The Red Skull

XVII–Clue Trail

So tense was the situation that no one noticed Doc Savage was again examining the note from Lea Aster. His attention was centered on the paper itself and the envelope. A pocket microscope was in use.

On the underside of the paper, he found faint, dark smears. These had come from the table upon which the paper had been placed while being written upon. The nature of no material could defy Doc’s analysis for long. He soon knew what the stains were.

Soot from oil smoke!

Without a word, he quitted the office. He wasted no time. His remarkable faculty for deduction had already functioned. He knew what the soot meant.

Skullduggery — being a temporary city — had no buildings equipped with oil furnaces. Mesquite stems served as firewood. These did not make an oily smoke.

Doc had noted a trash fire not far distant and the dark smoke it exuded. The fire no longer burned. But he recalled its location.

More important, he remembered that only one shack had been in the path of smoke from the conflagration. In this — it was reasonable to believe — the girl had written the note.

A thicket of mesquite received Doc’s figure. He seemed to vanish in the gnarled growth. A darkening twilight helped his disappearance.

All was quiet about the tar-paper shack which had served Lea Aster’s captors as a refuge. No light showed through the boarded windows. 3-or-4 striped gophers played around the doorstep. Atop the roof, a woodpecker operated industriously on a wormhole. Peace reigned.

A moist, jingly plop sounded near the shack. After this, the playful gophers seemed to go to sleep. The woodpecker lay down.

Inside the building, 2 loud thumps might have been the noise of men falling out of chairs.

Doc Savage — big and bronze — appeared as if by magic before a mesquite clump. He ran for the hut!

His remarkable anesthetic gas had already done its work and become harmless. Its penetration into the flimsy shack had been swift thanks to cracks in the rickety walls. It had spread instant unconsciousness — a coma which would eventually pass, leaving the victims entirely unharmed.

Doc reached the door but did not grasp the knob. His flashlight dispelled the gloom for a moment.

The knob had a sticky, syrupy coating.

Once more had Doc’s habitual caution saved him.

The stuff on the knob was undoubtedly poison such as had slain Bandy Stevens!

Around to the end of the shack glided the bronze giant.

His right hand became a hard, metallic block. It smashed once!

A plank caved with a splintering crash! Grasping other planks, Doc tore them off.

It was an amazing feat! With his bare hands, he did a job which seemingly called for axes and wrecking bars. The hardwood planks might have been mere strawberry boxes from the way they yielded to his case-hardened bronze fingers.

He entered, his flashlight gushing whiteness.

2 men were heaped on the floor. Both lay face down. Both snored noisily.

Doc brushed them with a toe, turning them. They were 2 of the cliff-dwelling gang.

The flash beam — hunting like a hungry thing — located a trapdoor in the floor. Doc opened this. Steps led down into an earth-walled cellar.

The cellar floor was littered with cigarette stubs, pipe dottle, and burned matches.

No one was there. Doc descended and searched but found nothing of value. The cigarettes were all hand-rolled cowboy fashion. The matches were grocery-store variety.

A rough table upstairs held a 5-cent tablet. From this, the paper for Lea Aster’s note had obviously come. All signs indicated the cabin had harbored a crowd of men through the day.

The gang had retired to some other retreat taking their young woman prisoner. Only two of their number had been left behind.

Doc Savage scooped up the 2 prisoners. They seemed without weight in his powerful grasp.

He pushed them out through the hole he had torn, then followed himself. He cleaned the poison off the front door knob with a handkerchief taken from one of his captives. He burned the handkerchief.

The increasing darkness then swallowed him. He carried the unconscious men.

Thunder gave a sudden thump in the distance, then rolled across the heavens like the insane laughter of a man half-choked. Lightning batted a red eye. A wind — stifling hot — scurried across the canyons and mesas. Overhead, clouds were massed in blowsy, awesome battalions.

A turbulent, threatful night promised.

The 3 partners who owned the Mountain Desert Construction Company were still in the office. Doc’s men were with them. They stared their surprise when Doc strode in with his 2 captives.

“Where’d you get ‘em?” Monk demanded.

Doc explained. He placed the 2 senseless men on separate desks.

“We’ll make them talk,” he finished. “Watch them while I go get the serum from the laboratory.”

He left the room quickly.

“Serum? Serum?” Nate Raff gave his enormous jaw a puzzled tug. “What did Savage mean by that?”

“Truth serum,” Monk replied,as if surprised that Raff did not comprehend.

“But I didn’t think that stuff was reliable,” Raff objected. “Police are not allowed to use confessions obtained by its use.”

“You watch!” Monk grinned. “Doc uses hypnotism after he administers the stuff. These 2 birds will spill everything they know!”

Thunder whooped noisily overhead as Monk spoke. It was as if some ethereal Colossus had been tickled. Lightning sprayed red flame over desert and mountain.

For a moment, the boisterous elements commanded attention. For 10 seconds-or-so, the 2 senseless captives were forgotten!

During that interval, a sharp eye might have seen each man give a small twitch. A single sharp movement as though a horrible agony had penetrated through the stupor of their slumber.

Amid the gobbling uproar of the Thunder overhead, none noticed the 2 unconscious men had stopped breathing!

Not until Doc Savage returned was the truth known. The Bronze Man halted the instant he caught sight of the two on the desks.

“They’re dead!” he said sharply.

Had lightning struck the flimsy building, the shock would not have been greater.

“They can’t be!” roared Nate Raff. “We’ve been here all the time!”

“All the time!” echoed O’Melia, hitching nervously at his khaki breeches. “Yes sir!”

“Maybe your anesthetic killed ‘em,” red-bearded Keller told Doc in a surly mutter.

Renny started for the dead men.

“Don’t!” Doc warned.

With quick gestures, he indicated the peril of going near the bodies. Splattered across the features of each unfortunate were syrupy stains.

“The poison which kills on contact,” he announced.

“But where did it come from?” Nate Raff thundered.

The office windows were open. Outside one of them, Doc found the answer to Raff’s query.

A toy water pistol! From this, the fatal liquid had been squirted. It was wiped clean of fingerprints.

“Somebody let ‘em have it through the window!” boomed Raff.

Keller nodded and explored his red whiskers with his trembly fingers. O’Melia shivered.

But grim looks passed among the aides of Doc Savage. They were trained observers, these 5 men. Although at times they might seem as children compared to the mighty Bronze Man who was their leader, each of the five had an unusually keen brain. They ranked as high above an ordinary man as they themselves were topped by their amazing bronze leader.

Every one of them saw that no tracks were outside the window where the water pistol lay! They realized the water gun had been thrown from inside the office. They knew that one of the Mountain Desert partners had killed the two so they couldn’t be questioned!

The discovery appalled them. Raff, O’Melia, Keller — which man was it? The question baffled them.

They wondered if Doc had singled out one man in his mind as the culprit. Why was he holding his hand? Was it to rescue Lea Aster? Was it to learn what was back of the crimes? Was it to solve the mystery of the red-hot lava in the ancient cliff dwelling?

Bronze and inscrutable, Doc Savage voiced no answers.

Soon after the bodies had been removed, Doc requested quarters.

He and his men were assigned a long corrugated iron building. It was one of many similar structures which lined a Skullduggery street. It was situated a short distance from the shack which Doc had already taken over as a laboratory.

Horror, peril, death — none of these visibly affected Doc Savage. He retired to the new quarters, laid down, and slept.

The satanic bedlam in the sky did not bother him. The whizzing cracks and cannonading of lightning, the stifling heat, the tinkle of wind-carried sand against the corrugated iron building — all failed to disturb him.

4 hours later, he arose. The minimum of slumber had refreshed him and tuned up his faculties for the dangerous work ahead.

Before dressing, Doc took his exercises. This was a grueling routine and lasted almost 2 hours. It was unlike anything else in the World. Doc’s father had started him on the ritual when he could hardly walk. And Doc had continued it religiously from that day.

To these exercises could be laid the credit for Doc’s tremendous physical and mental powers. He made his muscles tug against each other in a fashion he had perfected until perspiration covered his mighty bronze body in a heavy film.

He selected a number of a dozen figures and juggled it mentally, multiplying, dividing, extracting square and cube roots. This whetted his powers of concentration.

He carried with him always an apparatus that made sound waves of frequencies so high and low that the ordinary human ear could not detect them. Through a lifetime of practice, Doc had perfected his ears to a point where the sounds registered.

He named scores of assorted odors after a quick olefactory test of small vials racked in a special case.

To sharpen his touch, he read pages of very fine Braille printing — the writing for the blind which is a system of upraised dots.

He had many other varied parts in his routine. He went through them at a terrific pace, giving himself no time for rest. Dressing, he stepped out into the night.

Lightning splashed! Thunder made the earth tremble! The wind had died and it was hotter. The clouds overhead were blue-black, bloated, threatening.

Doc Savage swung off in the direction of the dam.

2 men watched him go.

Scowls distorted their faces. Both held rifles. The grips of single-action six-shooters stuck hornlike from low-slung holsters.

One gargled a curse and leveled his Winchester in Doc’s direction. The other man caught his arm.

“Nix, Jud! You might miss.”

“You’re crazy, Buttons!” growled the other. “I can get a bead on ‘im durin’ one of these lightnin’ flashes. I’m a crack shot!”

“Don’t take the chance!” Buttons snapped. “We’ve got another way of doin’ it.”

The skulking pair allowed 5 minutes for Doc Savage to get out of the vicinity.

Then they crept into a mesquite thicket and came out carrying a barrel. They handled this barrel very gingerly indeed. Toward Doc’s quarters, they bore it.

Under the eaves of the long corrugated building stood another barrel. It was used to catch rain water for washing purposes.

The barrel carried by Buttons Zortell and Jud exactly matched the one which belonged under the eaves. They made a quick exchange.

Only a close examination would reveal the substitution. And who would take the trouble of scrutinizing a harmless rain barrel?

“They can even dip washwater out without noticin’ anything wrong!” Buttons chuckled as they bore the other barrel away.

“Will we let ‘er go soon as the bronze guy comes back here?” Jud wanted to know.

Buttons considered this deeply.

“It’d be better if we could get his 5 pals with ‘im. We’ll try to do that!”

The sky suddenly roared with Thunder!

Looking up, Jud chuckled. “There’s sure gonna be a cloudburst!”

“That makes it swell for us, huh?” Buttons laughed.

But Jud was not so certain.

“The thing ain’t gonna be easy to do!”

“Blazes! All we gotta do is sit out here until we see Savage go into the shack along with his men, then…”

“I don’t mean that!” Jud snapped. “I’m talkin’ about the business at the dam. Savage is gonna be on the job. Somebody may get caught!”

“Well it won’t be us!” Buttons grunted callously. “We ain’t handlin’ that end.”

Jud seemed to struggle with his supply of brain matter, forcing it to wrestle with a mystery. The lightning flashes showed his inch-wide brow ditched with wrinkles. He gave it up.

“I don’t savvy it,” he grumbled.

“Savvy what?”

“Why the Boss don’t go ahead an’ blow up the dam. That would put the Company out of business. Why’s he doin’ this other thing?”

“The Boss is after somethin’!” Buttons explained patiently. “Can’t you get that through your head? It’s somethin’ that nobody but him knows about. He knows what he’s doin’!”

The two ceased their somewhat vague conversation. They settled themselves to wait. Their job was here. They were the human triggers of a death trap.

At the dam, another sinister plot was proceeding. A plot, it seemed, which did not have to do with destruction of the dam.