The Mental Wizard: A Doc Savage Adventure Read online

  The water gurgling in and out of his ears awakened him, and he found his craft aground on a mud bar on which tall birds with long, yellow legs and pouchy necks stood. He shoved the boat off the mud, got it out in the current and paddled.

  Hutton watched for floating coconuts, picked them up, and finally found one that was good. Later, he landed for fruit, and killed a fat bird with a stick, and ate it raw.

  That day, he slept in the canoe in the stream, and awakened conscious of water no longer around him, but with movement near. He listened. Something nudged the canoe, almost overturned it.

  He looked out, and actually cried out in terror. For he was on another mud bar and there were scores of alligators around him. One had nudged the canoe. He clubbed the ’gator; luckily, it withdrew. He got the dugout afloat again.

  The river was the Magdalena, and it led eventually to Cartagena. Big black natives and smaller brown natives saw him frequently and remembered, for a white man paddling a dugout alone was unusual, to say nothing of a white man who was skin and bones and who wore only a leather apron.

  Amber O’Neel trailed the flier down the river by questioning the natives. O’Neel was taking chances coming into the districts of the Colombian police. He knew it, but did not hesitate. He was cautious, though. And he was raising the ante to his natives.

  “Two guns, and all the ammunition he can carry in two trips to the man who gets that flier!” he promised.

  A bit later, it was three guns, and three loads of ammunition. Then he thought of throwing in an outboard motor, which was a brilliant stroke. Almost any native would trade his wife for an outboard motor.

  O’Neel and his natives were not more than an hour behind David Hutton when the latter tied his canoe up to the stone wall along the Cartagena water front.

  David Hutton stood on the wall and looked around. That move quite possibly changed the life course of a great many people.

  A crowd was gathered on the water front. David Hutton looked the way every one else seemed to be looking, out into the bay. A steamer with four funnels, flying a United States flag, was anchored out in the stream.

  “A tourist boat, probably.” Hutton shuddered. “People out having fun. It seems strange—after what I’ve been through.”

  His second look at the crowd showed something he had overlooked. A lot of top-hatted personages. There was also a squad of soldiers, some sailors, policemen, and two different bands.

  “Who is it?” Hutton asked a very brown man in very white clothes. “What’s the blow-out about?”

  The brown man looked a long time at the leather skirt the aviator wore.

  “The Señor Doc Savage is on that steamer,” the man said. “What you see is a reception to welcome and honor him. The president is here, the minister of war, and many others.”

  “So the day has come when they honor a doctor,” Hutton remarked.

  The brown man looked surprised, and said, “Is it possible you have not heard of this Doc Savage? Every one señor, knows him. Even the devils in hell.”

  “If you knew the kind of place I’ve been in for the last ten years,” Hutton replied, “you wouldn’t know much of what was going on in the world. Who is this guy, anyway?”

  The brown man expanded his chest. The subject appeared to please him. And it was evident he took pride in telling it.

  “Doc Savage is a wonderful man, señor. His muscular strength is said to be the greatest in the world. But most amazing of all, he possesses a keen brain with it. His scientific knowledge covers all fields, and he is a genius in every one. With him are five trusted aids, men who are masters of their respective trades. Yet, señor, this Doc Savage knows more than the whole five put together.”

  “What did you say his profession was?” Hutton was suddenly more interested than he had been.

  “Helping out others, señor. Those who are misfortunate, and righting wrongs. He is very wealthy, and so are his men. Look! There comes the lighter bearing them.”

  “Yeah,” Hutton said, thoughtfully. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  He walked rapidly toward the spot where Doc Savage would probably land. He elbowed people aside.

  He did not see Amber O’Neel, but O’Neel saw him.

  Amber O’Neel’s discovery of Hutton so promptly was not luck. The steamer in the harbor had suggested the idea that the quarry might take flight by that route.

  O’Neel had hurried to watch who embarked and disembarked, and to bribe the purser, if it were possible, for a look at the passenger list to see who had booked passage from Cartagena.

  “Damn me, my lucky day!” grinned O’Neel when he saw Aviator Hutton.

  O’Neel worked through the crowd. He looked like a pleasant, fat man, a bit sweaty and scratched by briars. Those who saw him couldn’t know that the hands in his pocket held his two guns, which he could handle dexterously with either hand.

  He also looked like a harmless, plump man with a purpose. But no one dreamed of the incredible ideas turning over in Amber O’Neel’s mind.

  O’Neel passed one of his men and passed the word.

  “There he is—still wearing that leather apron and not another stitch,” he told his men, in their tongue. “The reward still goes. I’ll even make it two outboard motors.”

  The lighter coming in from the cruise ship was really an old Mississippi River stern-wheeler which had seen its days on the Father of Waters and had been sailed down here no telling how.

  The native boatmen bringing her in were not doing a job that could be bragged about. The natives having dugout canoes moored along the quay significantly got into them and paddled to the clear.

  The dugouts belonged mostly to strapping, black hunters from the jungle. They brought their snake hides, leopard skins and green parrots down to sell to the tourists. They did not wear too many clothes.

  The stern-wheeler angled in sidewise, swiped the quay, backed off, tried again, parted a line, and made it on the third attempt.

  Every one from the captain to the deck swiper was yelling orders about how to make fast, and the crowd surged forward howling, “Viva Doc Savage!” and both bands struck up tunes. Two kids tried to jump from the quay to the side-wheeler, and for a wonder, both fell in. Their mothers shrieked.

  Aviator David Hutton tried to approach the place where they were landing the gangplank. He had a time keeping from being trampled. His bare feet were walked on, hide scraped off his ribs by elbows, and his ears deafened by “Vivas!” But he made it.

  He was standing so close that only an agile jump saved his naked toes from the descending gangplank. He tried to dash aboard the stern-wheeler, but half a hundred others had the same idea. They shoved at policemen, and the policemen shoved back. The policemen won.

  “Viva Doc Savage!” they yelled.

  David Hutton, being tall, saw a remarkable-looking apparition step from the stern-wheeler to the gangplank. The apparition had arms fully as long and as big around as his legs. It seemed a safe bet that the apparition could tie his shoestrings without stooping. The head was a nubbin, the eyes small and somewhere in pits of gristle, and the mouth astonishingly huge.

  The apparition raised hands and wrists on the backs of which hair looked as coarse as rusty shingle nails. He seemed to want everybody to be quiet so he could say something.

  “Viva!” howled the crowd, and the bands got tangled up in their tunes.

  The excitement was rattling David Hutton. He was an ill man, a physical wreck, and he had pushed himself. He uttered a wild shriek which he hoped would reach the man on the gangplank, who he supposed must be Doc Savage.

  David Hutton got a look at the black face of the devil with the knife.

  “Help!” Hutton squawled. “I need some one to help me! An incredible thing has happened to me! I’ve happened upon something that the world doesn’t dream exists!”

  Then he looked down and saw a sliver of stone reaching for his ribs. It was a dark-colored stone, the kind the jungle savages sometimes used for
knives. The stuff was razor-sharp and worse than steel, because it sometimes broke off in the wound.

  He had last seen the face in the jungle taking orders from the peaceful-looking white man who had used two guns so ambidextrously, and who had tried to kill him.

  Hutton screamed and twisted, but knew he’d never dodge the knife.

  Chapter IV

  AROUND THE DYING MAN

  A thousand other people were screaming within a hundred yards, so one more scream—David Hutton’s—did not make much difference. A squad of army airplanes roared overhead. They were flying in a formation that made the letters DOC.

  The hairy, nubbin-headed, long-armed man on the gangplank waved his arms and tried to yell something in Spanish. Nobody heard him, because he had a small squeaky voice which a kid would not have boasted about. A surge of the crowd pushed several people into the bay.

  Everybody seemed to be having a swell time.

  “Attention, señors and señoritas!” yelled the squeaky-voiced, pleasantly homely ape on the gangplank.

  Over to the left, in the crowd, there was a commotion now. A woman or two shrieked.

  “Listen to me, please!” shouted the fellow on the gangplank. “I’ve got something to say about this welcoming business!”

  “Viva Doc Savage!” they howled.

  “I ain’t Doc!” shouted the remarkable-looking specimen on the gangplank. “Gimme a chance to tell you Doc Savage ain’t comin’ ashore on account of he don’t go so big for this publicity and hero business!”

  “Viva Doc Savage! Viva!”

  The gangplanker squeaked, “Aw, shucks! Why didn’t Doc shove this job off on somebody else?”

  “Viva!”

  Some of the people thought the man on the gangplank was Doc Savage. They cheered him as such. He shook his head.

  “I’m Monk—I’m Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair,” he tried to tell them. “I’m the chemist of Doc’s little group of five assistants. I’m trying to advise you that Doc Savage never shows himself before public gatherings if he can help it, and when he took this trip on the cruise ship, it was to get a rest in peace and quiet and live halfway like a normal human bein’ for once. Only somebody recognized ’im, and this had to happen.”

  He had some more, but the crowd drowned him out.

  “Mucho hombre! Mucho hombre! Doc Savage!” they howled.

  The homely fellow on the gangplank shook his head slowly.

  “Human nature is a funny thing,” he grinned. “Doc ain’t even been in this country recently. All he ever done was stop a war between a couple of their neighbors and in which they might have been involved.

  “That was over a year ago. And here they’re all ready to take the place apart and hand it to him! Just because they’ve read in the newspapers and heard over their radios that Doc is quite a guy.”

  The hairy fellow’s homely face suddenly cracked a grin from ear to ear.

  He chuckled, said, “What they’ve read may’ve stood ’em on their ears, but what’s never been printed and what only Doc and us others know would spin ’em around and around like tops!”

  Aviator David Hutton had a piece of stone and an awful pain in his back. The obsidian knife had broken off. He was trying to get away, endeavoring to run from the slinking jungle native who had tried to kill him—and was still trying.

  Pain had David Hutton delirious. That, and the ailment that was racking him.

  “Try to—tell somebody,” he whispered. “Tell them—thing is too—too great to be—kept from world. Must—get it.”

  The stark agony and horror in his face did more to get people out of his way than his weak shoving. Another woman looked at him and almost fainted.

  “Some nation—United States—could send an army for it!” he mumbled. “It would take an army—to succeed.”

  He fell down. People reached to help him, but jerked their hands away when they saw the blood. He got up and stared at them vacantly.

  “An army could—not make—it,” he told them.

  He mouthed his words as if they were sticky.

  “They couldn’t do it with—airplanes,” he said. “Look at me. I’m proof of that. I made it. Look at me!”

  They were looking at him—and drawing back. His eyes were mad and his words madder, and they had no way of telling what he might do. He shook one finger solemnly at them.

  “A fleet of dirigibles, of big airships like those that were used on London in the great war might make it!”

  A man came snaking out of the crowd. He had another of the knives that was a lean stone splinter. A second and a third man just like him appeared. They were brown-black and half-naked; they wouldn’t have looked out of place jumping around a cannibal pot.

  David Hutton looked right at them and didn’t see them.

  A small, rotund white man appeared on the edge of the crowd, just within the circle around the jabbering aviator. The white man looked as if he should have been behind a bakery counter selling pastries.

  He would have made a good ad in a white cap and coat in any restaurant window. He was the outward picture of peace, contentment and good will toward all his fellow men.

  “Don’t forget the outboard motor!” he told the brown-black devils with knives. “I’ll make it an outboard motor to each man! Two to the first one to do the job!”

  David Hutton looked at nothing and said, “Dirigibles might make it. But it’d take more than one. It would take a lot of them, and they would have to carry a lot of men.”

  His voice was getting stronger. A red lake was growing around his feet. His leather skirt was slick and slopping red.

  “It would take men—men—to get it!” he shouted. “And no matter how big the army and how well-trained, they’ll have trouble. Plenty of trouble!”

  He leaned back, as if about to fall, and stared straight at the copper heat of the sun, with his eyes wide open.

  “Trouble!” he yelled. “The officers and men would find out what they were after, and your army would go to hell! They’d kill each other. The thoughts of what they were after would make them greedy. The more they thought, the madder they would get. And finally they——”

  He gargled, stopped, coughed, and shot a crimson spray to the ground.

  The brown-black men were close enough to get their stone splinters into their victim, almost. Their eyes were the eyes of small animals. Their faces were not the kind of faces that had expressions.

  David Hutton said blindly, “Dirigibles—an army—picked men—maybe you’d fail the first time—and the second—but finally—the greatest—most fantastic—treasure ever to fall into the hands of mankind.”

  The nearest brown-black man got his stone sliver ready to shove, but instead of shoving it, put it down, leaning double to do so, then lying down, completely slack, on top of it.

  His two companions did exactly the same thing almost immediately.

  The men who had lain down had their eyes open. One of them rolled over on his back, opened his mouth, and out came a comic opera snore. Some nitwit in the crowd laughed. He must have thought it was all some kind of show connected with the celebration.

  When the nitwit had finished his laugh, he lay down, also.

  Other people lay down. Four or five. Some snored, and some didn’t.

  Aviator David Hutton looked steadily at nothing and began to giggle. It was an awful kind of giggle. It sounded as if something inside him—some vital and necessary part of him—was tearing loose and coming out. His life’s blood came out of the corners of his mouth in dribbles and spurts.

  There was quite a commotion by now. A goodly number of people were lying on the ground. Hutton stood there and giggled and gargled, grotesque in his skin and bones and leather apron, made more horrible by the blood on him and around his feet.

  A man broke and ran from the spot. Others immediately thought it a good idea, and a general scampering ensued. Every one seemed to want to get away from the vicinity.

  One m
an was not fleeing. He was, in fact, jamming his way toward David Hutton.

  The approaching man, when he stood up straight, was taller than the tallest man in the crowd. He was not skinny. He had a remarkably symmetrical physical development. Most big men look out of proportion somewhere.

  This one didn’t. Seen away from other men, with nothing near to which his size might be compared, his physical build would have seemed ordinary.

  Not ordinary, though, when seen close enough to observe that the tendons on the backs of his hands were almost like wire ropes, and that his neck was cabled with sinew.

  This man’s skin was an unusual bronze tint. His eyes were more unusual. They were slightly eerie, and something like pools of flake gold stirred by something invisible.

  The giant had a brown mustache, long, brown hair, a wide-brimmed Panama hat with the brim yanked over his eyes, a white linen suit that was baggy, plain white shirt and black tie.

  The big man reached David Hutton, and laid hold of him. Hutton took a swing at him. It was a wild swing, easily caught. The bronzed big fellow grasped Hutton and held him easily.

  Hutton began to cry like a baby. He seemed to be bleeding faster.

  Four other men came working through the crowd. They apologized politely and shoved people out of their way.

  The foremost of the four made a good entering wedge. He was lean, pale, unhealthy-looking, and almost any sixteen-year-old boy would have been willing to bet he could lick the fellow.

  The pale physical wreck was followed by a man thinner than it seemed any man could be and still function, and who wore a monocle dangling from a lapel ribbon. Next was a waspish, dapper fashion plate, a man with the mobile mouth of an orator, and piercing, dark eyes.

  The last man of the four was built with big bones and a lot of gristle, but his fists were what stood out. Incredible hands! Doubled, they made fists the equal of many a man’s head in size. This man also wore a gloomy look on his long face. He was sourness itself.