Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938
- Автор: Clark Dale, 12627 Convict
- Год: 1938
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938». Краткое содержание книги:
Danny crushed his cigarette, walked out of the smoker. A few of the white-clad nurses in the coaches pored over magazines. Most of them were wise enough to doze in their seats knowing the sleepless, frantic hours of toil twelve miles ahead.
But one of them neither read nor dozed. Lucy Orr turned from trying to peer through the coach window. “Danny!”
Lucy Orr was one of the sanitarium nurses — blonde, pretty. Danny had a hunch she’d play a big part in that future of his.
He asked, “Well?” and put a lot of fondness into the single word.
“What can be holding us up here?” Lucy worried, her blue eyes deeply troubled. “Do you think this track could be washed out, too?”
Danny said, “Oh, the flood’s not this high. The brakeman said there might be something on the track.”
She tried vainly to see through the window again. “I thought I saw water out there, right beside the train—”
Danny knew the worry which gnawed in Lucy Orr’s mind. Her folks lived in Riverside, and not on a hilltop, either. Her invalided mother would have had to be carried out on a stretcher, if she got out at all. And there were kid brothers and sisters. Kids who could only be inoculated against the dread typhoid when the Special got through.
“I’ll look, Lucy,” he said quickly. “I’ll find out what’s the matter.”
Danny Lane walked out into the vestibule and hopped off into the darkness.
He trudged up the track. There was water out there, a dark sheet of it glimmering evilly in the light from the coach windows. Weeds thrusting up beside the sleepers took wet slaps at the interne’s ankles. The quarry spur certainly had been neglected in recent years. But Danny speedily forgot about the weeds.
His feet crunched the cinders faster. Something wrong ahead! That knot of men working beside the slowly puffing locomotive — no, beside the baggage car. They were... they were what?
Danny’s stare focused on the yellow glow of lanterns beside the track. Good heavens, it looked as if—
Yeah, no doubt about it. They were unloading the baggage car. The medical supplies, those gelatine cells of heat-killed typhoid bacilli mixed with starch, coming out of the car and going down into a scow moored where the water lapped against the embankment.
This couldn’t be right. Must be some mistake here. Why the devil unload twelve miles from the track end? Unless there was a washout ahead—
Danny Lane froze in his tracks. That was when he saw the metallic glitter of drawn guns, the train crew lined up beside the tender, hands in the air.
Robbery?
Danny Lane couldn’t believe his eyes, couldn’t realize anyone would be low enough, contemptible enough, to hijack the relief train.
It was happening though. The realization burst like a bombshell in the interne’s bewildered brain. Realization — and fear. Fear because he knew the supply of new type vaccine was so terribly limited — it wouldn’t be easy to get more — and it gave maximum protection two weeks sooner than doctors could obtain it with the old subcutaneous vaccines...
A yell of warning pushed into the interne’s throat as he thought of that. A yell that ended, suddenly, in a choked grunt. There was no warning for Danny Lane. He never saw the stealthy shadow behind him. The gun butt descended silently, crunched against his skull with sickening force.
Danny crumpled.
A toe prodded his ribs, turned him over. He rolled limply down the embankment. Slowly at first, then faster. A dull splash followed...
A few minutes later, its terrorized crew huddled in the locomotive cab, the Special chuffed slowly up the quarry spur, gathering speed. Lucy Orr sighed her relief at the click-clack on the rails, turned her cheek to the plush cushion, squeezed shut her eyes.
In the smoker Dr. Randall consulted his strap-watch, said, “Lost ten minutes here.”
Captain-Doctor Almonez murmured, “Torres, break out the brandy — eh? Where’d that man of mine go?”
The big, tropic-skinned man had disappeared.
The shock of the ice cold floodwater aroused Danny Lane to semi-consciousness, congealed the agony in his skull to a dull, intolerable ache. But it congealed the strength in his limbs, too. He struck out feebly but his garments prisoned him in a freezing straitjacket of waterlogged cloth, prisoned and dragged him down. The pull of the current swept him out into mid-flood.
Then his fingers locked spasmodically on a wet-slicked length of board. Somehow Danny got his chin out of the water. A blacker outline showed above him against the blackness of the night. He was clinging to the scow’s stern.
Voices came to him as from an infinitely great distance. The words might have been uttered in a foreign language for all the sense he could make of them. Danny did not cry out for help for he knew that none would help him. These men had tried once already to murder him. He concentrated, trying to cling to the scow. It wasn’t easy, he had to keep pushing off. The current, moving faster than the scow, tended to push his legs under the craft.
And gradually it did so. Now the least slip of his numbed hands meant death, for once drawn under the scow he would certainly drown. And he was already under it, up to his hands and head.
This could not have lasted long, though it seemed for hours. Could not, because his strength was measured in minutes.
Then the current changed, sharply. Danny heard the grate of poles going over the scow’s side. His own body shot out to arm’s length behind the craft. One hand was torn loose from its grip.
The scow moved slowly, jerkily. Suddenly it struck with a jolt that ran its whole length. The impact knocked Danny Lane’s other hand away. He had an instant’s vision of a bridge, a skeleton shape in the night, then the water rushed over his head, blotting out everything.
He no longer felt the current trundling him along, or the weight of his watersoaked clothes. He went spinning into a black void...
In reality, he lay unconscious — half of him in the water, half of him cast upon the weedy bank — a dozen yards below the railroad bridge.
Half an hour later, Danny became fragmentarily aware of life in his being. That is to say, he became aware of pain. His body was a chilled huddle of quivering flesh. His skull, a queer and pulpy weight, was filled with a soggy ache.
Something in the night went ku-lunk, ku-lunk. Like a slowly beaten jungle drum. Ku-lunk, ku-lunk! Or did he imagine that? Was the drum inside his bruised head?
He passed out, cold. More time passed. Then a ray of light played eerily on the weeds over his head. A voice said: “Only place along the line they could get a boat that close to the rails.”
Another voice: “Yeah, that so?”
“I’m telling you. I know. We still roll a few boxcars up here.” Danny Lane had heard that voice somewhere before. It went on, “Farmers load a little hay on the siding here. It saves ’em the truck haul downtown—”
The voices were going away.
Danny Lane picked himself groggily out of the weeds, saw two silhouettes walking up the track. One of them carried a flashlight. He was saying, “Can’t track ’em across water. Might as well go back and—”
Danny Lane cried, “Hey!” feebly. The blood came storming into his head again, and he fell flat. The men walked away, not having heard him.
After a while, Danny Lane came staggering over the embankment onto the roadbed. The clouds had broken overhead and a full moon shed its cold light over the scene. There was no sign of the two men. Obviously they had come out to investigate the robbery and as obviously had found nothing to investigate.