The Red Skull

XVI — New Suspect

“That’s a blasted lie!” Ossip Keller bellowed. “I didn’t have a thing to do with the slide!”

Johnny arose, but retained a tight grip on Keller’s coat. “You were running away, though!”

“Sure I ran!” Keller said angrily. “Who wouldn’t? I thought it was an earthquake or somethin’!”

Twisting, he threw a fist at Johnny’s rail-thin midriff. The fist missed.

The next instant, there was a clank as of 2 wooden blocks colliding!

Keller fell down. He sat there, feeling of his jaw and eyeing Johnny’s knuckles as though he had never seen such things.

“Getting tough won’t help you,” Doc advised Keller. “Better behave yourself. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He ran over to the point where the slide had started and began an investigation.

Without trouble, he found where an explosive — probably a quart-or-so of nitroglycerin — had been detonated. This had probably been the sharp blast which immediately preceded the slide.

Doc’s golden eyes held dissatisfied gleamings. This comparatively-small shot had not released those thousands of tons of stone.

He glanced about. The rock looked entirely solid. It was dark stuff with here-and-there a veining of lighter hue.

These veins received the Bronze Man’s attention. He risked death by clambering a few yards down the abrupt face from which the slide had broken.

He made an intensive examination, employing a small pocket microscope and various chemicals.

Once his eerie trilling note came into momentary being, rising-and-falling in not unmusical crescendo but so vague and indefinable that a listener would have been driven to the belief that it was an imaginative figment. Only Doc’s 5 trusted aides would have known from whence the mellow note filtered. Only they would have understood that it meant that Doc had made an interesting discovery!

Doc returned to where Johnny was holding the irate Ossip Keller.

“I can’t understand how a slide like that occurred in this rock formation,” Johnny complained with the concern of a geologist who sees all laws of his world violated. “I would swear it couldn’t happen!”

“The explosion of a small quantity of nitro started the slide,” Doc offered.

Johnny adjusted his spectacles with the magnifying left lens. He owlishly at Doc.

“That slide was a geological impossibility and you know it! I don’t see how it could possibly have happened.”

“Granted, Johnny. Have you noticed the veining in the stone, though?”

“Of course.”

“And you realize there are chemical combinations which would dissolve the filling of those veins? Or at least weaken it greatly.”

Johnny stared. “Is that…”

“It is. Someone has induced chemical solutions into the veining causing the entire rock formation to weaken. The blast of nitro merely set it into motion.”

Johnny scowled darkly at Ossip Keller.

“This man was acting suspiciously in the vicinity of the slide. He can’t deny that.”

Ossip Keller was purple with RAGE!

His red beard stuck out like cat whiskers. Evidently being manhandled on his own property was something new in his experience.

He began to express a profane opinion of Doc and the World in general…

…but caught the big Bronze Man’s eye and hastily changed his attitude.

“I had nothing to do with the slide!” he insisted once more. “If somebody set off a blast, I didn’t see it. But I did hear the noise of all that rock going down!”

He paused to shiver violently.

“It scared me. I may as well admit it. It scared me stiff! And that was why I was running.”

“Why’d you fight me when I tried to stop you?” Johnny demanded skeptically.

Keller was perspiring.

“I was frightened. The sound of that slide resembled an earthquake. I was in a quake once and badly injured. I have a horror of them. When I heard that rumbling and roaring and saw all the dust, it terrified me!”

A pronounced shudder racked him.

“You can go,” Doc said dryly. “We’ll accept your story for the time being.”

Ossip Keller glared at Johnny. “You gotta apologize to me, mister!”

Johnny snorted!

“Listen, Keller! When an apology is due, you’ll get it. If you start bellowing for one before that time, you’ll get this!”

The lanky geologist shoved out a cluster of hard knuckles.

Keller wet his lips a time-or-two… then departed, stamping a little to maintain his shaken dignity.

“There’s one bird who is wishing he hadn’t called on us for help!” Johnny grinned. “What do you make of his story, Doc? Sounded thin to me.”

“Have you noticed his habit of staring blankly at objects?” Doc countered.

“What’s that got to do with his story?”

“His trance-like behavior indicates he is given to moods and is possibly the victim of a minor mental disorder.”

“You mean he’s half nuts?”

“Oh no. He’s just the kind who would fly all to pieces under sudden excitement such as that slide. His earthquake mania story — if true — would account for his behavior.”

“And if it wasn’t true, it would account for a lot more!”

“You can add him to your ‘Suspect List’ if it’ll make you feel any better,” Doc said amiably.

Johnny squinted over his glasses. “Speaking of ‘suspect lists’, who is on yours, Doc?”

“You’d be surprised,” Doc replied.

No levity underlay Doc’s seemingly flippant reply. Indeed, his tone was as dry and cold as it ever became. Noting this fact, Johnny felt a surge of elation. He was suddenly certain that Doc had formed definite ideas as to the mastermind’s identity. The big Bronze Man must be even now seeking the necessary proof.

And there was still Lea Aster! Her rescue came before everything else.

Johnny took off his glasses and cleaned them. His hands showed nervousness by moving jerkily.

The thought of Lea Aster had upset him. It was strange their enemies had not tried to use the young woman’s safety as a club to drive Doc off the scene.

Did this mean that she was no longer alive?

Johnny’s fears were groundless. Word reached them from Lea Aster shortly before dusk. But the manner of its reaching them was suspicious.

Doc Savage had a faculty for seeing all that went on about him without seeming to do so. Hence it was that he observed roughly-clad Richard O’Melia in the act of furtively dropping something behind a desk.

O’Melia seemed nervous. Immediately after he concealed the object, he glanced around. Doc was apparently reading a newspaper.

O’Melia did not notice a small mirror in the palm of Doc’s hand. But the mirror relayed every move of the man as he hurriedly quit the office.

Doc glided over and secured the article O’Melia had secreted. It was an envelope. It bore Doc’s name written in the firm hand of Lea Aster. It was unsealed.

A bronze flash, Doc reached the door. “O’Melia!”

The burly construction man wheeled nervously.

Doc indicated the envelope. “Didn’t you lose this?”

O’Melia’s mouth opened and shut. His fingers fidgeted until he jammed them deep in the pockets of his laced khaki breeches. He seemed in pain.

“So you saw me ditch it,” he muttered. “I was afraid of that. Now I’m in a sure-enough jam!”

“Why?”

“Read it and you’ll see.”

“First,” Doc clipped grimly, “where did you get it?”

“I found it in my pocket,” O’Melia said earnestly. “That’s the truth believe it or not! I don’t know how it got there. But I think somebody wanted to get the message to you and tried to throw suspicion on me in the bargain.”

“Why did you try to hide it?”

O’Melia squirmed like a boy caught pilfering a melon patch. Either he was a good actor and liar… or genuinely uneasy.

“It gave me the jitters findin’ it in my pocket that way!” he explained. “I was gonna figure out some way of gettin’ it in your hands without showin’ it come from me. I mean, that I ever had it.”

Doc drew out the contents of the envelope — a single sheet of cheap tablet paper. On it, Lea Aster had penned a message:

Doc’s 5 men accompanied by Ossip Keller and Nate Raff came in. Doc handed them the missive, saying nothing.

Then he stepped out of the office, hurried to the temporary laboratory, and got the lantern which created ultraviolet light.

There was a chance Lea Aster had chalked a secret message upon the paper.

Ossip Keller scowled at Doc as he came in with the box-like lantern. It was plain that Keller still boiled with rage because of his encounter with Johnny. His indignation was the natural state of mind for a righteous man. But it was impossible to tell whether he was really affronted or wearing his cloak of wrath to cover more sinister feelings.

The flimsy buildings of Skullduggery were wired with regular lighting current, supplied by the company plant at the dam site. Doc plugged in the ultraviolet lantern. Had there been no other current available, a few moments’ work would have changed the lantern to battery operation.

Lea Aster’s note received the invisible beams.

“Glory be!” Monk chortled.

Eerie blue lettering had appeared upon the paper. Glowing with a curious electric quality, it was easily readable:

This message is a bluff, Doc. They intend to keep me unharmed and use me to force you to release any of the gang you should happen to capture.

I have not been able to learn who is the brains back of this. His name is never mentioned in my hearing.

I have no idea where I am being held.

Monk emitted a long, gusty sigh of relief!

“I’m sure glad the note was only a bluff! It had me worried for a minute.”

“They’re clever to use the girl as they are,” Doc said gravely. “This way they hinder my operations considerably.”

Surprise leaped upon Monk’s homely face!

“But this is the first time they have threatened to do bodily harm to her!”

“They didn’t need to threaten,” Doc indicated. “And they know that, no doubt. There are numerous workmen on the dam who are obviously in the gang.

“The fellow who let the ammonia compressor in the refrigerating plant overheat is an example. He was not so dumb but that he knew he wasn’t using oil in the bearings. And there are others like him. Yet it is necessary for me to refrain from seizing them.

“The moment I capture one of the gang, things will come to a show-down. Either I’ll have to turn my prisoner loose or the girl will be killed. But as long as I have not actually trapped some of them, they’re not likely to harm Miss Aster. She is, in fact, their ‘trump card’ for use only in a crisis! They surely know that.”

Doc’s 5 men showed marked relief as they heard these theories expounded.

But others did not look so free of mind. O’Melia and Keller — toward whom suspicion already pointed — shifted uneasily in their tracks. They seemed not to know what to do with their hands. Both perspired freely. But that might have been due to the heat.

Nate Raff stood apart with his big jaw outthrust and pipe clamped in his lipless mouth. His gaze fell on his 2 partners and lingered curiously. Even he could see all was not well with the pair.

Suddenly he looked away as though to conceal a swift, horrible suspicion.

Doc’s 5 aides were men trained in the quiet observation of details. They saw Nate Raff’s expression. They read its meaning as clearly as though Raff had been an actor registering feeling before a camera.

Raff’s look had shown that he suspected one or the other of his partners!