The Polar Treasure - Robeson Kenneth (лучшие книги читать онлайн .txt) 📗
The room was filled with bodies — bodies of the passengers and crew of the ill-fated ship. Bullets had done their work, and the northern cold had kept this tableau of carnage inviolate!
Doc thought of Victor Vail.
So this was what had happened during the time the blind man was unconscious!
Pirates, human fiends, had taken over the Oceanic. They were as bloodthirsty a gang as ever swung a cutlass or dangled a victim from a yardarm on the Spanish Main. Wholesale murder, they had committed.
Keelhaul de Rosa, Ben O'Gard, Dynamite Smith — greater villains never trod a deck. And, like the corsairs they were, they had fallen out over the loot.
The whole thing might have been lifted from the parchment chronicles of another century and transplanted to our time.
Doc quitted the hall of murder.
Uncanny whisperings and shufflings still crept through the lost liner. Yet Doc saw nothing. it was as though the tormented souls of those butchered here were holding spectral conclave.
Like that except for the flowery odor of living things. It was present everywhere.
Doc stepped out into another lounge.
His light picked up movement!
What it was, his sharp eyes failed to detect. The thing dropped behind the massive furniture before more than the backglow of Doc's light found it.
Warily, Doc sidled along the lounge wall. This was no animal confronting him.
What happened next came without the slightest sound.
Something touched Doc's bronze neck. It was warm. It was soft, yet it possessed a corded strength.
It encircled Doc's throat!
DOC MADE one of the quickest moves of his career. He ducked and whirled. But he did not get the beam of his flashlight lifted in time. All he saw was the blank panel of a tightly shut door.
He wrenched at it.
Chug! A hard object hit him in the back with terrific force.
Only the sprung steel of cushioning muscles kept his spine from being snapped. He was knocked to all fours. But he did not drop his flashlight.
He sprayed the beam on the lounge. A dozen frothing, hideous figures were leaping toward him.
It was seldom that Doc felt an impulse to hug an enemy. But he could have hugged these.
For their appearance dispelled the sinister air of supernatural foes which hung over the lost liner.
These were but Eskimos!
Doc doused his light. This was something he could cope with. He glided sidewise.
An avalanche of bodies piled onto the spot he had vacated. Clubs — it was a thrown club which had hit Doc's backbeat vigorously. An Innuit or two squealed painfully as he was belabored by a fellow. They seemed to use the squeals to express both excitement and pain.
Silence fell.
The Eskimos were puzzled. Their breathing was gusty, wheezing.
"Tarnuk!" whined one of the cowering Innuits.
This gave Doc a clew to the dialect they spoke. Roughly translated, the word meant "the soul of a man." So swiftly had Doc evaded their charge that one of the Eskimos had remarked he must be but a ghost!
"Chinzo!" Doc told them in their own lingo. "Welcome! You are my friends! But you have a strange way of greeting me."
This friendship business was undoubtedly news to everybody concerned. But Doc figured it wouldn't hurt to try that angle on them.
He spoke several variations of Eskimo dialect, among scores of other lingos he had mastered in his years of intensive study.
He might as well have saved his breath.
In a squealing knot, the Innuits bore down upon him. Again, they found themselves beating empty space, or whacking each other by accident.
From a position thirty feet away, Doc planted his flash beam on them. They were in a nice, tight bunch. A great chair stood at Doc's elbow. No doubt it would have been a load for any single steward who had long ago sailed on the ill-fated Oceanic.
It lifted in Doc's mighty hand as lightly as though it were a folding camp stool. It slammed into the midst of the Eskimos. They were bowled over, practically to a man.
Those able to, raised a terrific squawling.
They were calling upon more of their fellows outside for help.
Doc saw no object in standing up and fighting an army. If there had been some reason for it, that would be different.
He made swiftly for the forward staircase out of the lounge.
His thoughts flickered for an instant to the strange thing which had touched his neck. It had been none of these queer-smelling Innuits.
He forgot that puzzle speedily.
The staircase he was making for erupted warlike, greasy Eskimos. His retreat was cut off!
There was nothing to do now but make a fight of it.
FOUR OF the five Innuits carried lighted blubber lamps. Doc wondered where they had conjured them from. They Illuminated the lounge.
"You are making a mistake, my children," Doc told them in their lingo. "I come in peace!"
"You are a tongak, an evil spirit sent to harm us by the chief of all evil spirits!" an oily fellow clucked at him.
Doc sneezed. He had never smelled an Eskimo as aromatic as these fellows — and Eskimos are notoriously malodorous.
"You are wrong!" he argued with them. "I come only to do you good."
They threw gutturals back and forth at each other. All the while, they kept closing in on the giant bronze man.
"Where you come from?" demanded one.
"From a land to the south, where it is always warm."
Doc could see they didn't believe this.
One waved an arm expressively.
'"There is no such land," he said with all the certainty of a very ignorant man. "The only land besides this is nakroom, the great space beyond the sky."
They had never heard of Greenland, or any country to the south, Doc gathered.
"Very well, I come from nakroom," Doc persisted. "And I come to do good."
"You speak with a split tongue," he was informed. "Only tongaks, evil spirits, come from nakroom."
Doc decided to drop the subject. He didn't have time to convert their religious beliefs.
Doc took stock of their weapons. They carried harpoons with lines of hair seal thong bent in the detachable tips. Some held oonapiks, short hunting spears. Quite a few bayonets were in evidence. These had evidently been garnered from the Oceanic. No firearms were to be seen.
Not the least dangerous were ordinary dog whips. These had lashes fully eighteen feet long. From his vast knowledge, Doc knew an Eskimo could take one of these whips and cut a man's throat at five paces. Flicking at distant objects with the dog whips bordered on being the Eskimo national pastime.
"Kill him!" clucked the Eskimo leader. "He is only one man! It will be easy!"
The Innuit was underestimating, a mistake Doc's enemies quite often made.
DOC PICKED up a round-topped table. This would serve as a shield against any weapon his foes had.
He seized a chair, flung it as though it were a chip. Three Innuits were bowled over. They hadn't had time to dodge.
A flight of harpoons and short hunting spears chugged into the table. Doc threw two more chairs. He retreated to a spot far from the nearest flickering blubber lamp. He lowered the table, making sure they all saw he was behind it. Then he flattened to the lounge floor and glided away, unnoticed.
The Eskimos rushed the table, bent on murder. They howled in dismay when they found no one there. The howls turned to pain as hunters in the rear began dropping from bronze fists that exploded like nitro on their jaws.
An Innuit lunged at Doc with a harpoon. Doc picked the harpoon out of the fellow's hands and broke it over his head. A tough walrus lash on a dog whip slit the hood of Doc's parka like a knife stroke.
