The Red Skull

XVIII — Mysterious Motives

Doc Savage created a stir of interest when he appeared on the dam scene.

Somebody had dug up the magazine section of a Sunday newspaper published some weeks previously. This contained a story by a feature writer who had an imagination and a big supply of glowing adjectives. The story had to do with Doc Savage — Man of Mystery, Wizard of Science, muscular superman.

Among other things, the feature story speculated about the Bronze Man’s source of fabulous wealth. At irregular intervals said the tale, mysterious shipments of gold came to Doc. These shipments were stupendous of sum. As much as 5 million dollars!

The yarn would have sounded a bit fantastic had it carried the truth about Doc’s golden trove. At Noon on a prescribed day of each week, Doc had but to broadcast — over powerful radio stations — a few words in a mysterious tongue. Some days later, the gold would arrive.

The wealth came from a hidden valley in Central America — a lost retreat presided over by descendents of the ancient Mayan race — and was supplied Doc solely for the purpose of furthering his cause of right. Few people knew this, however.

The newspaper feature had given Doc a reputation among the dam workmen. Many were the curious stares which followed him about.

Salvos of Thunder romped across the heavens, the echoes filling the great canyon with a steady clamor. Lightning was coming so often now that the sky seemed an inverted bloody bowl.

Doc found Renny directing the placing of tarpaulins over the newly poured concrete.

“It don’t rain in this country, they tell me,” Renny said. “The sky just falls on you!”

Workmen were moving up out of the canyon. Squads staked covers over electrical equipment and made lumber fast. They had had experience with Western cloudbursts.

The strings of electric bulbs (they were mounted in rough-and-ready reflectors made of common tin dishpans) seemed to become paler-and-paler as the blaze of lightning increased. It became so that men could perform their allotted tasks independent of the electric lights.

The Earth seemed to tremble in terror of the heavenly theatrics!

The sky seemed to press down. Clouds boiled like black, tortured foam.

Suddenly the rain came! Not drops, not sheets but in a roaring mass!

The chasm walls turned into vertical torrents. Shovels, chipping hammers, clay diggers, picks — all sorts of loose tools were dashed down the sheer stone walls. Sacked concrete and boulders as large as tubs rolled over-and-over in the flood.

Then came 2 jarring explosions! Real blasts, these! Man-made!

“Holy cow!” Renny groaned. “They have blown up the diversion tunnels!”

Doc did not answer. The moaning inferno of the cloudburst was no place to carry on a conversation.

The storm moved in an upstream direction out over the ancient lake bed which was to be flooded by the Red Skull dam.

They were strange things, these Western cloudbursts. They emptied prodigious quantities of water. And Doc Savage had never experienced a more violent one than this.

Moving along the dam, he located the cableway which led down to the powerhouses. The flood had put the power lines out-of-commission, however, and the car would not operate.

He tried the phone. Different parts of the job were connected by telephone. These still functioned. He put a call down to the powerhouses.

“How much water is coming through the diversion tunnels?” he asked.

“None!” was the report. “Explosions seem to have closed ‘em up above the dam!”

Doc hung up. He stood in the little phone shed, listening to water flood against the corrugated iron. A thoughtful expression gripped his features.

An explosion could have destroyed the dam as readily as the diversion tunnels had been closed. The stoppage of the diversion tunnels meant the dam would have to hold water. These tunnels merely carried the stream around the structure. Their closure was a minor calamity IF the dam held. And it should… providing the water didn’t get too high which was highly unlikely.

Why seek to get water in the dam? That was the puzzle Doc considered.

And he apparently found a satisfactory answer for there came from his lips the low, mellow, trilling sound — the small, unconscious thing which he did when something of marked importance had occurred. Melodious yet devoid of tune, the weird note mingled defiantly with the deafening bellow of the cloudburst.

The rainfall began to slacken. It became a normal downpour, then a hard rain. This seemed but a dew compared to that which had gone before. But out on the lakebed, the cloudburst continued.

From Skullduggery, the 3 owners of the construction company came running. They were excited. If one of them felt something besides concern over the safety of the dam, he failed to show it.

Water — uneasy and foam-flecked — had already climbed many feet up the cement-and-steel barrier.

“If it just don’t give way!” Nate Raff wailed. “If it just don’t! The concrete is awful green!”

“It’s lucky you used a quick-set concrete!” Renny told him. “That may save it. But you can bet there’s going to be a lot of water in there before mornin’!”

Renny was an excellent prophet.

The cloudburst hung roaring and flashing over the lakebed, then crept on into the waste of mesas and canyons which drained into the lake. The water level kept climbing… inches-to-the-minute at first… then more slowly.

“The dam is going to hold” was Doc’s final verdict.

The hour was well past Midnight. For all his tremendous muscular development, Renny was dog tired. Monk and Ham were too played out to do more than give each other uncivil looks.

Long Tom and Johnny were not so exhausted. Long Tom because he had done no hard work. And Johnny because it was next to impossible to wear him out. Little more than a framework of tendon-armored bones, Johnny had been known to travel for days without sleep and with only a little water to drink.

In view of the fact that Doc had captured his sleep in the early evening, the other five hardly expected him to turn in with them now.

They were surprised when he now did.

A silently thoughtful group, they entered the long corrugated shack which had been assigned them as quarters.

Soaking wet from the cloudburst, Buttons Zortell and Jud observed from their mesquite clump. They put their heads close together so as to converse in the faintest of whispers.

“Now is your chance!” said Jud.

“Your chance, you mean!” growled Buttons.

“Blast it!” Jud snarled. “You ain’t gonna shove it off onto me! There’s some risk!”

“We’ll match for it, then.”

“Fair enough.”

Buttons now thrust a hand in his pocket, brought it out, and shoved it — a closed fist — into Jud’s clutch.

“How many coins in my hand? One or two?” he asked. “If you guess wrong, you gotta go.”

Jud smiled slyly in the darkness. He had heard a click in Buttons’s hand and knew there were 2 coins.

“Two!” he said.

Now it was Buttons’s turn to smirk. There was only one coin. He had clicked it against a ring he was wearing to make it sound like two.

Grumbling and wondering how he had been so mistaken, Jud started for the building housing Doc’s group. Then he scuttled back.

“Here comes a truck, dang it!”

Skidding on the rain-hammered roadway, the truck groaned up to Doc’s quarters. It had a van-like body. Engine howling, it turned and backed up to the door. Numerous boxes were unloaded.

“Must be some stuff Savage had shipped out by rail from New York?” Jud ruminated.

“He ain’t gonna need it!” Buttons grated.

The truck soon drove away.

Clouds came unexpectedly from the moon face. The lunar sphere was brilliant as though newly washed. Its beams shone on the departing truck. The van of a body was remindful of a shoebox on spools.

From the corrugated shack came Doc Savage’s powerful voice. The tones of his men answered.

Buttons Zortell and Jud could not understand the words. But they managed to identify tones.

“All 6 voices have spoken,” Buttons chuckled. “That means they’re all in the dump!”

The voices to which they listened ceased to speak. Lights in the structure went out.

“They can’t leave in the moonlight without us seein’ ‘em!” said Jud. “Moreover now that the Moon is out, there ain’t no need of me crawlin’ to that barrel an’ markin’ it with phosphorus. We can see it without that!”

Buttons agreed that the mission — it was the one over which they had held the tricky coin match — was now unnecessary.

Both men carefully unwrapped oil cloth from the breech mechanisms of their rifles. This cloth had protected the weapons against the heavy torrential rain. Together, they drew a bead upon the dimly visible barrel which they had planted close beside the corrugated shack.

“For Pete’s sake, don’t miss it!” Buttons snarled.

Their rifles whanged together. And they did not miss.

There was a flash…

…then all the World ripened into glaring flame! A titanic fist seemed to knock Buttons and Jud end over end! They brought up agonizingly in a bed of prickly pear.

They could hear fragments of corrugated iron raining about them. Their ears ached from the explosion which had just occurred.

“Blazes!” muttered Buttons. “We came near bein’ too close to that barrel of TNT!”

Peering in the direction of the shack, they saw it had been erased from the Earth. A sizable hole had been scooped out of the ground. No one in the shack could have remained alive.

“Doc Savage got away from our bomb in New York,” Buttons grinned. “But he didn’t get away from this one!”

The 2 men scuttled away from the spot carrying the rifles with which they had detonated the explosive in the barrel.

The blast had snapped Skullduggery into wakefulness. Many windows had been broken. Dishes had jumped off shelves. A stovepipe-or-two had fallen.

Curious persons piled out of their quarters and made for the scene of the burst. They shouted excitedly. Yapping dogs added to the excitement.

Buttons and Jud separated.

“I’m headin’ straight for the new hang-out,” Buttons declared. “It ain’t safe for me to stay here in Skullduggery. Too many people know me!”

After watching his confederate out-of-sight, Jud concealed his rifle under a parked truck. He turned up his collar and yanked his cowboy hat low.

Not many residents of Skullduggery knew Jud by sight. He was convinced that he would not be recognized.

He mingled with the crowd. The comments that he heard tickled him.

“If there was anybody in that shack, it’ll take hours to get their bodies together!” said a man.

“Worse than that,” insisted another. “They won’t find ‘em a-tall!”

Jud smirked widely at this talk.

Then he saw Richard O’Melia.

The burly construction man had evidently come from the dam site. He was disheveled. Sometime during the night, he had fallen in soft mud to his hips. He wore no hat and his hair was mud-stained.

Jud watched O’Melia with a strange expression on his villainous face. He licked his lips as if tasting a pleasant thought. His fingers crawled on the grips of his six-guns.

Once Jud turned as though to leave the scene. But his steps slowed. He wheeled back, his unpleasant face fixed in determination.

“Dadblame me!” he chuckled fiercely. “I’ll do it! I might as well be lookin’ out for myself!”

He skulked through the crowd with one eye cocked on the heavens. A cloud was sailing majestically toward the brilliant Moon. Jud timed his procedure with the progress of the cloud.

When moonlight was blotted out, he stepped up to O’Melia. He thorned a gun snout into the construction man’s side. He said nothing. No words were necessary.

O’Melia looked down slowly. There was enough light to reveal Jud’s revolver.

“What d’you want?” O’Melia asked in a low, angry voice.

“Plenty of silence!” Jud told him. “One bleat and you’ll be pickin’ lead outa yourself! Walk ahead of me. We’re gonna have a talk.”

O’Melia began: “You dirty…”

“I ain’t kiddin’!” Jud warned.

O’Melia snapped his lips together. He permitted himself to be herded away from the crowd. The gun snout bore steadily into his back.

They entered a cluster of yucca which shut off the dancing flashlights being rushed to the blast scene for use in hunting the bodies.

“Start your talkin’!” gritted O’Melia.

For answer, Jud flicked out his left-hand six-gun. He swung it, grunting with the effort! It clanked above O’Melia’s temple.

The construction man collapsed. Air rushed out of his lungs in a long, blubbering sigh.

Jud hunkered and felt the man’s wrist.

“Ain’t dead!” he passed judgment. “Don’t make any difference no how. I’ll finish the job disposin’ of his body!”