THE THREE DEVILS

Author:===========================================================================
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-05-17T15:55:07+00:00

DOC SAVAGE tapped on the door and tried some persuasive talk, not telling Joe who they were or giving him any other information, but just trying to get the man into a more coÖperative frame of mind. He wasted his breath and his arguments. He tried questions about where was the Mounted Police station, and got silence.

Renny and Doc walked away in the darkness, and Renny muttered, “This thing of everybody being scared is beginning to work on the roots of my hair.”

“It could get monotonous,” Doc agreed, failing to keep some of the tension out of his own voice.

Walking on tiptoes, keeping in shadows, feeling out places for their feet in the darkness so as not to crack a stick and make a noise, they entered the main part of town.

The night would have had to be as dark as blindness to make Three Devils look like anything but a typical sawmill and pulp mill town.

The mill was near the lake. They could see its continuous humping bulk. The boiler chimney stuck into the sky like a dark finger, naked of smoke. They could smell the sawdust, the odors of a mill, and beyond, lying probably for a mile or more along the lake shore, would be the sawed-lumber storage yard which they couldn’t see.

Renny muttered, “They’re shut down for some reason. That’s strange.”

All the great mill lay in stillness. There was no whine of band saws, no angry chunking of logs, no clanking and muttering of conveyors, no rumbling of lumber-truck tractors across the great raised ramps. Considering how pulp and lumber mills were roaring all over the United States and Canada to meet wartime necessity, the stillness was corpselike.

The main street of Three Devils began at the big gate of the mill, and ran straight up a hill. It was too dark to read the signs over the places of business, but Renny had been in enough lumber towns to call them off sight unseen. Almost every business in town would be company owned, and so would every house. The houses would be alike, lavishly made of wood, stupidly painted a color that was a mixture of dirt and lead. The sidewalks of boards, the street paved with chips and bark from the “hog,” as the big waste grinder was called, was typical lumber town.

“Someone coming,” Doc warned. They eased over into the darker shadows and waited.

“Cops,” Renny whispered. “What are we gonna do? We’re supposed to be under arrest at Little Sleepy.”

“Don’t show yourself yet,” Doc advised.

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