the French countryside.
D’Artagnan stepped from the car. “There is work to be done in France,” he said quietly. “I cannot leave. The rest of you take the good scientists on to Switzerland. I will remain here.” Porthos, Aramis and Athos clambered from the car.
“A shabby trick, D’Artagnan,” Porthos grumbled. “You would have the fun of sticking Nazis and leave us to twiddle our thumbs with women and children.”
Phillip had slipped quietly from the car and was standing beside the musketeers on the dark road.
“I will stay with you,” he said simply.
Marie looked at them for an instant, and her eyes were wet as they met D’Artagnan’s, but she said nothing.
“Your minds are made up,” she said softly. “May God bless you all and may we meet again.”
She touched D’Artagnan lightly on the cheek with her hand and then slipped to the driver’s seat.
“Au revoir, my friends,” she murmured.
The musketeers bowed slightly, and Phillip had to blink his eyes rapidly to keep back the tears.
The car moved away and the four men watched until its red tail-light disappeared in the blackness of the night. Then they turned and started walking back along the road to Paris, arm-in-arm, smiling into the darkness.
[*] “Enchanted Bookshelf”, Fantastic Adventures, March, 1943. In the bookshelf which Phillip Poincare purchased was an original manuscript of The Three Musketeers, by Dumas, containing the ecto-plasmic residue of the actual musketeers and D’Artagnan, from whom Dumas had drawn his immortal characters. Philip Poincare unwittingly broke the spell of their entombment and they returned to life. Their entombment had been accomplished by Cardinal Richlieu to save them from hanging. They became adjusted to the Twentieth Century quickly, and by their skill and courage saved a beautiful agent of General de Gaulle from the hands of Major Lanser, a Nazi, who was apprehended by D’Artagnan and eventually slain by Athos in a duel.
THE CURSE OF EL DORADO
First published in the April 1944 issue of Fantastic Adventures.
A falling plane brought two Americans to a forgotten race, a group of Nazis, and the curse of a golden idol.
SECOND Lieutenant Harley Smith looked down eight thousand feet at the South American jungle that spread beneath him like a lush green carpet. From that height the jungle looked cool, remote and beautiful. A river wound like a silver thread through the bright emerald of the smooth underbrush.
That was the impression at eight thousand feet, but Harley knew the jungle at close range; he knew the appearance of cool, lush beauty was very deceptive. The tangled jungles and forests of this area were a stinking, festering, snake-infested matting on ground that was a swampy morass—steaming, treacherous and trackless.
Harley glanced sideways at his copilot and grinned.
“Looks nice from up here, doesn’t it?”
The co-pilot, Johnny El well, looked over the side and shook his head disgustedly.
“It never looks good to me,” he said dourly. “You can have the jungle and I’ll take vanilla.”
Harley’s eyes roved over the instrument panel as they talked. He was a big, solidly built young man with brown hair and eyes. His hands were muscular and strong, but their touch on the stick was as gentle as a woman’s.
The plane he was flying was a twin-engined army bomber, with a six-man crew. Their present trip over the jungled interior was a routine observation flight from their squadron base on the coast of Peru.
“We shouldn’t kick,” he said. “We’ve got a pretty cool spot for our field.”
“That’s small compensation,” Johnny Elwell said. He was tall and slightly built, but there was whip-cord toughness about his movements. His face was thin and a lock of blond hair fell perpetually over his left eye. At Randolph Field, several thoughtless cadets had made the mistake of dubbing him Mister Veronica Lake. What had happened to them, drastically and quickly, had prevented the nickname from spreading.
“Why don’t they send us to Africa?” he demanded. “Or the Pacific? MacArthur needs bombers, doesn’t he? Why do we hang around down here?”
“Well this area has to be kept under aerial observation,” Harley said.
“Why?” Johnny demanded.
Harley glanced at him. “You really want to know?”
“Of course I do.”
“In that case,” Harley said, poker-faced, “you’ll be glad to know that General Arnold is in Washington. I saw it in the paper the other day. You can cable him when we get back to the field. And don’t let him evade the issue.”
Johnny sighed disgustedly.
“What a gay, joyful life you lead,” he muttered. “Little Sun-beam the Second. You—”
HE STOPPED speaking as an ominous cough suddenly sounded in the right motor. The plane side-slipped as the power failed momentarily. “What is it?” he asked tensely. Harley was studying the instrument panel with grim eyes.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Flash the word to the crew. We may have to get out of here in a hurry.”
Johnny picked up the radio mike and contacted the navigator, gunners and photographer. His orders were brief and curt: “Right motor missing, prepare to hit the silk if the skipper thinks it’s bad.”
He dropped the mike and glanced at Harley’s tense, set profile.
“Think you can limp in with one motor?”
“Maybe,” Harley said. “If we’re lucky—”
The plane suddenly dropped into a twisting, vertical dive. Harley watched the spinning needle of the altimeter as he fought to steady the ship.
“Tell t
he men to jump!” he snapped to Johnny. “Right wing is buckling. We’re going to crash.”
Johnny snapped the orders into the mike and then stared at the crazily spinning altimeter needle.
“2000—1800—1650—”
“Jump!” Harley snapped at him, without taking his eyes from the instrument panel.
“How about you?”
“Damn it, jump!” Harley yelled, over the screaming of the wind. “I’ll take care of myself.”
“Okay,” Johnny said, as he scrambled out of his seat; “but don’t wait too long,”
Harley waited until the altimeter registered fourteen hundred feet before he knew that there was no chance of saving the plane. Then he leaped toward the nearest parachute hatch and went out headfirst.
For an instant as he plummeted down he was afraid his parachute would become snarled in the plunging ship; but it flashed past him as he tugged at the rip-cord, and when the big white umbrella blossomed above him, the ship was hundreds of feet beneath. He felt the welcome tug of the ’chute, and then he was swinging back and forth, falling toward the ground at about twenty feet a second.
He saw the ship crash and burst into flame. A minute or so later his swinging feet brushed the top branches of a tree; he avoided several of the branches as he fell ground-ward, but he was brought to an abrupt jerking stop as the parachute caught and tangled in the upper branches.
Forty feet above the swampy ground he hung suspended, swinging gently back and forth. He could see the smoke arising from the wreckage of the plane, several hundred feet away. He wondered anxiously about Johnny and the crew. Johnny should be in the immediate vicinity, but the rest of the crew might be miles away. They had jumped several minutes before he and Johnny, and a minute in the air meant miles on the ground.
He cut himself from his parachute, then climbed cautiously to the ground and headed for the wreck of the plane. Johnny, he surmised, would do the same thing. There they might be able to salvage some equipment they would need badly on their trip back to the coast.
IT took him almost fifteen minutes to claw his way through the tangled underbrush to the plane. His face was cut in several places from the stinging backlash of low branches and to the middle of his thighs he was plastered with slimy mud.
Within fifty feet of the plane the heat of the blaze forced him to stop. He leaned against a tree and stared at the scene of destruction. The slim silver beauty of the ship had vanished and it was a blackened, twisted mass of flaming metal. There wouldn’t be much opportunity of salvaging anything from that wreckage, he thought bitterly.
He stood there for ten or fifteen minutes watching the blaze helplessly.
A shout from behind caused him to turn quickly.
Johnny was fifty yards away, limping toward him and waving one hand in the air. His clothes were plastered with mud and there was a trickle of blood running down his cheek from a cut on his forehead.
Harley felt a sense of relief that left him weak.
“A couple of bad pennies, I guess,” he said, when Johnny reached him. “That’s all we are.” He patted the lanky blond awkwardly on the shoulder. “I never thought I’d be this glad to see anyone in my life. What’s the matter with that leg of yours?”
Johnny leaned against a tree, sighed, and lifted his left foot from the ground. Under its wind-burn, his face was white.
“Nothing much,” he said, tight-lipped. Twisted it a little when I landed. It’s not broken.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Harley said. “How far from here did you land.”
“About half a mile,” Johnny said. “I saw the smoke from the plane and headed over here as fast as I could.” He looked straight at Harley and his candid blue eyes were worried. “How about the others?”
“No sign,” Harley said, with a shake of his head. He glanced about and his forehead furrowed with tiny lines of anxiety. “They’re probably miles from here,” he added.
“Harley,” Johnny said suddenly, “let’s don’t kid each other. We haven’t got a chance in the world of getting back to the field and you know it.”
“We’re going to get back,” Harley said stubbornly. “I didn’t join the Air Force to find a grave down here in this damn jungle. And neither did you. So stop worrying about not getting back. We’ll do it.”
“Hear! Hear!” Johnny muttered. “Noble sentiment and all that, but not very practical. Have you got any idea of what we’re up against?” He gestured toward the blackened wreckage of the plane. “Maybe you’ll fly Lulu Belle back?”
Harley shook his head with a grim smile.
“Nope,” he said, “Lulu Belle has made her last trip. Kind of tough on the old girl. But we’re not through. We’re about three hundred and fifty miles from the coast, and slightly northeast of our field. That’s rough figuring but we can’t get much closer without instruments.” He frowned for an instant as he made a mental computation. “At twenty miles a day we’ll be home in a little over two weeks.”
“Fine,” Johnny said, “but how about food and water? I’m not trying to be a pessimist, but let’s look at things straight. There’s damned little water in this neck of the woods. And no cafeteria service, either.”
“We’ve got revolvers,” Harley pointed out. “We should be able to shoot a few birds. And we’ll find water, don’t worry.”
“Okay,” Johnny said tiredly. “Who am I to withstand all this Rover Boy enthusiasm? But I got a better idea. This leg of mine is going to slow us up quite a bit, so,” he smiled cheerfully, “why don’t you go on and send back for me? That way we’ll both—”
“Shut up,” Harley said. “We’ve got more important things to do than waste our time with that sort of nonsense. Let’s take a look at that leg of yours.”
“But Harley,” Johnny protested, “can’t you see what I mean? You’ve got a chance alone; with me as baggage you’ll never make it.”
“Will you stop babbling?” Harley said mildly. “I’ve suspected you for a long time of having a streak of ham in your make-up and now I’m sure of it. You’re just aching to make a corny dramatic gesture. This isn’t Beau Geste so forget about being noble.”
“All right,” Johnny said with a sigh, “we’ll play it your way. Let’s get to work on this leg of mine. Tomorrow morning we should be on our way.”
THE following day they covered almost twelve miles. Johnny’s ankle was strapped with a cloth bandage made from his shirt, and Harley had cut him a walking-stick that was almost as good as a crutch. But each of those twelve miles was like walking an eternity in hell. The ground gave treacherously under their boots and many times they slipped waist-deep into slimy mud; branches whipped at their faces and clothes and the sun hung in a white sky like a molten ball of brass.
They rested that night.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Harley said, when they’d stretched out on one of the few dry patches of ground they had encountered.
“I hope it doesn’t get any worse,” Johnny croaked. He looked at Harley and shook his head. “We’re just foolin’ ourselves, I’m afraid. No water, no food and still about three hundred and forty miles from the field.”
“We’ll make it,” Harley said.
But as he turned over and closed his eyes to get some sleep he was wondering just how they were going to do it . . .
SOMETHING awoke him later that night. He had no idea of the time. It was a dark night and the oppressively humid air was still. Johnny was sleeping beside him with an arm flung over his face.
He sat up carefully and glanced around. But in the blackness he could see nothing. The trees that ringed the small clearing were like black shadows on a dark curtain.
He came slowly to his feet. His nerves were tingling. He shook Johnny cautiously and whispered to him to be quiet. Johnny sat up and gripped Harley’s shoulder.
“What’s up?” he asked tensely.
“Don’t know,” Harley answered. He glanced around the clearing again, and his imagination seemed to be playing tr
icks on him. For some of the shadows that were moving in the fringe of trees resembled human forms. And he heard an occasional rustling on the ground that might have been made by human footsteps. This sound, he decided, was what had awakened him.
“I’m going to take a look around,” he whispered to Johnny. “You stay right where you are.”
“Now wait a minute,” Johnny hissed in a plaintive voice, “you can’t go hogging all the fun. I’m going with you.”
“No you’re not,” Harley said fiercely. “This is a one-man job. Now sit tight.”
He moved away from Johnny, stepping as softly as he could over the dry, hard ground. When he reached the trees he stopped and listened until his ears ached from the dead stillness; then he proceeded on, making a cautious circle on the outskirts of the small clearing.
He was beginning to think he had been victimized by his jumpy nerves when he saw a shadow directly before him, move back into the deeper blackness of the trees. No sound accompanied the movement. The shadow simply faded away like a wraith.
He stopped, every muscle tensed. With a curious sense of foreboding he knew that something was about to happen. The feeling was in the ominous stillness, the unnatural hush of the jungle. It couldn’t last.
And it didn’t!
But when the deathly stillness was shattered, Harley was too shocked to move.
A voice with an unmistakable German accent said, “Now!” loudly and crisply. The voice emanated from the shadows of the trees and it cracked with authority.
Almost immediately a glaringly bright light slashed from the blackness and bathed the clearing with its searing white brilliance.
Harley backed involuntarily, throwing one hand before his face against the blinding brightness of the light. Johnny was still sitting in the center of the clearing, too stupefied to act. His blond hair was in his eyes and his face looked as white as chalk in the light.
Harley recovered first and his hand dropped to the revolver at his side.
“On your feet, Johnny!” he snapped.
Collected Fiction (1940-1963) Page 210