Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace Read Online Free PDF

After he swore, he jumped the grader ditch onto the road and ran down the pavement.
    Half a mile brought him to the nearest neighbor who had a telephone, and while he was loping that distance, four cars passed him with their noise and lights, like rockets traveling backward. The neighbor, an agriculturist who wore overalls and chewed tobacco, offered a remark that, “I heard that old scattergun go off down there a while ago. You see a skunk?”
    “A small one and five big ones,” Gull said grimly.
    “Whillikers! Lots of skunks, eh?”
    Gull telephoned the Missouri State Highway Patrol headquarters at Macon and told them exactly what had happened, answered all their questions truthfully.
    “That was kind of a queer business,” the officer suggested.
    “You’re telling me!”
    “You stick around there,” the patrolman directed. “This is a little worse than you thought, I’m afraid. We’ll want to question you.”
    Gull frowned at the telephone, asked quickly, “What do you mean—worse than I thought?”
    “Never mind. You just be sure to stay there.”
    Gull made two thoughtful passes with the receiver before he got it on the hook. He hadn’t cared for that last remark.
    AFTER hanging up, Gull stood at the telephone, rubbing his jaw absently and wondering just what the officer meant. A possible explanation occurred to him, and it was not cheering—in his newspaper reading, he had gathered the opinion that the police frequently “held the man for questioning,” which actually meant that they kept the fellow in jail.
    Suppose they suspected The Great Gulliver of something criminal? Suppose they— “This is a little worse than you thought, I’m afraid.” The officer had said that. What in the devil did he mean by that? Gull absently grasped a fistful of his oily hair and moved the scalp hide around as if trying to loosen a growing tension.
    Then an idea hit him—the telegram! It must have come through the local depot operator, and they kept carbon copies of telegrams, didn’t they?
    Gull quickly called the depot and asked for the operator, but got someone else who was a word hoarder. Gull requested, “Put the operator on the wire.”
    “Can’t.”
    “Eh? What do you mean? Where is the operator?”
    “Dead.”
    “What?”
    The succinct voice at the depot said, “Dead. Murdered. Knife. Heart.”
    “But who did it?”
    “Question.”
    “Well then, why was he killed? He was a nice old fellow. What reason was there for anyone harming him?”
    “Mystery.”
    Gull absently strained his ivory hair with his fingers, then asked the man of few words to look for the copy of the telegram. The man was a long time coming back to the phone.
    “Nope.”
    “You made sure it wasn’t there?”
    “Yep.”
    “But where would a telegram for me come, if not there?”
    “Here.”
    Gull repeated his earlier gesture of absently combing his cotton-hued hair with his fingers, then wiped the hand on his trousers. His mouth worked around into various thinking shapes, then straightened out grimly when he remembered the unusual three-edged knife the hound-voiced little man had carried.
    “Anything peculiar about the wound that killed the telegram operator?” he asked abruptly.
    “Three-cornered,” said the word-hoarder.
    Gull said grimly, “Thanks.”
    “Sure.”
    Gull broke the connection and called the State Highway Patrol at Macon for the second time.
    He told the Patrol officer, “It seems the telegraph operator at La Plata has been killed by the same fellows who took the telegram from me. It begins to look as if someone tried to get the wire and also dispose of everybody who knew anything about it.”
    The Patrolman said, “So I figured when you called the first time. How did you come to get the idea?”
    “The runt who got most of the telegram from me carried a knife with a three-cornered blade.”
    “He did, eh? Well, we’ve already got our cars watching for him and the lads with him. Now you know why