The Red Skull

XI — The Canyon Fight

Doc did not change position. The gunman could not see him, anyway.

Giving his voice a brutal coarseness and a tearing note of rage, he sent a shout upward.

“What d’you think this is, anyhow?”

“It ain’t no place to go strollin’ in the dark!” came the snarled retort. “Who’re you, hombre?”

“I’m the jasper that’s gonna walk your carcass if you throw any more lead!” Doc bellowed, simulating the truculent manner of one tough guy addressing another.

“How many men are with you?”

“I don’t need any help to take care of you!” Doc blustered up at the gunman.

“Cut the clownin’! Did the Boss come with you?”

“No!” said Doc, taking advantage of this tip that the mastermind was not present. “I’m gonna wait here for ‘im.”

“Don’t be too sure of that! Are you the sheriff?”

“Are you tryin’ to insult me?” Doc howled.

Laughter rattled from the man overhead. He seemed to consider the sheriff query a great joke.

“Hang around,” he directed. “I’m comin’ down to interview you, sweetheart.”

Instead of one man, several descended a rope ladder which they flung down the cliff face. They brought electric lanterns.

The Arizona penitentiary and all the dives on the border could have been combed without netting a more savage-looking collection. A slovenly beard stubble decorated most of the faces. They all would have benefited from a bath.

The man who had shot at Doc — a tubby individual with ears thickened and nose flattened as the result of much pounding — scowled darkly.

“So the Boss sent you here to wait for ‘im, huh?”

“You don’t think I’m here for my health do you?” Doc snorted.

He was deliberately assuming the character of a hard-boiled personage. With insolent, flippant answers, he could evade dangerous questions.

“Your health is gonna be affected if you keep on crackin’ wise!” grated the other. “I never saw you before.”

“That’s your loss.”

“Oh yeah? Are you a new man?”

“You might call me that.”

The stocky man glanced about meaningly at his companions. “This guy showin’ up looks kinda fishy to me. The Boss ain’t said nothin’ about takin’ on any new hands.”

“Does the Boss have to ask your permission?” Doc growled sarcastically.

“What trail did you use comin’ here?” the fellow countered.

“Don’t make me laugh!” Doc snorted and hoped mightily that some hint would show him the proper answer.

2 of the other men laughed.

“You can’t kid this fellow, Jud!” one told the burly man. “He knows the only way of reachin’ this place alive is by water. An’ plane.”

The remark was illuminating. The men must have a powerboat on Red Skull river — a craft able to cope with the current.

“Who brought you up?” the tubby Jud persisted.

Doc bent a fierce glare upon his questioner.

“Maybe you have to have somebody lead you up that river,” he sneered. “But I don’t!”

“Oh?” Jud looked vastly enlightened. “So the Boss took you on because you know this country an’ the river?”

Ignoring the remark, Doc waved an arm overhead.

“You hombres know the plane from New York is comin’ in before long, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“And you know about the girl?”

“Sure. We got a radio up above. The Boss slips us important orders over that.”

The remark about the wireless set was bad news to Doc. Suppose these men should get in touch with their leader in an effort to verify his connection with the gang? This would disrupt his careful plans.

“I’m here to take charge of the girl,” he continued.

The men showed no surprise at the remark. One greeted it with a rowdy snort.

“What’s the matter? Ain’t we good enough to keep the city dame company?”

Doc decided to put in a few words which they might later recall as a warning.

“The man that harms that girl signs his own death war-rang,” he growled vehemently. “And don’t any of you hombres forget that! She may be the price that will buy Doc Savage off in case he gets us cornered. If she is harmed in the slightest, it’s gonna be just too bad!”

For a moment, Doc thought he might have put the speech a bit too forcibly. The group gave him curious stares.

But the incident was permitted to pass.

Doc was invited to mount the rope ladder which hung down the vertical cliff face.

He did so. It led him into the square opening which he had first glimpsed from the air.

Beyond the aperture was a stone room in the center of which a campfire burned fitfully.

Doc gazed about, not a little surprised. Other rooms opened off this one. And still more seemed to form additional stories. The walls were of roughly shaped stone set in a dry-mud mortar. Stout timbers supported the ceiling and the floors above.

It was an ancient cliff dwelling — a ruin of the type not at all uncommon in Arizona and other Southwestern States.

Built hundreds — possibly thousands — of years ago by some race long forgotten, the structure was in good preservation. Outlines of human fingers could be seen upon the mortar. The dry climate had kept the wooden timbers from decaying.

“A nifty hang-out, eh?” suggested one of the men.

“It is IF it don’t fall down on you!” Doc retorted gruffly.

“It won’t. Not after standin’ this long. I’ll bet nobody had been in it for a thousand years until the Boss found it. He said he had a dickens-of-a-time gettin’ up to it!”

Standing well out of the firelight, Doc began to fish slyly for information.

“When did he find it?” he asked, feigning only cursory interest.

“I dunno. Before the dam buildin’ started, I guess.”

“How come the Boss to be pokin’ around this region?”

The other man looked surprised.

“You don’t know much about the Boss, do you? How’d you come to tie up with him?”

“Through a friend of his — Buttons.”

And that, Doc reflected, was no lie!

“Buttons Zortell, eh?” said the other, making conversation. “Buttons is quite a guy. But I hear he didn’t do so well in New York.”

“Who cares about Buttons,” Doc yawned. “What I’m interested in, partner, is learnin’ more about this scatter I’m mixed up in. The Boss didn’t have time to tell me much. What’s the ‘kitty’ in this thing? What’re we after?”

Doc was alert for the slightest sign of hostility after he put the bold query. He expected such ignorance in an accepted member of the gang to arouse instant suspicion. But he got a surprise.

The men emitted snorts of laughter!

“We don’t know ourselves what the Big Boss is after,” one chuckled. “We get paid. We do our work. We keep our mouths shut. That’s all there is to it.”

“It must be somethin’ in connection with the dam,” Doc suggested.

“With keepin’ the dam from gettin’ built, you mean!”

Doc filed this bit of news for future consideration. So there was opposition to the building of the dam!

“I see,” he grunted. “But what about the Boss? What little I know, I got through Buttons.”

The other man seemed unsuspicious.

“What d’you want me to tell you?”

Doc reflected silently that almost anything would be of interest.

“His name is supposed to be a big secret, huh?” he asked.

A puzzled squint puckered the eyes of the man before him.

“I don’t quite savvy what you’re drivin’ at. Of course it’s a secret outside the gang. But everybody in the gang knows his name ain’t ‘Nick Clipton’.”

“Hey you!” suddenly roared squat Judwho had first discovered Doc.

The fellow had moved around to the side and surreptitiously drawn a six-gun. He had the weapon leveled at Doc’s head.

“You ain’t one of this scatter at all!” snarled the gunman.

Doc Savage hastily assumed his hard-boiled, domineering character.

“You’re fixin’ to get yourself ventilated, hombre!” he rasped.

Jud’s big single-action revolver jutted forward threateningly.

“I’m wise to you!” he spat. “There was somethin’ phony about you right from ‘taw!”

“Smart boy.”

“You’re durn tootin’ I am! I’ll prove it, too!”

“If you’re on the up-and-up, you can give us the real name of the Boss. What is it?”

Doc would have given a lot to be able to supply the correct answer to that question. Not because he was greatly concerned over his dangerous position. He had stood before killer guns on other occasions. But the main purpose behind his talk with these men had been to learn the name of the mastermind who paid them.

“The only name I know him by is ‘Nick Clipton’,” he growled truthfully.

The men exchanged alarmed glances. Then they all drew guns.

“By golly, I believe you’re right about ‘im!” one told Jud.

“Sure I’m right!”

“You dumb sheepherders!” Doc roared. “I know how we can settle this. Call the Boss on the radio an’ ask him about me.”

The suggestion was not bluff on his part. He wanted them to call. And as they called, he hoped to overhear the name of their leader.

But they saw through his subterfuge.

“Nix!” grinned Jud derisively. “That radio is an old spark-coil set that can be heard all over the joint when it’s goin’. You could hear the Boss’s name. We’ll just tie you up an’ decide what to do later.”

They advanced threateningly with guns ready.

A close observer might have seen Doc’s chest expand as though he were drawing a capacity quantity of air and holding it within his lungs. His hands were above his head. Yet for no apparent reason, the biceps of his right arm tensed and swelled until it stretched the sleeve of his coat.

The foremost man reached out to search him…

Then a weird thing happened. The reaching effort seemed to overcome the man.

He fell limp as a rag flat on his face!

An instant later, the other gunmen toppled over in the same uncanny fashion. They lay where they fell, breathing noisily.

Every man was unconscious!

Doc waited a bit longer than a minute… then released the breath he had been holding. Retaining his breath over that interval was — for Doc Savage — no great effort.

Inside his right coat sleeve over the biceps was a small, secret pocket. This had held several thin-walled glass balls. They contained a quick-spreading anesthetic gas which produced instant unconsciousness yet which became harmless after diffused in the air more than a minute.

Doc had merely broken the balls to release the gas by tensing his tremendous biceps muscle and held his breath until the vapor became impotent. The men would be senseless for some time.

As he stood there drawing in lungfuls of the dry night air, a plane came moaning down into the abyss of Red Skull Canyon. Exhaust sound indicated it was a single-motored ship.

Buttons Zortell was to come in such a craft! Doc flung to the rectangle of an opening. His flakey-gold eyes probed the darkness.

Clouds had momentarily parted above the mighty rent in the Earth, letting down chalky moonlight which whitened the rock spires and canyon rim but left the depths in gloom. Echoes of the plane motor bounced in salvos from the beetling cliffs, making it seem that a thousand aircraft labored in the chasm.

Wingtip lights off-and-on in signal betrayed the location of the ship. It was circling in the moonlight, keeping directly above the 4 ground lights.

Doc knew there must be an arrangement to illuminate the field.

With his small flashlight, he made a quick search. An adjoining room of the cliff dwelling — also looking out upon the level terrain below — held the lighting device.

It was an ordinary washtub aimed like a searchlight at the ground and fitted with a friction-igniting flare.

Doc hastily tore off the friction end of the flare and scraped it aflame. The brilliance which resulted was blinding. The details of the landing field were disclosed.

It was his first opportunity for a comprehensive survey and Doc delayed a moment to take in the scene.

The shelf of ground — several acres in area — was even smoother than he expected. Located at the point where a large side canyon joined Red Skull, the shelf was open in 3 directions. At least open enough to enable an expert pilot to make a landing. The fourth side was walled by the cliff.

Doc hurried to the rope ladder and started down. He could not make out details of the plane as yet. It had not come within the flare luminance.

The rope ladder swayed as Doc descended, scraping along the vertical stone. Below was a sheer drop of at least a hundred feet. Above, there was no way of telling how high the abrupt stone lifted.

Doc had covered but a few feet when the ladder gave a sharp, inexplicable jerk! An instant later, it collapsed completely.

It had been cut at the top!