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 Lane looked around. Back of him there was nothing but floodwater, a mile-wide bay of it glittering ominously under the moon. The water extended under the bridge to his left, spread a lake on the farmland across the tracks there.
Danny peered up the siding. It had originally been a double-tracked section, permitting empties to pull off the line for loaded trains coming out of the quarry. That had been years ago. The siding was largely overgrown with weeds now. A little string of boxcars stood there; the door of one was open a bit, and the moonlight revealed the rectangular ends of hay bales inside.
The little strings of boxcars held no interest for the young interne. Danny looked on up the track. Twelve miles to Riverside he remembered the brakeman saying.
It might as well have been twelve hundred. Danny couldn’t walk it; not weak as he was, drenched and with chattering teeth, with a head which burst from smouldering pain into red agony at every step he took.
He turned, stumbled across the bridge. There was a dirt grade crossing with a cattleguard, beyond that a wooden gate crossing a clay-packed road. It wasn’t really a road, but a lane. At the end of the lane, Danny could see a little dark clump of farm buildings.
The farmer would have an automobile, a telephone, or at least a horse; some means of communicating with the city. He would also have dry clothing.
Danny stumbled up the clay road. He gasped with relief as he reached the farmhouse porch. The building was a small oblong of dingy gray, set in a muddy flat yard with barns and sheds at the rear. The sound of Danny’s knuckles on the door echoed across the yard; brought no other response.
He muttered, teeth clacking, “G-got to b-break in!”
But the door wasn’t locked. Danny pushed into the stale warmth of a kitchen. Moonlight at the uncurtained window showed a bare table, a stove, a cream separator. He went to the stove, hunted across its metal top until he found a box of matches.
An oil lamp rested in a bracket over the table. Danny fumbled it lit. Then he turned to the stove. There were cobs in a coal bucket, a packing box stuffed with chopped wood, a tin kerosene can with a potato on its snout.
Trembling with cold, the interne dumped fuel into the stove, spread kerosene liberally, dragged a match across the blacked lids. The flame was instant, bright, warming. It howled pleasantly into the pipe.
A coffee pot with some dark liquid in it stood on the back of the stove. It would be hot by the time he found some dry clothes.
Danny took down the lamp, pushed open the door at the other end of the kitchen, stopped short. “Holy—!”
A man lay on the floor just over the threshold. He wore rubber boots, denim overalls, and a denim jacket. An irregular red blotch, the size of a dinner plate, stained the overall bib. There was a good deal more, a lot more, red on the carpet about him. The man had been shot, not through the heart, but in the lung.
Danny Lane stood stock-still a long moment, his throat contracting as he stared. The man might have been fifty or seventy — there were no special characteristics identifying his time-worn face — or at least the interne observed none. After that moment, he turned away; climbed the stairs to the second story. When he returned, it was with an armful of clothes.
He dressed in the kitchen. A half-full bottle of whiskey stood on a window sill back of the cream separator. Danny drank a cup of mixed whiskey and bitter coffee. The stimulation from the rank medicinal dose coursed through his veins pleasantly. He felt wanned but still weak; his head swollen, charged with heavy internal pressure.
Danny paid no more attention to the dead man in the next room. It did not occur to him that the farmer’s death might in any way be linked with the train robbery. He was not one of those super-sleuths who can be knocked cold one moment and wake up the next with a perfect crime solution in mind. He was not a sleuth at all, just an exhausted youth, with one thought inside his battered skull; to get to Riverside and tell his story to the authorities.
Danny went outside. The eastern sky had brightened to a pale mauve which found reflection in the swollen pond covering the lower end of the farm. Fence lines marched down into the water, disappeared; the brown thatch of a haystack made a tiny island in the flood.
His stare stopped on a muddy ring perhaps forty feet in diameter, a few rods from the water and near another stack, sliced in two like a loaf of bread.
It held no particular meaning for him.
He looked across the barnyard. There were a good many footprints in the mud. Water stood in some; these were old, before the night’s rain. Others were fresher — and the makers’ feet had skidded, leaving furrows and grooves rather than identifiable prints.
The tracks led to the ramshackle barn. Danny followed them. He pushed the barn door open clumsily. A movement inside made his pulse leap, sent a crackle of agony through his bruised head. Then Danny grunted — it was only a rat scurrying along a manger timber. Three cows and a team were stabled in the stalls.
Danny’s lips twisted in perplexity. A salty rime of sweat traced the outlines of harness on the horses. Danny went in, mumbled, “Who-a-a, boy,” and touched one of the rumps. The horse was warm. The mud on its fetlocks looked fresh.
Danny Lane muttered, “Well I’ll be damned!”
For the first time, his fogged brain began to grip a meaning in all these circumstances. He came out of the barn, hurrying, and looked around again.
Back of the barn, the cattleyard was a straw-choked quagmire. Danny circled the hen house and implement shed, came abruptly onto a lip of the old quarry. It had been closed commercially for years; but some stone for local use had been coming out lately. A wagon track meandered down to the quarry floor. There was a wide expanse of bare rock across the quarry and beyond that a view of the railroad.
A long ways off, Danny could see a moving dot. He strained to focus his eyes on it. The dot took form — the form of an old-fashioned handcar. Danny could make out the tiny figure of a man pumping it along.
The interne started down the wagon trail into the pit. His jarring footfalls increased the torment in his head as he picked his way carefully. A thin orange-peel of sun slid over the horizon as he pushed through the bushes at the other end of the quarry and came out onto the track siding.
A frown tightened Danny’s tired face as he inspected the scene. The muddy road along the track was blandly smooth.
But nevertheless the door of the last boxcar of the string on the siding, was closed. It had been open during the night. And the rising sun discovered certain tiny marks on the rails — brighter bits visible where the rust was broken.
Danny lurched through the mud, got his hands onto that door. A surge of his body moved it only an inch. On the next try he got it six inches farther. Presently he had an opening wide enough to admit a man’s body.
He jumped weakly, succeeded in grasping the latch with one hand. Clawing desperately, he got the toe of a shoe braced onto the metal-stripped sill. He climbed shakily.
The boxcar was filled nearly to its roof. There was barely room for Danny to crawl across the tiers of baled hay. He peered at the bales. Each would weigh around a hundred pounds and was encircled by two wires.
Lacking a pincers, he struggled to break one of the wires. Bare hands couldn’t do it. Danny drove his heel into the bale, used all the strength in his leg, and the wire snapped.
The hay bulged out in accordion pleats. Danny muttered, “Yeah!” and drove his hands into the pleats. He twisted out a small wooden box and again muttered, “Yeah!”
He didn’t need to open the box. He knew what it contained. It held the bile capsules, administered as a preliminary to the oral vaccination.