TEXT:  THE MENTAL WIZARD
  A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
  
  Table of Contents
  THE MENTAL WIZARD..................................................................................................................................1
  A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson.....................................................................................1
  PROLOGUE............................................................................................................................................1
  Chapter I. THE WEIRD GIRL................................................................................................................2
  Chapter II. LAST TESTAMENT............................................................................................................7
  Chapter III. THE REMARKABLE TOURIST......................................................................................12
  Chapter IV. AROUND THE DYING MAN..........................................................................................17
  Chapter V. SNAKES.............................................................................................................................25
  Chapter VI. SPELL!...............................................................................................................................31
  Chapter VII. EXPEDITION...................................................................................................................35
  Chapter VIII. RAID...............................................................................................................................38
  Chapter IX. THE SECRET OF KLANTIC...........................................................................................45
  Chapter X. A JUNGLE AND FOUR PLANES.....................................................................................50
  Chapter XI. WHAT MONK SAW.........................................................................................................59
  Chapter XII. TOO FAR IN!...................................................................................................................64
  Chapter XIII. FEAR JUNGLE...............................................................................................................70
  Chapter XIV. THE BIG MAN...............................................................................................................77
  Chapter XV. PRISONER LEGION.......................................................................................................80
  Chapter XVI. UPROAR.........................................................................................................................88
  Chapter XVII. SIEGE............................................................................................................................92
  Chapter XVIII. THE KLANTIC............................................................................................................96
  Chapter XIX. THE GOLDEN KNOT.................................................................................................102
   THE MENTAL WIZARD
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  THE MENTAL WIZARD
  A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  http://www.blackmask.com
  PROLOGUE
  • 
  Chapter I. THE WEIRD GIRL
  • 
  Chapter II. LAST TESTAMENT
  • 
  Chapter III. THE REMARKABLE TOURIST
  • 
  Chapter IV. AROUND THE DYING MAN
  • 
  Chapter V. SNAKES
  • 
  Chapter VI. SPELL!
  • 
  Chapter VII. EXPEDITION
  • 
  Chapter VIII. RAID
  • 
  Chapter IX. THE SECRET OF KLANTIC
  • 
  Chapter X. A JUNGLE AND FOUR PLANES
  • 
  Chapter XI. WHAT MONK SAW
  • 
  Chapter XII. TOO FAR IN!
  • 
  Chapter XIII. FEAR JUNGLE
  • 
  Chapter XIV. THE BIG MAN
  • 
  Chapter XV. PRISONER LEGION
  • 
  Chapter XVI. UPROAR
  • 
  Chapter XVII. SIEGE
  • 
  Chapter XVIII. THE KLANTIC
  • 
  Chapter XIX. THE GOLDEN KNOT
  • 
  PROLOGUE
  FACTS do not lie, the old saying goes. What follows,  being in general excerpts from newspapers over the
  past few years may,  therefore, be taken for what they are worth. The full items from the  newspapers will not
  be reprinted here, for they have filled scores of  news columns and many Sunday pages; and moreover, some
  of them would  make uninteresting reading.
  But the clippings and the story they tell,  considered as a whole, are more than interesting. They are absorbing
  to  a point where there is a hint of something incredible.
  These newspaper clippings deal with one of the  unexplored regions of the world, of which there are still a
  few.  Rather, the news stories deal with men who went into the region during  the past few years. Never have
  the news stories dealt with what  happened to these men after they penetrated the region. No one knows  about
  that. No one, that is, belonging to what is called the civilized  world.
  Some of the men went in by foot, with native  porters. They never came back. In cases, some, but rarely all, of
  the  natives turned up at distant points, and almost invariably they had  strange stories to tell—stories so
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  inarticulate and fantastic that they  did not warrant belief from the level−headed managers of frontier  trading
  posts who heard them.
  Some of the lost men went by air, their planes  equipped with the latest radio apparatus, burdened with plenty
  of  rifles, ammunition and spare food. They have not been heard from.
  Expeditions have gone in search of these men. In no  case was a substantial trace found of the lost men. In an
  instance or  two, the searchers were not heard from again.
  The American Legion organization in the Panama Canal  Zone recently sponsored, it is reported, a search for
  one of these lost  men, an aviator. This aviator’s name was Redfern. Many attempts have  been made to find
  another prominent individual who was lost, Fawcett by  name.
  In no case has a great deal of success greeted the  searchers, for the region they had to penetrate is the terrible
  jungle  country on certain headwater branches of the Amazon River in South  America.
  What is there in that particular jungle which has  kept so many men from coming back?
  Chapter I. THE WEIRD GIRL
  MIRACLES do not occur too often. El Liberator  "Amber" O’Neel very nearly fell over with surprise when
  one happened to  him. But he lost no time in taking advantage of it.
  It was, incidentally, a fact that if O’Neel had  known what he was letting himself in for, he would probably
  have  crawled under the roots of the nearest mangrove and let the miracle go  moaning past.
  Carl O’Neel, alias Amber O’Neel, alias El  Liberator—he was El Liberator Amber O’Neel just  now—was a
  brave Yankee, too, which was bad, because he was also  crooked, cruel, without morals, and all other kinds of
  a rascal.
  Bravery and such qualities are a rare mixture, and a  bad one. But O’Neel did not crawl under a mangrove.
  Instead, he  bellowed enthusiastic orders.
  "Quick!" he squawled, in Spanish. "Get out there in  the clearing! Line up and wave your arms!"
  El Liberator 
  Amber O’Neel had been standing at the edge of an open glade in the  South American jungle, wishing that a
  plane would happen along. No  sooner the wish, and presto! The sound of an airplane motor was  approaching! 
  "Wave your arms, damn you!" O’Neel howled. "Get that  plane down! Then see that it does not get up again!"
  Amber O’Neel was in great need of a plane, because  the authorities of this South American country of
  Colombia were looking  for him to stand him against a stone wall and see if he were  bulletproof. This by way
  of proving that it is not wise to murder and  rob under the guise of being a leader of a gang of patriots trying to
  make Colombia a land of the free. Colombia was already enough of a land  of the free to satisfy almost every
  one.
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  "Wave, damn it!" bawled O’Neel. "Wave them arms!"
  If he had a plane, Amber O’Neel reflected, he could  scout for groups of Colombian soldiers or police, and
  there would be  less likelihood of his raiding a trading post when authority was too  near. He chuckled. He
  would claim the plane was his military air force.
  "Get the pilot’s attention!" O’Neel yelled. "Make  him think we’re in distress or something!"
  The plane, thought O’Neel, would make a swell  get−away vehicle when the going got too tough.
  O’Neel’s patriots waved their arms as if their lives  depended upon it. They were all for their chief, who was
  as swell a  general as they had ever had. Of course, he flew into a rage and shot  somebody now and then. But
  jungle life was cheap, and El Liberator  O’Neel was a lad who raided where the raiding was good.
  The patriots were a scurvy−looking bunch. Some were  natives, jungle savages who looked as if they would
  be more at home  drying human heads. Indeed, they had dried a few.
  There were a couple of bums from up Nicaragua way, a  bit of scum from Panama, Colombian riffraff. But no
  whites. O’Neel was  white, and he didn’t like more of his own color. Sometimes a white man  objected to
  some of the things O’Neel did.
  But El Liberator Amber O’Neel’s rabble  patriots were better trained than they looked. Six of them, indeed,
  were good military aviators, trained by Colombia and other South  American republics at some expense.
  They all waved their arms vigorously at the plane  cruising overhead.
  THE plane was a model ten years old, and not a pilot  in a thousand would have cared about being in it while
  it was over this  kind of jungle. The ship had been flying north, so it must have left  behind an unexplored
  stretch of jungle where, for all any one knew,  landing grounds might be a hundred miles between. No place,
  certainly,  for a bus as old as this one.
  The pilot flew like a war−time kiwi—a kiwi being a  bird with wings that can’t fly. He was going to land. He
  wabbled down.  He tried to skid air speed away, narrowly missed scraping a wing, came  down hard, bounced
  twenty feet straight up, came down on one wing, and  the plane began to fall to pieces.
  O’Neel cursed wildly. "Looks like that pilot  deliberately wrecked his wagon!"
  The propeller tied itself into a strange knot. The  plane—what was left of it—turned over on its back, and a
  cloud of  splinters and bits of fabric settled on it, and the episode was over.  That plane would never take to the
  air again.
  Amber O’Neel produced two long−barreled, small−bore  pistols from holsters next to his sides, and he
  handled them as if each  of his hands was a right hand. In fact, that was how Amber O’Neel had  gotten one of
  his nicknames.
  He was ambidextrous, could use both hands with equal  ease. He boasted about his being ambidextrous. Men
  who couldn’t  pronounce that word had taken to calling him "Amber."
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  Amber O’Neel ran toward the plane. He planned to  shoot the occupants, if still alive, and take whatever they
  had. He  poked his head and his guns into the interior of the ship.
  For some time, he remained in exactly that position.
  When he withdrew his head, he looked wide−eyed,  startled. His lips made words, but not sounds.
  His patriots, who had drawn near, withdrew. Amber  O’Neel was fat, innocent−looking. Just a benign, chubby
  gentleman to  the eye. To look at him, you’d trust him with your bank roll. Those who  knew him didn’t even
  want to be around him.
  That look on Amber O’Neel’s face scared his patriots.
  Amber O’Neel showed no signs of being aware of the  flurry among his lovers of liberty—and loot. His guns
  hung limply in  his hands. His mouth kept working, and he swallowed with a great deal  of effort, as if trying
  to down half a banana without chewing it.
  "Fever!" he exploded. "That’s what it is! Blast me,  I’ve got it, and I’m delirious!"
  Then he did something that would have made an  onlooker laugh—but not to Amber O’Neel’s face.
  He hit himself on the head with the barrels of both  guns simultaneously, just hard enough to convince himself
  he was awake.  He looked somewhat childishly pained, then shoved his head into the  plane’s cabin again.
  "At first, I figured I was seein’ things," he said,  sharply. "What’s the idea of the regalia, lady?"
  The fantastically garbed young woman said nothing,
  SHE was a fabulous creature.
  Her hair, perhaps, was most striking of all. It was  spun gold. Not the spun gold that the poets rhyme about.
  They mean  their girls’ hair to be only like unto spun gold in color and texture.  This girl’s hair was spun gold.
  At least, it had been treated  with some gilt process.
  She had an oval face with a tendency to length, and  there was something absolutely aristocratic about the
  chiseling of her  features. She was not the kind of a beauty every man would try to flirt  with. They would hold
  their breath when she went by.
  But it was her attire which held Amber O’Neel  breathless. The garments were scanty, in a sense. First was an
  affair  to take care of the upper body, leaving arms and shoulders bare.
  It was something like the halter of a modernistic  bathing suit. Only halters of modernistic bathing suits are
  not usually  made of cloth composed of chain mesh of heavy gold.
  The lower part of the strange ensemble was a pair of  shorts of the same rich yellow material, and tall sandals
  of an  unusual−looking leather, which was apparently very pliable.
  "Hey?" Amber O’Neel barked. "You knocked speechless  or something when the plane crashed?"
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  The strange−looking young woman pointed with an arm  instead of answering. The pointing gesture focused
  O’Neel’s attention  on a strange set of adornments on the exquisitely formed arm. Men’s  wrist watches. Six of
  them, strung in two bracelets.
  All seemed to be running, and keeping only slightly  different time. They were not alike, and they were styles
  of different  years, as well as having been manufactured in different countries.
  Amber O’Neel took his eyes off the watches and  stared at what the young woman’s arm was pointing. It was
  a man, the  pilot of the plane, and the only other occupant.
  The flier seemed to be senseless. There was a heavy  copper ring—not gold, O’Neel made sure—around each
  ankle, and from the  rings dangled a short length of chain. It looked as if the chain had  once connected his
  legs, but he had managed to cut it so that he could  run. He wore only a long leather skirt.
  He looked like something out of a coffin, this  pilot. There was almost seven feet of him, and in his day he had
  been  very much a man, but now his bones might weigh a hundred pounds, the  rest of him not nearly so much.
  The pilot lay on his side. Amber O’Neel scowled.  Obviously, the strange girl with the metallic hair wanted
  him helped.
  O’Neel brought up his two guns. Help him? Sure! Help  him keep his mouth shut!
  But the gaunt pilot had not been senseless. He had  been faking, as was evident when he spoke in a perfectly
  calm voice.
  "If you’ve ever seen anybody shot with .45s , you’ll think again before you lift them things any higher," he
  said.
  Simultaneously, he rolled a trifle. A big army  automatic showed. It looked rusty, but there is nothing to
  guarantee a  rusty gun won’t go off. O’Neel stood very still.
  O’Neel had shot men in his time, and knew what  happened. They didn’t always die when they were supposed
  to do. There  was a time in Rio when a man with three bullets as nearly in his heart  as O’Neel had been able to
  put them had gotten up and chased O’Neel a  block. This flier might pull the automatic trigger even after a
  bullet  hit his brain.
  Amber O’Neel put his hands up.
  "Drop the guns!" ordered the wasted flier.
  O’Neel dropped them, and said nothing.
  "Head inland and run!" grated the aviator. "We’re  going the other way, and it’ll be tough if you follow us!"
  THE flier paused. He seemed to have something else  on his mind, and it did not sit pleasantly. His mouth
  became a grim  line, and he shoved his head forward.
  "I hope you go as far inland as I did!" he gritted.  "And I hope you find what I found, and what a lot of others
  have found!"
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  O’Neel was wishing he had shot it out with the  flier. He didn’t like the way the fellow’s gun hand shook.
  "What’d they find?" he asked, trying to be sociable.
  The pilot got up from the mangled floor of the plane.
  "Never mind!" he barked shortly. "Forget it!"
  "Who found what?" O’Neel asked, suddenly interested.
  "Forget it, I said!" barked the aviator.
  Amber O’Neel jerked his head toward the girl. "Did  you find her inland somewhere?"
  The emaciated flier said, in a disquietingly earnest  tone, "I figure maybe I should shoot you because maybe I
  was excited a  minute ago, and now you know too much!"
  O’Neel had used that tone himself a time or two. He  whirled, fled wildly. At every jump, he expected a shot,
  but none came.  When he finally gained the jungle and flopped behind a tree, he caught  his breath and made a
  resolution: More caution in the future.
  That pilot must have seen him coming with his guns  drawn and had faked senselessness until he had a chance
  to get the  upper hand.
  "I wonder," muttered O’Neel, "what he meant by that  stuff about finding something inland?"
  He crawled cautiously for a spot where he could  watch the clearing unobserved.
  "Probably he found the dame inland," he decided.  "Some looker after her style, but I’ll take mine a little more
  baby−faced. But I could use some of the stuff her bathing suit was made  out of—if the whole thing ain’t
  some phony set−up!"
  He got a look at the clearing. His natives were  cackling happily among themselves. Gloating over his
  ignominious flight!
  The flier was fleeing with the girl.
  O’Neel stared, then emitted a low, hissing noise,  his way of indicating surprise. The girl was not going
  willingly with  the aviator. He had her by one wrist, was dragging her along toward the  opposite side of the
  clearing.
  IN his emaciated condition, the flier was not equal  to the girl in strength. She got her wrists free of his clutch,
  and  swung on him. Her punching would have done credit to a pugilist with  medical training. She knew just
  where to hit. She staggered the flier  away with a blow, then whirled and ran.
  O’Neel held his breath. The aviator had a gun. He’d  have to use it to stop the girl. But the flier did not try to
  fire his  automatic.
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  "Danged rusty thing ain’t no account!" decided Amber  O’Neel, and promptly charged out into the clearing,
  drawing a tiny,  flat pistol out of each hip pocket.
  The jumping at conclusions nearly cost him his life.  The pilot lifted his big automatic. It banged. O’Neel
  shrieked, grabbed  one arm and fell down.
  The aviator saw he could not overtake the girl. He  whirled and, traveling in a staggering lope, vanished into
  the jungle.
  Amber O’Neel got up and ran in the opposite  direction. He still held his arm, although he knew by now that
  the  bullet from the flier’s .45 had only burned it.
  The patriots were also running. They had started  with the shot, and were sprinting madly in all directions.
  Amber O’Neel  began to curse them.
  He was still cursing his "army" when he caught sight  of the girl.
  Chapter II. LAST TESTAMENT
  THE young woman with the strange golden hair and  metallic cloth garments approached with a calmness
  which was somewhat  unnerving. Amber O’Neel felt an impulse to run, and he could not  explain it. There was
  just something about the girl. She seemed to have  some power.
  She came close to O’Neel and lifted an arm. He half  ducked, thinking she was going to strike him. But she
  waved, instead,  that he should pursue the fleeing aviator.
  O’Neel thought of the big .45 automatic, and was not enthusiastic about the pursuit. Anyway, he had  some
  ideas, and wanted to ask questions.
  "Look!" he said. "That aviator guy found you inland somewhere, and he wants to know where you got the
  gold that  queer cloth you’re wearing is made out of. Right?"
  The girl said nothing. She jerked her arm, directing  O’Neel to pursue the aviator.
  "What tribe are you from?" O’Neel asked.
  She continued to point, to say nothing.
  "Hablah Espanol? 
  O’Neel asked, his Spanish bad. 
  Apparently she didn’t speak Spanish. O’Neel tried  Portuguese, one or two Indian dialects, and French—all
  the languages he  knew. Results were zero.
  "Aw, heck!" he exploded finally. "The cat got your  tongue?"
  When the girl still said nothing, he glowered at her  with the idea of causing her to avert her gaze. She had
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  been staring at  him steadily. Her eyes were a most unusual shade of blue, he noted, and  there was something
  disquieting about them.
  As he watched the eyes, they seemed to radiate  something like an invisible solid that gripped him and held
  him. He  tried to move his hands, but the idea somehow didn’t quite seem to get  to his hands, so that they did
  not move.
  The girl’s eyes seemed to get more and more potent,  until they were incredible magnets of blue. O’Neel felt
  the world begin  to turn slowly under his feet— 
  He gave a violent jump, whirled, got his back to the  girl, and began to beat himself in the face.
  "Hell’s bells!" he squawled. "Hypnotizing me! She’s  two thirds witch!"
  He had snapped the spell. He ran to the spot where  he had been forced by the aviator to drop his guns. They
  were still  there, and he used them to menace such of his patriots as he could find.
  "Grab that girl!" he yelled at them, in their native  tongues. "Tie her with bark rope."
  The patriots, afraid of the two guns, ran swiftly  and encircled the girl, then came toward her. There was
  nothing subtle  about them. They came in crouching, with arms open ready to grab, like  so many wrestlers
  approaching an opponent.
  They stopped. They did it as if they were one man.  And all of them stared at the girl.
  "Rush her!" O’Neel yelled.
  They not only didn’t rush her, but they acted as if  they were going to sleep on their feet.
  O’Neel knew a little about hypnotism. He lifted his  guns, and they roared, almost together. Two patriots
  howled as the  bullets burned grooves in their skin. It was amazing shooting.
  "Grab her!" O’Neel barked, in the aboriginal tongue.
  They grabbed her, four of them—and the next instant  all four were flying backward.
  IT was as if they had tackled the flying weights on  a big engine governor. Amber O’Neel, pop−eyed, knew he
  had seen as  blinding a bit of applied self−defense as he had ever witnessed.
  He had started to rush in himself. But now he held  back. One of the men had been barely touched by the
  strange girl, it  seemed, but now he had a broken arm.
  "Seize her, all of you!" O’Neel bawled, and his two  guns cracked like vicious whips.
  The patriots ran in. They swarmed over the girl, so  many of them that she was lost to sight. Out of the pile of
  struggling  forms came moans and screams. All of these sounds were emitted by the  natives. When the mêlée
  moved a few yards to the right, senseless forms  were left behind.
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  Unexpectedly, the girl broke free. She got clear. As  she ran, her fleetness of foot was startling. Her bright,
  golden  garments, unscathed by the fray, glistened in the sunlight as she  crossed the clearing.
  O’Neel, excited and not wanting to lose the wealth  represented by the girl’s golden attire, lifted his guns.
  "Stop, or I’ll kill you!" he shrieked.
  He meant it.
  The girl stopped. She stood perfectly still. O’Neel  ran toward her, stopped before he was too close, and
  howled for the  natives to seize and bind the girl.
  "I’ll kill you if you try to fight them!" he snarled.
  He still meant it.
  The remarkable young woman let herself be bound. Two  patriots used cords braided out of the same tough
  bark strands which  they used to make their clothing, and it was not likely she would break  loose.
  Amber O’Neel crouched beside the young woman, taking  care that her eyes did not meet his. This was easy.
  She seemed to be  watching one of the natives.
  O’Neel dug into a pocket and brought out a bottle  holding one of the regular acids for making a gold test. His
  business  was platinum, but there was gold in this country. He doused some of the  stuff on the upper part of
  the girl’s garments. It was gold.
  "Where’d this stuff come from?" he yelled at her.
  She didn’t answer, and she was still staring at the  native.
  "C’mon an’ answer me!" O’Neel commanded angrily.  "You can speak some kind of language, can’t you?"
  She still stared at the native.
  O’Neel looked at the native. The act kept the world  from losing a fellow who was doing it no good. It saved
  Amber O’Neel’s  life.
  The native had slipped his machete from its sheath,  raised it, and was creeping forward. He sprang, eyes
  glaring a desire  to kill. O’Neel dodged. Quarters were too close for his guns. Yet the  guns still saved his life,
  for he got them up before him.
  The machete blade hit the steel and stopped, which  was lucky, for the native had spent a lifetime chopping
  paths through  jungles with a machete, and he had swung a blow that could have cut  O’Neel in two. O’Neel
  grunted loudly, then clubbed a gun to the  native’s head.
  The native fell senseless, and O’Neel was too shaken  to do something he ordinarily would have done—shoot
  the native.
  "You done that!" he yelled at the girl. He met her  strange eyes, then wildly shifted his gaze away from hers.
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  He was panting excitedly, and not until he had  wrenched off his shirt and tied it around the girl’s head to
  cover her  eyes did he breathe anywhere near normally.
  "A confounded witch!" he gulped.
  He tested her bonds to make sure the patriots had  done a good job of tying her, muttering as he did so, "She
  hypnotized  that native, made him jump me! But how’d she do it without tellin’ him  what to do?"
  He stood up, satisfied she was tied.
  "Come here, you fellows!" he yelled at his patriots.  "We’re going to catch that aviator!"
  THE aviator was traveling like a fellow who would be  easy to catch. He hooked the ground with his toes as
  he ran. At times,  weaving to pass trees, he did not quite make it, and the shocks knocked  him reeling. Almost
  any kind of a bush tripped him.
  He was collecting mud and scratches. The unusual  leather skirt which he wore did not protect him much. He
  kept the . 45 automatic in his hand, as if afraid of losing it. And  frequently he stopped to listen.
  He, like Amber O’Neel, had a habit of talking to  himself, and Ireland was now in his voice. It hadn’t been so
  noticeable  before. 
  "Sure, and they’ll follow me!" he muttered. "The  gold Z is wearin’ will make that white devil greedy. And Z
  won’t tell  the scut where it came from, so he’ll be followin’ me ve−r−ra soon!"
  He pronounced it as "Z," the last word in the  English alphabet.
  He smashed his face against a tree which he either  didn’t see or couldn’t avoid, got up, then ran out.
  "Or mayze Z will steer the scamp wrong long enough  so that I can get away." He thought a bit, then
  amended: "No, she  won’t! She’ll do anything she can to keep me from gettin’ to the  outside with news of
  Klantic and the secret!"
  A sharp stick would have disemboweled him, except  that he saw it in time.
  "Mother of Mercy!" he mumbled. "I’ve gotta get to  the world with this! It’s the biggest thing that’s ever
  happened to  mankind!"
  He stumbled into a thorn thicket and came out a  sight that was not pleasant to look at. That stopped his
  muttering to  himself, and evidently started him thinking. Finally, he stopped.
  "Sure, and I can’t make it!" he told himself  hollowly.
  He tried to sit on the ground, but fell, utterly  exhausted.
  "Overwork—strain—planning to escape—got me down!" he  mumbled. "Shouldn’t have saved—so big share
  of rations—for escape food  supply. Starved myself. Didn’t need it when—found they hadn’t destroyed  plane.
  But how was I—know they hadn’t destroyed it?"
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  Chapter II. LAST TESTAMENT
  10
  
  He shook his head solemnly over that mistake.
  "If was only some way—of getting diary—outside." His  voice had a whine of despair.
  He fumbled in a pocket cleverly contrived to strap  to his leg under his leather skirt. The notebook which
  came out was an  expensive one. Otherwise it would not have stood the wear it had stood.
  Amber O’Neel came out of the jungle about the same  time the notebook came out of the pocket.
  THE meeting was an accident, in a sense. Amber  O’Neel had not expected to meet his quarry so soon, so he
  walked out  boldly, feet making some swishing noises in the rank jungle weeds.
  The aviator looked up, saw his enemy, dropped the  notebook and grabbed at the automatic. The gun banged
  the instant he  got his hand on it.
  By rights, Amber O’Neel should have died then. But  the aviator was either a poor shot or very much out of
  practice. He  missed. O’Neel yipped like a dog just missed by a rock, and flashed his  two guns.
  Immediately, there was a great thundering of guns in  the little glade in which the men had met. Both men
  moved rapidly as  they fired. Weeds were tall, bushes rank. Neither man was exactly sure  where the other
  was. Both guns went empty about the same time.
  Neither man made a sound. Amber O’Neel, not proud of  the shooting he had been doing, lay still and strained
  his ears, guns  ready.
  The South American jungle is noted for its noisy  birds. The shooting had stirred them up. Parrakeets
  squawked raucously.  Gaudy birds made squawking, whistling and moaning noises, and there was  one that
  sounded like a clear bell.
  Amber O’Neel was so on edge that he failed to notice  something that should have caught his attention. One
  particular uproar  of bird cries was receding. When O’Neel did notice this, he sprang  erect and cursed.
  "The aviator guy’s runnin’ away!" he gritted.
  He scrambled forward through the weeds and small  bushes. Still uppermost in his mind was catching the flier
  and making  him tell where the strange girl—the girl with such weird powers—had  come from, and especially
  the source of her gold frock.
  Anyway, it wouldn’t help the temper of the Colombian  officials if the aviator came out of the jungle with the
  story of the  attack and the captured girl.
  BUT Amber O’Neel saw the notebook. It lay where the  flier had dropped it. The notebook covers were a
  bright red, despite  being worn, an eye−catching contrast against the green of the weeds.
  Because he was a greedy devil who overlooked few  bets, Amber O’Neel veered over to snatch up the
  notebook. Naturally, he  looked inside.
   THE MENTAL WIZARD
  Chapter II. LAST TESTAMENT
  11
  
  DAVID HUTTON, HIS DIARY.
  Amber O’Neel spoke aloud to himself.
  "That name," he said, "is damn familiar for some  reason." Men alone a great deal of the time get the habit of
  talking to  themselves.
  He examined the first entry in the diary. It was  dated almost ten years ago, and the first line started off:
  To−day I leave on my attempted flight from Rio de  Janeiro to the United States, flying alone.
  "Hell!" O’Neel said, and stopped running. "I  remember now. This guy was an aviator. He was lost. A lot of
  birds went  hunting him, and some of them didn’t—"
  He stopped, as if he wanted to think over what he  had been about to say.
  "Some of them didn’t get back," he finished.
  Chapter III. THE REMARKABLE TOURIST
  AMBER O’NEEL stood still and let the aviator run on.  O’Neel was afraid of Aviator David Hutton’s rusty
  old automatic, and he  also wanted to read that diary and see if it told what had kept the  flier in the unexplored
  jungle interior for ten years.
  O’Neel began to turn the notebook leaves. Flier  David Hutton had started off the diary with painstaking care
  in writing  the lettering; but, as things do, the care had petered out. However, it  was all readable.
  O’Neel’s interest at first was fragmentary. He  glanced up each time a bird squawked, or a jungle bush moved.
  It was  hot. He moistened his finger to turn the notebook leaves, by wiping it  in the sweat on his forehead.
  O’Neel began to be more absorbed in the notebook. A  gaudy parrakeet with a nest near by screamed at him
  suddenly, and he  didn’t even look up.
  The birds were beginning to settle back in the  thick, moist carpet of green. Bursts of excitement in the jungle
  are  frequent. Monkeys—curious as humans—drawn by the earlier uproar,  arrived and began squeaking and
  working closer to the reading man.
  One of Amber O’Neel’s half−savage  followers—unwilling—came out of the jungle growth and stood almost
  beside O’Neel, and the white man didn’t seem to notice.
  O’Neel made a gasping sound of unbounded,  unbelieving surprise.
  The monkeys came closer, behaving a little like  humans. One would throw himself forward with a loud
  outcry, as if  daring the men below to fight, but ready to turn if they wanted to.  Another monkey would do the
  same thing.
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  Chapter III. THE REMARKABLE TOURIST
  12
  
  FOUR patriots came out of the jungle carrying the  strange gold−clad girl. She was still blindfolded.
  O’Neel was ogling the diary. He had it open at about  the middle. Across the two pages was a picture, or
  sketch, of a crude  map, and it terminated at something marked "Klantic."
  O’Neel read on.
  "It’s impossible!" he gasped once.
  He read on. His men put down the girl and glowered  at the jungle.
  "Why—what—" O’Neel ogled the diary.
  His patriots were eying the girl. They didn’t eye  her as men of their kind would ordinarily eye one of the
  prettiest  women ever to penetrate any jungle.
  They were afraid of her. They wanted to run. But two  things held them: The gold of her garments, and the
  knowledge that  El Liberator Amber O’Neel shot cowards sometimes.
  O’Neel suddenly leveled an arm at the girl.
  "You’re Z!" he howled.
  She made no move, no sound.
  "You’re mentioned in this diary!" O’Neel shouted at  her. "You’re Z! Then, damn it, this whole incredible
  thing must be  true! But it couldn’t be!"
  He was so excited, he could hardly stand up.
  He came over and touched the girl. The way in which  he did this was strange. He did it as if she were some
  rare jewel, or  something that might blow up.
  O’Neel wrenched off her blindfold. For no more than  three seconds, he stared at the girl’s eyes. Then he
  replaced the  blindfold.
  "It’s true!" he squawled.
  He sprang erect. His eyes were wild; he jumped up  and down, and he could hardly talk.
  "I’ve got it!" he bellowed. "I’ve hit it at last!  The biggest thing of my life!"
  He brandished his arms at the natives, scaring them  until they almost ran.
  "Gold!" he jeered. "Who gives a damn about gold,  when something like this comes along! Something that is
  something!  Something worth more than—well, hell! There ain’t enough dollars and  cents in the world to buy
  this!"
  He ran at the natives, struck them.
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  Chapter III. THE REMARKABLE TOURIST
  13
  
  "Catch that flier!" he shouted at them, in their  tongue. "A new rifle and all the ammunition he can carry to the
  man who  catches and kills him!"
  The natives dashed off instantly in pursuit of the  aviator. Which, after all, proved them just about as bad as
  their  master, Amber O’Neel.
  THEY did not catch the aviator, David Hutton. He got  some breaks. He came to a stream, almost fell over a
  dugout canoe  cached by some hunter, and launched it. He paddled with weak ferocity  for a while, then lay
  down in the two inches of water sloshing on the  bottom of the dugout and slept or was unconscious—he
  never was sure  which.
  The water gurgling in and out of his ears awakened  him, and he found his craft aground on a mud bar on
  which tall birds  with long, yellow legs and pouchy necks stood. He shoved the boat off  the mud, got it out in
  the current and paddled.
  Hutton watched for floating coconuts, picked them  up, and finally found one that was good. Later, he landed
  for fruit,  and killed a fat bird with a stick, and ate it raw.
  That day, he slept in the canoe in the stream, and  awakened conscious of water no longer around him, but
  with movement  near. He listened. Something nudged the canoe, almost overturned it.
  He looked out, and actually cried out in terror. For  he was on another mud bar and there were scores of
  alligators around  him. One had nudged the canoe. He clubbed the ‘gator; luckily, it  withdrew. He got the
  dugout afloat again.
  The river was the Magdalena, and it led eventually  to Cartagena. Big black natives and smaller brown natives
  saw him  frequently and remembered, for a white man paddling a dugout alone was  unusual, to say nothing of
  a white man who was skin and bones and who  wore only a leather apron.
  Amber O’Neel trailed the flier down the river by  questioning the natives. O’Neel was taking chances coming
  into the  districts of the Colombian police. He knew it, but did not hesitate. He  was cautious, though. And he
  was raising the ante to hit natives.
  "Two guns, and all the ammunition he can carry in  two trips to the man who gets that flier!" he promised.
  A bit later, it was three guns, and three loads of  ammunition. Then he thought of throwing in an outboard
  motor, which was  a brilliant stroke. Almost any native would trade his wife for an  outboard motor.
  O’Neel and his natives were not more than an hour  behind David Hutton when the latter tied his canoe up to
  the stone wall  along the Cartagena water front.
  David Hutton stood on the wall and looked around.  That move quite possibly changed the life course of a
  great many people.
  A CROWD was gathered on the water front. David  Hutton looked the way every one else seemed to be
  looking, out into the  bay. A steamer with four funnels, flying a United States flag, was  anchored out in the
  stream.
   THE MENTAL WIZARD
  Chapter III. THE REMARKABLE TOURIST
  14
  
  "A tourist boat, probably." Hutton shuddered.  "People out having fun. It seems strange—after what I’ve been
  through."
  His second look at the crowd showed something he had  overlooked. A lot of top−hatted personages. There
  was also a squad of  soldiers, some sailors, policemen, and two different bands.
  "Who is it?" Hutton asked a very brown man in very  white clothes. "What’s the blow−out about?"
  The brown man looked a long time at the leather  skirt the aviator wore.
  "The Señor Doc Savage is on that steamer," the man  said. "What you see is a reception to welcome and honor
  him. The  president is here, the minister of war, and many others."
  "So the day has come when they honor a doctor,"  Hutton remarked.
  The brown man looked surprised, and said, "Is it  possible you have not heard of this Doc Savage? Every one
  señor, knows  him. Even the devils in hell."
  "If you knew the kind of place I’ve been in for the  last ten years," Hutton replied, "you wouldn’t know much
  of what was  going on in the world. Who is this guy, anyway?"
  The brown man expanded his chest. The subject  appeared to please him. And it was evident he took pride in
  telling it.
  "Doc Savage is a wonderful man, señor. His muscular  strength is said to be the greatest in the world. But
  most amazing of  all, he possesses a keen brain with it. His scientific knowledge covers  all fields, and he is a
  genius in every one. With him are five trusted  aids, men who are masters of their respective trades. Yet,
  señor, this  Doc Savage knows more than the whole five put together."
  "What did you say his profession was?" Hutton was  suddenly more interested than he had been.
  "Helping out others, señor. Those who are  misfortunate, and righting wrongs. He is very wealthy, and so are
  his  men. Look! There comes the lighter bearing them."
  "Yeah," Hutton said, thoughtfully. "Thanks. Thanks a  lot."
  He walked rapidly toward the spot where Doc Savage  would probably land. He elbowed people aside.
  He did not see Amber O’Neel, but O’Neel saw him.
  AMBER O’NEEL’S discovery of Hutton so promptly was  not luck. The steamer in the harbor had suggested
  the idea that the  quarry might take flight by that route.
  O’Neel had hurried to watch who embarked and  disembarked, and to bribe the purser, if it were possible, for
  a look  at the passenger list to see who had booked passage from Cartagena.
  "Damn me, my lucky day!" grinned O’Neel when he saw  Aviator Hutton.
   THE MENTAL WIZARD
  Chapter III. THE REMARKABLE TOURIST
  15
  
  O’Neel worked through the crowd. He looked like a  pleasant, fat man, a bit sweaty and scratched by briars.
  Those who saw  him couldn’t know that the hands in his pocket held his two guns, which  he could handle
  dexterously with either hand.
  He also looked like a harmless, plump man with a  purpose. But no one dreamed of the incredible ideas
  turning over in  Amber O’Neel’s mind.
  O’Neel passed one of his men and passed the word.
  "There he is—still wearing that leather apron and  not another stitch," he told his men, in their tongue. "The
  reward  still goes. I’ll even make it two outboard motors."
  The lighter coming in from the cruise ship was  really an old Mississippi River stern−wheeler which had seen
  its days  on the Father of Waters and had been sailed down here no telling how.
  The native boatmen bringing her in were not doing a  job that could be bragged about. The natives having
  dugout canoes  moored along the quay significantly got into them and paddled to the  clear.
  The dugout belonged mostly to strapping, black  hunters from the jungle. They brought their snake hides,
  leopard skins  and green parrots down to sell to the tourists. They did not wear too  many clothes.
  The stern−wheeler angled in sidewise, swiped the  quay, backed off, tried again, parted a line, and made it on
  the third  attempt.
  Every one from the captain to the deck swiper was  yelling orders about how to make fast, and the crowd
  surged forward  howling, "Viva Doc Savage!" and both bands struck up tunes. Two  kids tried to jump from
  the quay to the side−wheeler, and for a wonder,  both fell in. Their mothers shrieked.
  Aviator David Hutton tried to approach the place  where they were landing the gangplank. He had a time
  keeping from being  trampled. His bare feet were walked on, hide scraped off his ribs by  elbows, and his ears
  deafened by "Vivas!" But he made it.
  He was standing so close that only an agile jump  saved his naked toes from the descending gangplank. He
  tried to dash  aboard the stern−wheeler, but half a hundred others had the same idea.  They shoved at
  policemen, and the policemen shoved back. The policemen  won.
  "Viva 
  Doc Savage!" they yelled. 
  DAVID HUTTON, being tall, saw a remarkable−looking  apparition step from the stern−wheeler to the
  gangplank. The apparition  had arms fully as long and as big around as his legs. It seemed a safe  bet that the
  apparition could tie his shoestrings without stooping. The  head was a nubbin, the eyes small and somewhere
  in pits of gristle, and  the mouth astonishingly huge.
  The apparition raised hands and wrists on the backs  of which hair looked as coarse as rusty shingle nails. He
  seemed to  want everybody to be quiet so he could say something.
  "Viva!" 
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  Chapter III. THE REMARKABLE TOURIST
  16
  
  howled the crowd, and the bands got tangled up in their tunes. 
  The excitement was rattling David Hutton. He was an  ill man, a physical wreck, and he had pushed himself.
  He uttered a wild  shriek which he hoped would reach the man on the gangplank, who he  supposed must be
  Doc Savage.
  David Hutton got a look at the black face of the  devil with the knife.
  "Help!" Hutton squawled. "I need some one to help  me! An incredible thing has happened to me! I’ve
  happened upon  something that the world doesn’t dream exists!"
  Then he looked down and saw a sliver of stone  reaching for his ribs. It was a dark−colored stone, the kind the
  jungle  savages sometimes used for knives. The stuff was razor−sharp and worse  than steel, because it
  sometimes broke off in the wound.
  He had last seen the face in the jungle taking  orders from the peaceful−looking white man who had used two
  guns so  ambidextrously, and who had tried to kill him.
  Hutton screamed and twisted, but knew he’d never  dodge the knife.
  Chapter IV. AROUND THE DYING MAN
  A THOUSAND other people were screaming within a  hundred yards, so one more scream—David
  Hutton’s—did not make much  difference. A squad of army airplanes roared overhead. They were flying  in a
  formation that made the letter DOC.
  The hairy, nubbin−headed, long−armed man on the  gangplank waved his arms and tried to yell something in
  Spanish. Nobody  heard him, because he had a small squeaky voice which a kid would not  have boasted
  about. A surge of the crowd pushed several people into the  bay.
  Everybody seemed to be having a swell time.
  "Attention, señors and señoritas!" yelled the  squeakyvoiced, pleasantly homely ape on the gangplank.
  Over to the left, in the crowd, there was a  commotion now. A woman or two shrieked.
  "Listen to me, please!" shouted the fellow on the  gangplank. "I’ve got something to say about this welcoming
  business!"
  "Viva 
  Doc Savage!" they howled. 
  "I ain’t Doc!" shouted the remarkable−looking  specimen on the gangplank. "Gimme a chance to tell you Doc
  Savage ain’t  comin’ ashore on account of he don’t go so big for this publicity and  hero business!"
  "Viva 
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  Chapter IV. AROUND THE DYING MAN
  17
  
  Doc Savage! Viva!"
  The gangplanker squeaked, "Aw, shucks! Why didn’t  Doc shove this job off on somebody else?"
  "Viva!"
  Some of the people thought the man on the gangplank  was Doc Savage. They cheered him as such. He shook
  his head.
  "I’m Monk—I’m Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett  Mayfair," he tried to tell them. "I’m the chemist of
  Doc’s little group  of five assistants. I’m trying to advise you that Doc Savage never  shows himself before
  public gatherings if he can help it, and when he  took this trip on the cruise ship, it was to get a rest in peace
  and  quiet and live halfway like a normal human bein’ for once. Only  somebody recognized ‘im, and this had
  to happen."
  He had some more, but the crowd drowned him out.
  "Mucho hombre! Mucho hombre! Doc Savage!" 
  they howled. 
  The homely fellow on the gangplank shook his head  slowly. 
  "Human nature is a funny thing," he grinned. "Doc  ain’t even been in this country recently. All he ever done
  was stop a  war between a couple of their neighbors and in which they might have  been involved.
  "That was over a year ago. And here they’re all  ready to take the place apart and hand it to him! Just because
  they’ve  read in the newspapers and heard over their radios that Doc is quite a  guy."
  The hairy fellow’s homely face suddenly cracked a  grin from ear to ear.
  He chuckled, said, "What they’ve read may’ve stood  ‘em on their ears, but what’s never been printed and
  what only Doc and  us others know would spin ‘em around and around like tops!"
  AVIATOR DAVID HUTTON had a piece of stone and an  awful pain in his back. The obsidian knife had
  broken off. He was  trying to get away, endeavoring to run from the slinking jungle native  who had tried to
  kill him—and was still trying.
  Pain had David Hutton delirious. That, and the  ailment that was racking him.
  "Try to—tell somebody," he whispered. "Tell  them—thing is too—too great to be—kept from world.
  Must—get it."
  The stark agony and horror in his face did more to  get people out of his way than his weak shoving. Another
  woman looked  at him and almost fainted.
  "Some nation—United States—could send an army for  it!" he mumbled. "It would take an army—to
  succeed."
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  Chapter IV. AROUND THE DYING MAN
  18
  
  He fell down. People reached to help him, but jerked  their hands away when they saw the blood. He got up
  and stared at them  vacantly.
  "An army could—not make—it," he told them.
  He mouthed his words as if they were sticky.
  "They couldn’t do it with—airplanes, he said. "Look  at me. I’m proof of that. I made it. Look at me!"
  They were looking at him—and drawing back. His eyes  were mad and his words madder, and they had no
  way of telling what he  might do. He shook one finger solemnly at them.
  "A fleet of dirigibles, of big airships like those  that were used on London in the great war might make it!"
  A man came snaking out of the crowd. He had another  of the knives that was a lean stone splinter. A second
  and a third man  just like him appeared. They were brown−black and half−naked; they  wouldn’t have looked
  out of place jumping around a cannibal pot.
  David Hutton looked right at them and didn’t see  them.
  A small, rotund white man appeared on the edge of  the crowd, just within the circle around the jabbering
  aviator.
  The white man looked as if he should have been  behind a bakery counter selling pastries.
  He would have made a good ad in a white cap and coat  in any restaurant window. He was the outward picture
  of peace,  contentment and good will toward all his fellow men.
  "Don’t forget the outboard motor!" he told the  brown−black devils with knives. "I’ll make it an outboard
  motor to each  man! Two to the first one to do the job!"
  David Hutton looked at nothing and said, "Dirigibles  might make it. But it’d take more than one. It would
  take a lot of  them, and they would have to carry a lot of men."
  His voice was getting stronger. A red lake was  growing around his feet. His leather skirt was slick and
  slopping red.
  "It would take men—men—to get it!" he shouted. "And  no matter how big the army and how well−trained,
  they’ll have trouble.  Plenty of trouble!"
  He leaned back, as if about to fall, and stared  straight at the copper heat of the sun, with his eyes wide open.
  "Trouble!" he yelled. "The officers and men would  find out what they were after, and your army would go to
  hell! They’d  kill each other. The thoughts of what they were after would make them  greedy. The more they
  thought, the madder they would get. And finally  they—"
  He gargled, stopped, coughed, and shot a crimson  spray to the ground.
  The brown−black men were close enough to get their  stone splinters into their victim, almost. Their eyes
  were the eyes of  small animals. Their faces were not the kind of faces that had  expressions.
   THE MENTAL WIZARD
  Chapter IV. AROUND THE DYING MAN
  19
  
  David Hutton said blindly, "Dirigibles—an  army—picked men—maybe you’d fail the first time—and the
  second—but  finally—the greatest—most fantastic—treasure ever to fall into the  hands of mankind."
  The nearest brown−black man got his stone sliver  ready to shove, but instead of shoving it, put it down,
  leaning double  to do so, then lying down, completely slack, on top of it.
  His two companions did exactly the same thing almost  immediately.
  THE men who had lain down had their eyes open. One  of them rolled over on his back, opened his mouth,
  and out came a comic  opera snore. Some nitwit in the crowd laughed. He must have thought it  was all some
  kind of show connected with the celebration.
  When the nitwit had finished his laugh, he lay down,  also.
  Other people lay down. Four or five. Some snored,  and some didn’t.
  Aviator David Hutton looked steadily at nothing and  began to giggle. It was an awful kind of giggle. It
  sounded as if  something inside him—some vital and necessary part of him—was tearing  loose and coming
  out. His life’s blood came out of the corners of his  mouth in dribbles and spurts.
  There was quite a commotion by now. A goodly number  of people were lying on the ground. Hutton stood
  there and giggled and  gargled, grotesque in his skin and bones and leather apron, made more  horrible by the
  blood on him and around his feet.
  A man broke and ran from the spot. Others  immediately thought it a good idea, and a general scampering
  ensued.  Every one seemed to want to get away from the vicinity.
  One man was not fleeing. He was, in fact, jamming  his way toward David Hutton.
  The approaching man, when he stood up straight, was  taller than the tallest man in the crowd. He was not
  skinny. He had a  remarkably symmetrical physical development. Most big men look out of  proportion
  somewhere.
  This one didn’t. Seen away from other men, with  nothing near to which his size might be compared, his
  physical build  would have seemed ordinary.
  Not ordinary, though, when seen close enough to  observe that the tendons on the backs of his hands were
  almost like  wire ropes, and that his neck was cabled with sinew.
  This man’s skin was an unusual bronze tint. His eyes  were more unusual. They were slightly eerie, and
  something like pools  of flake gold stirred by something invisible.
  The giant had a brown mustache, long, brown hair, a  wide−brimmed Panama hat with the brim yanked over
  his eyes, a white  linen suit that was baggy, plain white shirt and black tie.
  The big man reached David Hutton, and laid hold of  him. Hutton took a swing at him. It was a wild swing,
  easily caught.  The bronzed big fellow grasped Hutton and held him easily.
  Hutton began to cry like a baby. He seemed to be  bleeding faster.
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  Chapter IV. AROUND THE DYING MAN
  20
  
  Four other men came working through the crowd. They  apologized politely and shoved people out of their
  way.
  The foremost of the four made a good entering wedge.  He was lean, pale, unhealthy−looking, and almost any
  sixteen−year−old  boy would have been willing to bet he could lick the fellow.
  The pale physical wreck was followed by a man  thinner than it seemed any man could be and still function,
  and who  wore a monocle dangling from a lapel ribbon. Next was a waspish, dapper  fashion plate, a man with
  the mobile mouth of an orator, and piercing,  dark eyes.
  The last man of the four was built with big bones  and a lot of gristle, but his fists were what stood out.
  Incredible  hands! Doubled, they made fists the equal of many a man’s head in size.  This man also wore a
  gloomy look on his long face. He was sourness  itself.
  The last man was big, and he needed his bigness,  because the people the other three shoved out of their way
  wanted to  fight by the time the big−fisted man came to them. He was big enough to  push them off like flies,
  though.
  They reached the bronze giant who was holding David  Hutton.
  "What’ve you found, Doc?" asked the small pale  unhealthy−looking man.
  "Wounded man," said the bronze giant. "And do not  call me Doc Savage. We are trying to avoid the crowd,
  Long Tom."
  "Sure," said pale "Long Tom." "I forgot."
  David Hutton babbled, "Dirigibles—an army—they’ll go  through hell—find things no man ever dreamed
  existed—but it’s worth  it—all!"
  THE man who was so tall, so thin, and wore a  monocle, said, "I’ll be superamalgamated! A metempirical, I
  might even  say transcendentally esoteric, avouchment."
  "Johnny and his big words, not even death will  part," said the dapper man who wore the immaculate clothing.
  "Why can’t  you speak like ordinary white people, Johnny?"
  "Let him alone, Ham," rumbled the big−fisted man,  who proved to have a voice like a very big bear in a very
  ample cave.  "You’ve got such a habit of pickin’ on Monk, that you work on other  people when he ain’t
  around. Holy cow! I get tired of it."
  "From that sour puss you wear, you look as if you  were tired of living, Renny," retorted "Ham."
  Doc Savage said, "Pick up these natives."
  The four looked at the bronze giant. He was  indicating the brown−black fellows who had been ganging up on
  David  Hutton. They seemed to be asleep. All three of them.
  The four men picked up the natives. The waspish man  with the very sartorially perfect garb stood back until
  the three men  had been picked up.
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  "What’s the idea, Ham?" rumbled big−fisted "Renny."  "Afraid of mussing them pretty clothes?"
  "There wasn’t enough to go around, was there?"
  Doc Savage carried David Hutton away. Hutton kicked,  squirmed, gibbered.
  "Dirigibles!" he moaned. "Don’t try it—anything  else—and watch—that golden−haired girl—she’s not
  like—the rest of the  human race!"
  Doc Savage made a way through the crowd. Hutton  flounced, and accidentally struck the bronze man’s
  mustache, so that  the mustache was knocked askew and it became plainly evident that the  mustache was false.
  Suddenly, the men found themselves confronted by  policemen. The officers stared at them, and promptly
  produced pistols,  for they were a queer−looking crowd. The bronze giant’s mustache being  askew was
  plainly suspicious.
  "Halt!" they ordered, in Spanish.
  Doc Savage stopped.
  "Now this," he said, "should make you hold your  breath."
  He then held his breath. So did the other four. Doc  Savage grasped a coat pocket and squeezed, and a
  container, evidently  of thin glass, broke, for the coat−pocket fabric was wet an instant,  but dried almost at
  once as the liquid vaporized.
  The squad of policemen, and almost every one else  within a score of feet seemed to go to sleep on their feet
  and fell  down.
  Ham said, "If they had known we were Doc Savage and  his aids, they would have let us through."
  Almost instantly after he said that, he lay down  with the policemen, apparently sleeping.
  Doc Savage and the others continued to hold their  breath.
  FINALLY, when almost a minute had elapsed, Doc  Savage and the others began to breathe.
  Pale Long Tom looked at sleeping Ham and said, "Monk  would have enjoyed that."
  "He would have laid an egg," agreed big−fisted  Renny. "Ham was so cocky he got careless. He should have
  known that gas  which Doc released by breaking the container in his pocket is odorless  and colorless, but will
  render a man unconscious until at least a  minute has elapsed, or until it has time to be rendered harmless by
  mixture with the air."
  They went on. Once out of the crowd, they ran. Doc  Savage was also carrying Ham, and when they were
  alone, except for the  noise of their own running feet. He led them into an open−fronted  building which said,
  "La Tropical" over the front.
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  Chapter IV. AROUND THE DYING MAN
  22
  
  Inside were small old tables on which stood beer  steins and a guitar, and around and on which flies buzzed
  and crawled.  No one was in sight.
  Renny went on into the gloom in the back, found a  soda fountain. Looking at the knobs he rumbled, "Which
  one of these  does water come out of? I can’t never remember."
  "You thirsty?" Long Tom snorted. "I must say it’s a  fine time—"
  "Holy cow!" boomed Renny. "I want water for that  dying fellow Doc’s got! It’ll wash out his throat maybe so
  he can talk!"
  Aviator Dave Hutton said, "Watch the girl—don’t ever  be alone with her—and don’t ever look at her. She’s
  not like an  ordinary woman."
  Doc Savage had stopped the flow of scarlet from  Hutton’s wound, and was carrying him easily.
  "We will see if we can find a more private place  upstairs," Doc said.
  They walked upstairs. Renny, last, found which spout  the fountain water came out of, and carried three beer
  glasses of it  easily, gripping the bottoms of all three glasses in one huge palm.
  Big−worded "Johnny" stood at the one window of the  large, shabby and absolutely empty room at the top of
  the stairs.
  "Monk," he said, "still maintains a prominent  ensconcement upon that gangplank. He seems to be
  harranguing the  multitude."
  "You mean he’s still tellin’ ‘em Doc won’t be  ashore?" Long Tom grunted.
  "That," said Johnny, "would be an abundant guess."
  He remained at the window, dividing his time between  watching the crowd and Monk on the gangplank of
  the stern−wheeler  waving his arms and talking, and watching the beer place below to see  that no one came in.
  Doc Savage began to work on David Hutton.
  THERE was obviously a great deal of skill in the  bronze man’s muscular fingers. He made no false moves,
  and with almost  no instruments, except a pocketknife and a tiny metal pincers which he  produced from
  somewhere inside his clothing, he shortly had the stone  blade.
  "Monk seems to be having a supereminently joyful  interval," Johnny said from the window.
  Ham, on the floor, snored loudly.
  Renny, boomed, "Monk would have a lot better time if  he could be seeing Ham now."
  Doc Savage worked briskly.
  "Doc," said Long Tom, "what is this thing about?"
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  23
  
  "No way of telling yet," replied the bronze man,  without interrupting what he was doing.
  "How’d you get tipped off?"
  "Watching Monk trying to explain to the crowd that  we didn’t want a public reception, and saw the white
  man stabbed by a  native," Doc explained. "Tried to get to him. Saw more natives closing  in. Threw some
  thin−walled glass bulbs filled with that anaesthetic  gas. It got the natives. But the white man got away."
  "The who got away?"
  "White man," Doc elaborated. "He came close to the  natives when they were closing in on this fellow,
  addressed them in  their native tongue, and promised them outboard motors."
  Long Tom scowled, "What’d he look like?"
  "As peaceful," Doc replied, "as you can possibly  imagine a man looking."
  Renny put in, booming, "What I don’t see is how he  got away if you were close enough to hear him promise
  them natives  outboard motors or whatever he promised ‘em."
  Long Tom answered that. "Lip−reading."
  Aviator David Hutton continued to mumble and jabber.
  Ham lay motionless on the floor where Doc had put  him. He snored.
  "WHAT I can’t see is why Ham is unconscious and that  the other fellow isn’t," Renny continued.
  "He is unconscious," Doc explained.
  "But he talks!"
  "Delirium," the bronze man replied. "He does not  know what is going on around him.
  Hutton mumbled loudly, "Z! Z! Z!" Renny leaned  forward. "What’s he sayin’?"
  "Z! Z! Watch her!" Hutton’s voice got louder. He  squirmed, trying to get to his feet. "She’s an incredible
  creature! No  normal human being is her equal! She can—can—"
  He got on his feet—Doc let him because letting him  was less hard on him than not letting him."
  "Z!" Hutton screamed. "Watch her! That little, fat  devil who tried to kill us in the jungle caught her! But
  she’ll get  away from him! He don’t know what he’s caught! He’ll think she’s an  ordinary woman and—"
  Hutton drew himself stiffly erect.
  "I’ve found the most incredible thing in the world,"  he said.
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  24
  
  He went slack, all of a sudden, as if some one had  cut the wire that supplied him with juice. Only a dead man
  could fall  thus.
  Sticking to his dead, sweating chest was a small  thing of black, greasy−looking hardwood with a brightly
  colored feather  lashed to it.
  "Holy cow!" Renny roared, and dropped all three beer  glasses of water, which had not been used.
  "Blowgun!" Long Tom clipped. "Poison dart!"
  A split second of intense silence followed. It was  broken by a brief, wispy whisper.
  Doc Savage, giant of bronze, fell. He went down with  a slow start, then very fast, so that it seemed he would
  hit hard, but  when he did hit the floor, it was with an unexpected lightness, no more  than if a boy had fallen.
  He lay very still.
  Also sticking to his chest—under the breast pocket  of his white coat—was a bright feather, a lardy−looking
  piece of dark,  needlelike hardwood.
  "Poison darts!" Renny howled. "Where are they comin’  from?"
  Chapter V. SNAKES
  DOC SAVAGE lay very still on his back and did not  look as if he were breathing. Renny, Long Tom and
  Johnny stared  horrified in disbelief. Disaster had struck, and struck like it often  does, when least expected.
  Doc Savage down—dead from a poison dart—killed with  no more commotion than a wispy whisper of a dart
  through the air of the  room. It was too much for them. They couldn’t credit it.
  "Doc!" Renny gulped hoarsely. "You’re faking!"
  No answer, no movement from the bronze man. The  horror of that inanimation gripped them so awfully that
  they scarcely  knew of the danger of more darts, were unaware of everything but that  giant bronze figure limp
  on the floor, in fact.
  Then another dart came whispering, and gaunt Johnny  jumped like a bony skeleton and stared pop−eyed at
  his coat sleeve,  where a dart stuck.
  "Cut the wound!" Long Tom yelled. "Suck the poison  out!"
  Johnny snapped the dart out of his coat sleeve.
  "Didn’t prick me!" He leveled an arm. "Came through  the window! Roof across the street!"
  They all ran out, pulling strange weapons from  armpit holsters so cleverly padded that they had not been
  noticeable.
  The weapons looked like oversized automatic pistols.
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  25
  
  They were machine pistols with a remarkable rate of  fire, and they discharged anything from so−called
  "mercy" bullets—which  produced quick unconsciousness—to high explosives and thermit slugs  which would
  melt steel.
  They did not make much noise going down the stairs,  and they went fast. They looked efficient.
  And they were efficient, or they had that  reputation. Renny, the man with the big fists and the
  bear−in−a−cave  voice, was Colonel John Renwick, world−renowned engineer.
  Johnny, the string of bones with the monocle, was  William Harper Littlejohn, erudite archaeologist and
  geologist, and his  monocle was really a magnifier for looking at ancient statues and  strange rocks.
  Long Tom, who always looked somewhat as if he were  ready for a hospital, was Major Thomas J. Roberts,
  electrical wizard  extraordinary, and actually as healthy a fellow as one could find  anywhere.
  Any one of them would have sacrificed his life to  preserve that of the unusual bronze man. Grim and speedy
  was their rush  in pursuit of the bronze man’s slayer of slayers.
  "There was two of ‘em!" Johnny gulped, still using  small words as he went down the steps. He invariably did
  this when  excited. "Brown devils! Jungle Indians, I presume!"
  They ran across the street and charged into the  building from the roof of which the poisoned darts had been
  discharged  by blowguns.
  They were hardly out of sight when several natives  ran lightly up a rear stairway and into the room where
  Doc Savage’s  prone form lay among the figures of Ham and the anaesthetic−gassed  natives and dead David
  Hutton.
  They were members of Amber O’Neel’s band of  self−styled patriots.
  One produced a big revolver, then growled. "This  will put an end to our troubles!"
  SOME one grabbed his arm as he was about to shoot  into David Hutton’s lifeless body. "Look! One of the
  others has already  hit him with a blowgun arrow!"
  Another man pointed at Doc Savage. "The big bronze  one, also."
  "Who is he?" the gunman demanded.
  "The famous one who was to arrive to−day—Doc Savage."
  "Famous one, eh? That is not something to be happy  about. His death will cause a commotion. It will stir up
  the police."
  "Better be joyful that the bronze one is now where  he cannot be stirred up. He would be worse than the
  police!"
  "Si, si," 
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  Chapter V. SNAKES
  26
  
  a man in the rear agreed hollowly. "Even the little men in the  jungle, who dry human heads and smoke them,
  have heard of this Doc  Savage and some of the uncanny things he has been able to do." 
  Two pistol shots banged outdoors. They were followed  by a strange, loud roar—it was as if a bull had
  bellowed once. It was  the sound made by one of the machine pistols, but a good ear was  required to
  distinguish any individual reports.
  "That will draw the police," growled one of O’Neel’s  patriots. "We had better leave."
  They looked at their anaesthetic−gassed comrades on  the floor.
  "What is wrong with them?"
  "They look as if they are dead, but they snore."
  "Snoring men usually awaken, señors," said one of  the men, who seemed to have some authority. "We will
  take them with us."
  They gathered up their friends.
  One pointed at Ham. "What about this one?" he said.  "He snores."
  "Take him. I lay claim to those wonderful clothes he  is wearing."
  "Kill him and leave his body, but take the clothes."
  "No! Undressing him would take time, and killing him  might soil the clothes anyway."
  So they picked the dapper Ham up and carried him  out, not because they wanted Ham, but because they
  wanted his clothing.  That would have pleased Ham. He was Brigadier General Theodore Marley  Brooks, an
  eminent lawyer, but his hobby and his pride was his  clothing. Everything was secondary to his clothing
  The men traveled rapidly down the rear stairs,  trying not to make much noise.
  They were not yet out of the building when Doc  Savage got up off the floor where they had left him for a
  dead man.
  WITH care, Doc Savage plucked the poison dart from  his coat front. He flung it, and it stuck in the wall,
  where no one  would be likely to step on it by accident. Using a pocketknife, the  bronze man carefully cut the
  place where the dart had stuck out of his  coat. This revealed an undershirt of a metallic mesh.
  The metal mesh garment was so closely woven that it  was unlikely the sharp dart point could have penetrated.
  Doc wiped the  mesh off, anyway, and touched a match to the handkerchief he had wiped  with, and the pieces
  out of his coat and shirt.
  His actions showed that he knew just how dangerous  that poison was.
  He followed the O’Neel patriots. Doing so, he used a  bit of strategy. The O’Neel men watched behind them
  for pursuit. So Doc  got ahead of them, or to one side, and, kept there, doing it very  successfully because his
   THE MENTAL WIZARD
  Chapter V. SNAKES
  27
  
  method was not orthodox.
  He did not keep to the sidewalks and alleys, but  took to rooftops and even leaped such alleys as he
  encountered.
  The O’Neel band reached a shadowy sidewalk café  which had no customers and looked as if it had never had
  any. They  peered around. Obviously, they had expected some one to be waiting  there.
  "El Liberator 
  O’Neel told us he would meet us here when he ordered us to pursue  Doc Savage, kill the aviator and rescue
  our comrades." 
  The proprietor of the place came out of some dark  hole, shaking, his expression showing that he often hired
  his place out  to these men as a rendezvous, and now regretted it.
  "Where’s the great, the kind, the all−beloved El  Liberator O’Neel?" they roared at him.
  "He was here, and left In a hurry," the proprietor  chattered.
  "In a hurry?"
  "Si, Si. 
  He was scared, white and trembling, and I thought he would faint—"  The proprietor stopped, realizing he was
  saying the wrong thing.
  "Scared—El Liberator 
  scared—" One of the men shook a knife out of one sleeve. 
  "It is certain I was mistaken!" the proprietor  gulped. "The magnificent and courageous one, El Liberator
  O’Neel, said you were to meet him where you are holding the girl."
  O’Neel’s patriots went on.
  Half a block distant, a bronze giant dropped below a  roofs edge and hastily stowed away a tiny tube of a
  telescope into a  pocket. Doc Savage’s features were expressionless, except that there  was a trace of strain
  around his forehead. Reading lips is not easy at  best. Reading them when they speak a foreign language
  rapidly is less  easy.
  O’Neel’s patriots hurried, entirely unaware that  they were followed.
  THE place where the girl was held proved to be a  scabby white house behind a scabbier, but very tall and
  very solid  white wall. It was out toward the hill on which the ruined fortress,  relic of the Spanish conquest,
  stood, and there were no other dwellings  close.
  A man sat on a box at the gate. He sat in such a  position that he could fall sidewise, turn the box over, and
  grab the  revolver he had placed under it. He grinned at the newcomers.
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  Chapter V. SNAKES
  28
  
  "Is El Liberator 
  here?" they asked him. 
  "No," he said.
  "Where is he?" they demanded, astonished.
  "Quién sabe?" 
  The look−out made a he−might−be−anywhere gesture. Then he peered at  the senseless burdens which the
  men bore. He blinked in amazement.  "What! They are asleep?" 
  "We do not know what happened to them."
  The look−out shook his head, pointed at the  remarkable clothing of Ham, and said, "I lay claim to his
  garments!"
  He was told that was all the good it would do him,  and the new arrivals went inside.
  The look−out tilted back on his box, took a small  billet of paper from his shirt, unwrapped it and revealed a
  bean. The  bean lay in his palm for a bit, then gave a violent jump. The look−out  grinned.
  "No matter who gets those fancy clothes, I shall  have them before long," he told himself.
  Colombians of his type were inveterate gamblers, and  they like to bet on jumping bean races. This look−out
  happened to know  that if a jumping bean was soaked in a certain solution prior to the  race, the worm inside
  could be made more frenzied in its efforts, and  since the movement of the worm made the bean jump, the
  bean became a  better racer.
  He was looking at the bean lovingly when something  that had the feel of steel without its coldness grabbed
  his throat. It  caught him with breath out of his lungs, and he struggled madly, but  without much effect. By
  twisting, he got a look at his captor, and if  possible, his face turned purple more rapidly.
  He had never before seen the giant of bronze who  held him, but there was somehow something about the
  bronze fellow that  took care of that. He looked like Nemesis himself.
  The bronze giant’s fingers did something expert and  quick to the nerve centers along the look−out’s spine,
  just below the  cranial juncture. One great jerk, the look−out gave. After that, he was  stiff. His eyes were
  open, but fixed, and he barely breathed.
  The bronze man watched the victim closely for a  moment. Administering that tricky pressure which produced
  a condition  of spinal stricture was a delicate matter. Overdoing it might be fatal.  He had never had an
  accident, but he was always careful.
  He had perfected the method of inducing helplessness  himself. It had no practical value to the osteopathic or
  medical world,  so he kept the secret.
  Satisfied the guard was all right, he calmly  shouldered him and carried him through the shabby gate. It was a
  bold  move, based on the possibility that no one would be watching from the  house.
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  Chapter V. SNAKES
  29
  
  But two men, both with rifles, stood in front of the  door. They lifted the guns.
  DOC SAVAGE, most of his face hidden by the form of  the man he was carrying, called sharply:
  "No! I am here because of El Liberator!"
  Not for nothing had Doc spent years perfecting his  use of foreign languages. His Spanish was perfect. It even
  had the  language shadings of a low−class Colombian, a vernacular as distinctly  its own kind as the "dem,"
  "dose" and "dat" of the Bowery bum.
  The men with the rifles stared until it was too  late. They were not as fortunate as the look−out outside the
  gate had  been. They never knew, at the time, what hit them. When they figured it  out later, they were in no
  position to do much about it.
  Two fist blows, they eventually decided, must have  felled them. But how they got hit without even seeing it
  was something  they never did understand.
  Had they been able to watch Doc Savage go through  one of his two−hour routine of exercises he had taken
  daily since  childhood, they would have understood where some of his physical  ability came from.
  The door was unlocked. Doc went through it into a  cold cave of a reception room. There was absolutely no
  vestige of  decoration.
  Somewhere deeper in the house, men were breathing  loudly, as if they were in a struggle.
  Doc glided toward the sound: He came to a room on  the floor of which bodies sprawled motionless. The
  bodies were Ham and  the gassed O’Neel patriots, apparently dropped there in a hurry.
  The loud breathing was farther on.
  Doc whipped ahead. The breathing got louder. There  seemed a strange note of terror in it. Feet rasped the
  floor, as if  struggling against something.
  A strange sight came into view. Men—seven of  them—were bunched against a door, pushing against it,
  pushing to keep  it closed. They gasped and strained, and the sweat poured  off them.
  "Dios mio!" 
  one groaned. "We cannot hold it much longer!" 
  One began to pray loudly, reciting his sins and  asking forgiveness. They were very black sins. He sounded
  very scared.
  DOC SAVAGE rushed the men. He used his fists. Two  blows with the right, one with the left. Three men
  were knocked  senseless. Four were left. They turned their heads and saw him. But  they didn’t let go the door.
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  30
  
  Doc Savage had overcome as many as seven men before.  It was all in how you went about it. But he had
  never whipped seven  easier than he whipped these.
  They were more afraid of what was behind the door  than of him. He merely used his fists, weaved, ducked,
  took several  blows that were not dangerous, and got three more foes down.
  One survived. He pulled madly at the doorknob. Doc  grabbed him, jerked him away from the door. The man
  shook like a scared  rabbit in Doc’s clutch, and ogled the door.
  The door did not open.
  "What is behind the door?" Doc demanded.
  The prisoner rolled his eyes.
  "Fer−de−lance!" he choked. "They are all over the  floor! A thousand of them! Maybe more! The girl is
  pushing at the door  to let them out upon us. They are all big ones. She has them trained!"
  His fear was understandable. Not many men have been  bitten by the fer−de−lance, a venomous jungle snake,
  and lived to tell  how it felt.
  Doc Savage put the man asleep with a blow on the  jaw, dropped him, and opened the door which they had
  been straining to  hold shut. There was no need of the caution which he used.
  There was a tall, golden−haired girl garbed in what  looked as if it were a beach suit of golden cloth seated in
  a chair in  the room.
  She was bound, gagged, blindfolded, and bound to the  chair with ropes and wire. There was no one else and
  no other furniture  in the room.
  There were no snakes.
  Chapter VI. SPELL!
  THERE was no window or other opening through which  the snakes could have crawled.
  Doc Savage advanced toward the girl. But, after  taking no more than half a dozen steps, he stopped. A vague
  flicker of  some expression or other passed over his metallic features which had  remained immobile all
  throughout the recent action. His head shook. It  seemed as if he were annoyed by something buzzing about,
  but there was  nothing.
  Obviously, something was happening. The bronze man  shook his head again and again. Once he became
  rather rigid and stared,  until he broke what seemed to be a spell by slapping his hands together  loudly.
  The bronze man was startled, spellbound by something  unseen occurring in the room. For he began to make a
  small, weird  trilling sound—a tiny, exotic and indefinable note which was as hard to  classify as the thing that
  was happening in the room.
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  Chapter VI. SPELL!
  31
  
  Doc’s sound might have been wind filtering through a  leafless forest, or working around the cornices of some
  old−fashioned  skyscraper.
  Doc Savage made this sound somewhere in his throat,  made it without conscious effort, and it invariably
  came when he was  surprised, or when he contemplated some unexpected course of action.
  Suddenly, he spoke. He used Spanish.
  "Stop that!" he said, sharply. "Or do you want to be  turned loose?"
  Doc Savage waited. Nothing seemed to happen. For  that matter, nothing visible had happened previously.
  He used English.
  "If you wish to be freed, you will have to cease  what you are trying to do!"
  Doc Savage waited again. Several times, he shook his  head. He was careful not to look in the girl’s direction.
  "All right!" he said, in a vaguely disgusted tone.  "Be stubborn and stay there!"
  He whirled and strode out through the door. But once  outside, he paused and cast a quick glance at the girl.
  Some of her  bonds were so tight they must be producing infinite agony.
  After a moment’s hesitation, the bronze man ran back  into the room, seized some of the tighter wires, and
  undid them. He did  not free the girl entirely. He merely made her more comfortable. He  worked with haste.
  He almost ran away from her and into the hall.  There, he stood and seemed to think deeply.
  Doc Savage’s small, exotic trilling noise came into  existence again—low and amazed—and penetrated to
  most of the confines  of the shabby, big house. The note had an unusual quality in that it  was ventriloquial in
  nature; it was almost impossible to tell from  whence the sound emanated.
  Any one knowing Doc Savage, and watching him now,  would have realized that some discovery of the last
  few minutes had  come about as near dumfounding him as anything could.
  He walked in and began tying the prisoners.
  Ham still snored blissfully on the floor. Some one  had taken his bright necktie before Doc made his raid.
  THOSE of the prisoners who had been kayoed, when  they awakened, looked around them, at Doc Savage,
  then at the door  which concealed the bound golden−haired girl, and became about as white  as their very
  brown skins would allow.
  "The snakes!" one moaned. "She was setting them upon  us!"
  They stared at Doc and pleaded, "Hold the door shut,  señor!"
  "On the contrary," Doc told them quietly, "the door  will be opened unless you fellows tell some truth in a
  hurry."
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  Chapter VI. SPELL!
  32
  
  He watched them, and from the way they ogled the  door, decided they were not likely to lie.
  "Where did that girl come from?" he demanded.
  They didn’t answer until the bronze man walked over  and grasped the doorknob.
  Then they explained she had been in an old plane  with a seemingly mad aviator which had landed in the
  jungle. They even  admitted decoying the plane down. They were patriots, they explained,  and they wanted
  the plane to fight the federals.
  Threatening them with the open door got the rest of  the story.
  They had followed the aviator, keeping the girl a  prisoner. The girl had been a problem. None of them dared
  go near her.  Even El Liberator O’Neel, their "president," had been scared  silly of the girl. They did not say he
  had been scared silly, but that  idea could be gathered.
  O’Neel had ordered them to kill the flier. They had  tried, failed when Doc intervened with his anaesthetic
  gas, but kept on  trying.
  Now they wished they had never seen the girl. There  was something uncanny about her. They didn’t know
  what. She just didn’t  seem human. She was fantastic.
  She had never spoken a word in any language during  the few opportunities they had given her.
  Doc asked, "But why did you follow and try to kill  the aviator?"
  "Because the magnificent, powerful and brave El  Liberator O’Neel ordered it."
  "Why did O’Neel want the aviator dead?"
  They shrugged, said, "Quién sabe?"
  Doc used the door on them. They quaked and shook and  whined.
  There had been a book, a notebook. The aviator had  dropped it. O’Neel had found it. That had really been the
  reason.
  "What was in the book?" Doc demanded.
  They didn’t know, not even after the bronze man had  opened the door a bit.
  Doc moved into another room and closed the door on  their frightened howling. The bronze man then drew
  from a pocket a flat  case that might have held cigars, but didn’t and the front of which was  complex with
  dials and tiny switches.
  He adjusted the switches, and said to the case,  "Renny! Long Tom! Johnny!"
  The case spoke back to him in a loud voice, after a  long moment. The loud voice was guttural with disbelief.
  "Holy cow! It can’t—these durned micro−wave radios  never have tuned in—a spirit message—we must
  ‘a’—well, holy cow!"
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  33
  
  "The metal cloth vest kept off the poison dart,  Renny," Doc Savage said to the case. "You fellows did not
  think of  that. Did you have any luck with your chase?"
  "Holy cow!" Renny’s voice’s threatened to damage the  tiny radio. "Doc! You’re alive! I’ll say we had some
  luck! Three of  them were discharging the poisoned darts. We got all three!"
  "Bring them here," Doc requested, and told them how  to reach the old house where he was.
  The bronze man returned the tiny micro−wave device  to a pocket, and then went back to the prisoners.
  Ham still snored on the floor. He would awaken  eventually, when the effects of the anaesthetic gas wore off.
  Doc Savage opened the door and looked at the girl.  She was still tied, and there were still no snakes.
  He shut the door hastily.
  BONY Johnny, pale Long Tom and big−fisted Renny  arrived shortly afterward. They had three prisoners.
  Doc explained what  he had done, and they did likewise.
  "Now, we’ll see if your prisoners tell the same  story as mine did," Doc said.
  They told the same story.
  Renny made and unmade big blocks out of his fists,  absently watching the effect.
  "I wonder what was in that notebook," he rumbled.  "Whatever it was, it sure touched off something."
  Long, thin Johnny said, "An amplitudinous desire to  perceive this exceptional female seizes me."
  He walked toward the door.
  "No!" Doc Savage said, sharply. "Keep away from her!"
  Johnny stopped, gazed blankly at Doc, and absently  fingered his monocle magnifier.
  "Care to explain why you don’t want me to see her?"  he asked, using small words.
  "Later," Doc told him.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" Johnny murmured, but  kept away from the door.
  There was a knock on the front door, bold and loud.  "This man they call El Liberator, or O’Neel, was to meet
  his men  here," Doc said swiftly.
  They arranged a reception around the door for the  visitor, then opened the door.
  The man who walked in was the long−armed,  homely−faced anthropoidlike man who had talked to the crowd
  from the  stern−wheeler gangplank.
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  Chapter VI. SPELL!
  34
  
  "Monk!" Renny thumped.
  "A fine trick!" complained small−voiced "Monk."  "Some nice excitement comes along, and you lads charge
  off after it!  Leave me there making a speech in Spanish, which everybody knows I  can’t hardly speak. Pals!"
  No one said anything. They did not look very  remorseful. 
  "I wouldn’t ‘a’ found you yet, only after my speech,  I kept listenin’ in on my midget radio, and I heard Doc
  tell you where  to meet him," continued Monk shrilly.
  His voice got louder, more peeved.
  "I’ll bet it was the work of that shyster clothes  horse, Ham!" he squeaked. "Always connivin’ against me, he
  is! I don’t  see how he keeps from bein’ poisoned by his own meanness!"
  Doc Savage said, "We are waiting for the leader of  the gang to show up."
  "Huh!" Monk gulped. "Then I’m makin’ too much noise!"
  He came in hastily and closed the door.
  Chapter VII. EXPEDITION
  AMBER O’NEEL, the man who called himself El  Liberator, saw Monk close the door. He had seen Monk
  arrive.
  "That was one of Doc Savage’s men!" He gulped, and  sank back, into concealment.
  His knees felt watery, his arms queer, as they did  when he was very scared. He had heard a great deal about
  this Doc  Savage.
  "I almost walked into a trap!" he mumbled.
  With that, he lost no time leaving the vicinity.
  Amber O’Neel did not look like his usual self. He  had darkened his face with a nut dye, was wearing a big
  hat and a  shabby suit. He was careful not to get too close to any policemen. His  head was down, his lips
  moving, indicating he was doing some deep  thinking.
  "Bueno!" 
  he exclaimed finally, in Spanish. 
  More of his crew of patriots—the very bad ones who  were afraid to be seen in Cartagena—were waiting,
  encamped up the  river. He did not join them.
  O’Neel went to a bar which had a bad reputation with  the police, and before long was inclosed in a back
  room with some  gentlemen who stood very little chance of dying of old age.
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  Chapter VII. EXPEDITION
  35
  
  Sometimes these men called themselves patriots, too.  More often, they admitted they were plain murderers
  and thieves. They  did not have the imagination of El Liberator O’Neel.
  There is probably no honor among crooks, but an  ambitious crook who wants to build up a gang and a
  reputation, tried to  give the impression of what is lugubriously known as a "square guy."  Amber O’Neel had
  done that carefully over a period of years. He was a  "square guy," or as they said it locally, Uno caballero.
  He could tell one whopping lie, and all the crooks  in Cartagena would believe it. Just once. He told his
  whopper now. He  had it all planned.
  "Listen, hombres," he said. "There came in  to−day, on that Yankee cruise ship, a full dozen cases of
  narcotics.  They were unloaded last night while the ship was at anchor off the  river mouth, awaiting for
  daylight. I know where they can be taken."
  This interested the listeners about as much as  anything would have.
  "They are in a house," continued O’Neel. "There are  five or six men guarding them. It will be necessary to
  attack suddenly  and without delay, slaying these men, and making away with the cases  before the police
  arrive."
  "Why are you not taking this plum for yourself?" a  listener wanted to know, not unreasonably.
  "Not enough men," replied O’Neel. "It must be done  quickly. You do it. For my information, I will be
  satisfied with such a  small share as you care to turn over to me."
  It sounded good. Narcotics at the moment were  bringing a high price, thanks to the activity of the rather
  efficient  police.
  The upshot of it was that they decided to make the  raid immediately.
  O’Neel managed to excuse himself from their company.
  AMBER O’NEEL now hurried and joined his patriots who  were camped up the river. He explained his bad
  luck. The way he told  it, it did not sound as if he had done so badly himself, although his  men had not been
  so efficient.
  "I have played a trick," he finished. "Some men who  are very good fighters have been led to believe there is a
  shipment of  narcotics for the taking. They will attack, and kill Doc Savage and any  of his men who are there.
  That means Doc Savage will not bother us."
  The talk about Doc Savage did not seem to make his  patriots any too happy.
  "Is this thing we are after worth the danger of  fighting this Doc Savage?" one asked uneasily. "Me, I would
  be happier  to go away somewhere. The farther, the better."
  "Si, si," 
  agreed another quickly. "If I had the choice of fighting this Doc  Savage to see who would be president of
  Colombia, me or him, I would go  away." 
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  36
  
  "I bet you would run," grunted another.
  "Like hell," admitted the first. "This bronze man  from the United States is not what you would call ‘easy
  pickings.’"
  "Silence!" rapped O’Neel.
  They gave him his silence.
  "The prize which we seek is greater than anything  you ever heard of!" O’Neel said emphatically.
  One man offered, "The greatest prize I ever heard of  was the one a pirate once took out of Cartagena. Some
  say it was five  millions, and some ten, but that—"
  "Pocket change!" snorted O’Neel, speaking English  accidentally.
  They gaped at him. He told them what pocket change  meant in Spanish. They looked doubtful.
  "You might tell us what it is," one suggested  gingerly.
  O’Neel shrugged.
  "No," he said. "If I did that, the prize is so  fabulous that you would start killing each other, each trying to be
  the  one to reach the thing. As it is, I know, and I am taking you because I  need you, and will share with you
  because I have always shared, as you  know. If you kill me, the secret dies with me."
  Diplomacy, that. Every one satisfied, every one made  more greedy. And they would look sharp to see that
  nothing happened to  him who had all knowledge, Amber O’Neel, El Liberator.
  One thoughtful soul had a question. "What about the  girl?"
  "Oh, her." O’Neel wet his lips. "She may get killed  in the raid the men will make after imagined narcotics.
  Good riddance!"
  "But if she is not killed?"
  O’Neel put out his round, fat jaw.
  "Look," he growled. "It would be swell if she were  out of the way, and we should have done it when we had
  her. It would be  swell if Doc Savage is killed. But no matter what happens to them, we  head into the jungle.
  We’ll have the start on everybody, see! No matter  what happens, we’ll be first. And that means a lot."
  "That girl," a man murmured. "What kind of woman  was she?"
  O’Neel said, "You’ll understand that when we get to  the secret of Klantic."
  "The what?"
  "The secret of Klantic," said Amber O’Neel.
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  Chapter VII. EXPEDITION
  37
  
  HIS men had never heard of the secret of Klantic  before. Their vacant stares showed that.
  "It’s what that aviator, David Hutton, called it in  his diary," continued Amber O’Neel. "And it’s as good a
  name as  any. We’ll call it that."
  They eyed him and knew he would not tell them more  about that. But they still had curiosity. They tried
  again on the girl,  pumping O’Neel.
  "Can the girl really do us harm?" they wanted to  know. 
  Amber O’Neel nodded solemnly.
  "Make no mistake about that golden−haired wench," he  said, dropping each word like a brick. "She is
  probably as dangerous as  Doc Savage. More, is my bet."
  "Why?"
  Amber O’Neel almost told them. He had his mouth  open, then shut it.
  "Never mind," he said. "She is. It was all in that  aviator’s diary. All about her and the secret of Klantic, and
  the whole  thing."
  His tone told them they had better not ask any more  questions. They didn’t.
  "We will get ready to march into the jungle," they  said. "Is it far?"
  "Too far to march."
  "What?"
  "We will take planes," O’Neel advised.
  "But we have not even a single aircraft!"
  "I have a plan," said O’Neel, "for getting us a  number of airplanes. We will have to have them. Without them,
  we might  never make the trip."
  He led them toward the outskirts of Cartagena. "What  about our comrades, who you say Doc Savage seized?"
  O’Neel’s patriots  wanted to know.
  O’Neel explained that was their own hard luck. He  tried to sound as regretful as he could.
  Chapter VIII. RAID
  DOC SAVAGE had finished questioning all of his  prisoners—O’Neel’s patriots—for the second time, and
  had gotten no  further information. Doc had also decided Amber O’Neel was not going to  show up. The
  bronze man did not know the break O’Neel had gotten when  he had seen Monk arrive.
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  38
  
  Monk, unaware he had accidentally upset plans, was  around somewhere, supposedly watching for O’Neel’s
  arrival. The others  were likewise watching, except Ham, who still slept.
  Monk, when last seen, had been complaining of cramps  in his stomach. He indignantly denied that they had
  been brought on by  the paroxysms of laughter into which he had gone when he had seen Ham  asleep, and had
  been told that Ham had breathed some of the anaesthetic  gas through his own carelessness. They had been
  forced at one point to  gag Monk to stop his tittering.
  Doc Savage went over to Ham. It should be about time  for his recovery. Ordinarily, the anaesthetic gas
  produced  unconsciousness only half an hour, but this particular dose had been  concentrated.
  A little pinching in a spot calculated to stimulate  the nervous reactions, and Ham was sitting erect. He looked
  at Doc  Savage and smiled wryly. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the  anaesthetic gas was that it left
  virtually no after effect.
  "I hope Monk hasn’t learned of this!" Ham said.
  "He has," Doc said. "And he nearly ruined himself  laughing."
  Ham took his head in his hands. "The missing link!"  He felt himself over. "Who stole my necktie?"
  It was typical of Ham that he would be more  interested in his clothing than in what had happened to the world
  while  he was senseless.
  Renny appeared suddenly in the doorway. He looked  excited. "Something’s happened to Monk!"
  "Hope he’s broken his neck!" Ham snapped. Then he  looked at Renny, saw Renny was serious, and suddenly
  registered  anxiety. "Look here! Monk isn’t injured?"
  "I don’t know what you’d call it," Renny boomed.  "Doc, you’d better come and look at him."
  The big−fisted engineer led the way; Doc followed,  and they stopped at the door behind which the girl had
  sat bound in the  chair.
  Renny explained, "Monk didn’t hear you advise Johnny  and the rest of us to stay away from the girl."
  Ham, who had trailed along, demanded, "Is there a  girl behind that door?"
  "She looks like a girl," said Renny, "but I’m  beginning to wonder if she’s human."
  "If there’s a girl in there, no telling what Monk  has done to show off!" Ham snapped. "Nothing at all would
  surprise me."
  "I’ll bet this will," Renny rumbled, and opened the  door. 
  Monk lay flat on his back on the floor in front of  the golden−haired girl’s chair. He was holding his legs and
  arms up  straight and stiff.
  HAM gulped, "What’s wrong with him?"
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  "Search me," Renny boomed, softly. "I found him like  that."
  Monk’s eyes were open, but fixed on the ceiling. He  did not show any signs of knowing they were present.
  "Poor Monk!" Ham breathed, with genuine anxiety. "He  must have been seized with some kind of paralysis!"
  The girl was still gagged and blindfolded. The gag  and eye covering made it impossible to tell much about
  her classic  features.
  Doc Savage walked forward briskly and kicked Monk  lightly. Monk awakened. He stared at his own upraised
  arms and legs.
  "What the heck am I doin’?" he gulped, and got up  hastily.
  Doc bundled Monk and the others out and shut the  door.
  "Keep out of there," he told them.
  Monk, looking dazed and sheepish, asked, "Doc, what  happened to me? I opened that door, and here was that
  girl all tied up.  She looked like a peach, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to make sure  she was comfortable. So I
  go over."
  Monk paused. Apparently he wasn’t proud of the rest.
  "Next thing I know, Doc has got his foot in my ribs,  and there I am on the floor, holding my arms up like a
  ninny."
  "Acting perfectly natural, you mean," Ham put in  sarcastically. "Always the clown."
  Monk ignored that. "Doc, what happened to me?
  "That girl," the bronze man replied quietly, "is  going to prove to be a remarkable young woman. Just how
  remarkable, we  have yet no means of knowing."
  "Whatcha mean by that?" Monk asked uneasily.
  "First, the girl can make men think they see and  feel things which are not there."
  "Hypnotism. Lot of people can do that. You’re  especially good at it, Doc."
  "What this girl does is far beyond any of my  abilities," the bronze man explained. "My hypnotism is ordinary,
  consisting of the usual fixation of attention, the inducing of a state  of mental relaxation, and so on, all
  induced by concrete, visible  methods that are as understandable as putting a man to sleep with a  blow of your
  fist."
  "Maybe," Monk grunted. "But you spent months in  India and elsewhere learning how it was done."
  "Did you look at this girl’s eyes?" Doc countered.
  "No."
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  40
  
  "Did she speak?"
  "No."
  "Did she make a move?"
  "She didn’t do a blame thing," Monk said. "It was  me. I laid down and put my arms and legs in the air."
  Ham began to laugh, starting with an amused giggle,  then a titter and finally cackling.
  "You’re a ladies man yourself!" Monk told him,  indignantly. "I dare you to go in there and stay five minutes
  with her."
  Ham stopped cackling. He had nothing to say.
  Doc Savage stated, "This girl secures her effects by  control through actual thought telepathy, it appears."
  "What?" 
  Monk exploded. 
  "It is a bit hard to admit possible," the bronze man  agreed. "But she seems to be able to make other men see
  or think  exactly what she wants them to see or think, without even speaking to  them or using any of the other
  tricks of hypnotism.
  "Mind you, my intention is not to say for certain  that she does this. But it appears, from what we have seen so
  far, that  this girl has an intelligence infinitely beyond anything we possess."
  "Infinitely beyond—" Monk squinted at Doc. "Beyond  us, maybe. But not you. You’ve been trained
  scientifically since the  day you were born. A brain like yours isn’t easy to equal."
  "No flattery," Doc requested.
  "There ain’t none of us kidding each other," Monk  said. "You mean to tell me this girl is some kind of—of
  mental wizard?"
  "Exactly," Doc said.
  On the back door, something small and hard made a  loud, rapping noise.
  IT sounded as if the rear door were being opened.  Voices murmured, one of them Johnny’s. The other voice
  was whinnying.
  Johnny was speaking Spanish, and sticking to his  habit of using the longest words his agile mind could
  produce. The  whinnying voice seemed to have difficulty understanding.
  Doc Savage walked quickly toward the voices. Monk,  Ham and Renny followed him. They came upon tall,
  bony Johnny and a fat,  brown man who needed a bath, a barber and a tailor.
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  Chapter VIII. RAID
  41
  
  The disreputable−looking brown man had a huge wicker  basket balanced on his head. The basket seemed to
  be full of bananas,  coconuts and queer−looking loaves of bread.
  "He says this stuff was bought and ordered delivered  by the men who live here," Johnny said, suddenly
  switching to small  English words.
  "Bring it in," Doc Savage said, quietly.
  The bronze man stepped forward, so that, as the man  with the basket of groceries entered, he passed close.
  The bronze man’s  action in getting close seemed to have no particular significance. But,  an instant after the
  basket of fruit and bread passed, things began to  happen.
  Doc Savage made, for the briefest of instants, the  small peculiar trilling noise which was his characteristic
  reaction to  the unexpected.
  "Wait!" Doc said sharply, in Spanish.
  The bearer of the basket halted and looked vacant.
  "What kind of bulky objects made of metal are you  carrying?" Doc asked.
  The fat, brown man didn’t try to explain. He was  supporting the basket on his head with one hand. He jerked
  this hand  away, and it was evident it held a string which ran into the basket. He  jerked this string. Then he
  hurled the basket from him, spun, and dived  outdoors.
  Doc Savage jumped, caught the basket before it hit  the floor. He hurled the basket out of the door. It arched
  over the  head of the fleeing brown man and hit in front of him.
  The brown man saw the basket. He threw his upper  torso back, his legs as far out in front as he could, and
  stopped. He  was running backward making the motion—even before he stopped.
  There hadn’t been time for any expression to appear  on the brown fellow’s face. But it was in the man’s eyes.
  The basket  bringer suddenly dived toward the door.
  Doc Savage banged the door shut.
  The door came open again at once. Came apart,  rather. It was paneled, and the panels jumped inward. The
  hinges  weren’t strong enough, and the whole door followed. Through the hole  came bright light, noise and
  dust and gravel.
  Plaster separated from the ceiling in big patches;  pictures dropped off the walls, and there was the noise of
  other things  falling.
  The silence which followed seemed double by contrast.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated," Johnny said finally.  "Doc, since when did you become a mind reader?"
  "Nothing like that," the bronze man said, quietly.
  "Then how’d you know there was something in that  basket?"
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  42
  
  "An adaption," Doc Savage said, "of the monitor  device which watches the door of our headquarters in New
  York City."
  Monk shoved his head out, squinted through the door,  then ducked back.
  "Blazes!" he exploded. "There’s fifteen or twenty  guys with guns comin’!"
  GAUNT and bony Johnny hastily jerked his  supermachine pistol out of its padded underarm holster. He
  understood,  now, how Doc had accomplished the seeming magic of detecting what had  evidently been a big
  grenade in the basket of fruit and bread.
  Long ago, Doc had refined a device which was coming  more and more into use in prisons and police stations.
  The apparatus  consisted simply of a contrivance which registered, through the  alteration in a magnetic field,
  the nearness of any iron or steel.
  Doc had equipped his headquarters with it. Any  visitors carrying guns could be spotted. Doc had simply
  reduced the  contrivance to pocket size.
  Doc Savage said, "Better not let them get too close!"
  Johnny showed himself briefly, and his machine  pistol made its huge fiddle noise. Empty cartridges fell from
  the  ejector to the floor in almost a cloud.
  Monk looked, then squeaked admiringly, "Boy, you  must have been practicing with that thing! About half of
  ‘em are down!"
  "When they start going down, place your shots more  carefully," Doc Savage directed. "We do not want to hit
  any eyes or  ears."
  It was a steadfast rule with the bronze man and his  aids never to take a life if it could possibly be avoided. His
  aids  tried honestly to adhere to the rule, but slip−ups were liable to  happen during exciting moments.
  Bullets came in through the door opening. They  knocked glass out of a window. The tall hill where the old
  fort stood  was some distance behind the house, and the gunshot echoes came jumping  back from it in distinct
  reports, sounding like little guns.
  Monk was shooting now. Long Tom and Renny joined in.  They latched the machine pistols into single shot,
  and placed their  slugs carefully, not missing often.
  They were firing—had been from the first—the slugs  which were but a shell with a chemical compound
  which, when the  fragments embedded in the flesh, would be absorbed harmlessly by the  body. The shells
  contained a chemical which produced abrupt  unconsciousness lasting some hours.
  These so−called "mercy" bullets were not new in  theory. Big−game hunters for zoos had long since used
  them actually to  get live specimens. But the chemical compound shells of the bullets,  dissolving harmlessly
  in the human body, and even cauterizing their own  wounds, were a product of Doc Savage’s inventive genius.
  The attackers began to retreat. Two of them turned  tail first, and others quickly. But they did not flee the
  vicinity.  They took shelter behind boulders and distant houses.
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  43
  
  Doc made a suggestion, and his aids switched  high−explosive bullets for the "mercy" slugs. These opened
  great pits  in the earth, and knocked down walls sheltering riflemen.
  The attackers fled. The fear of the police arriving  might have had a little to do with their quick exodus.
  DOC SAVAGE and his aids likewise lost no time in  leaving the vicinity.
  Fear of the authorities or what they might accuse  him of did not promote Doc’s hurried departure. There was
  probably not  a policeman who did not admire the bronze man and his work.
  But bringing in the police meant a ponderous  organization working, and attendant delay. Not that the
  Colombian  police were inefficient. It was simply that no ordinary group of men  could act as swiftly as Doc’s
  trained crowd. They were specialists to  the last degree.
  Doc went ahead, taking the strange girl with the  golden hair. He kept her blindfolded, gagged and
  bound—bound only  sufficiently so that she could not snatch off the blindfold.
  Monk and the others followed with the brown fellow  who had tried to give them the big grenade in a basket
  of fruit and  bread.
  They left the other prisoners—El Liberator  O’Neel’s captured patriots—behind, having an idea the
  Colombian police  would have business with them.
  In a clump of jungle growth on the outskirts of the  city, beyond the ruins of the old wall which Indian slaves
  of Spanish  conquistadors had built, Doc questioned the brown basket carrier.
  The man at first put out his jaw, but no  information. Monk, who was good at it, made some pointed and awful
  threats, which the prisoner didn’t know but what might be carried out.  Monk’s terrible Spanish probably
  made it sound worse.
  The brown man still refused to say a word.
  Doc Savage then told the man exactly what had  happened. Everything. The effect was the desired one. The
  prisoner  realized he and his fellows had been tricked by the narcotic story.
  He told all about the trick.
  Doc Savage selected, from a pocket case holding  chemicals which Monk carried, a rather large yellow pill.
  He gave this  to the brown man after he had finished the story.
  Doc then turned the prisoner loose.
  The brown fellow was bad, should at least have been  in prison. But he would find his fellows and tell them
  they had been  double−crossed by El Liberator O’Neel, and that would add its  bit to O’Neel’s troubles.
  Furthermore, the yellow pill would, in a few days,  make the man violently but harmlessly ill of what would
  seem to be  appendicitis.
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  44
  
  Doc wrote a note requesting the police to look out  for a crook who might in a day or two turn up with what
  appeared to be  appendicitis. Doc suggested watching the hospitals.
  "We’ll mail this to the police," he explained.
  Echoing his voice, mixing with the last three words  of what he had said, came the sound of shots.
  Chapter IX. THE SECRET OF KLANTIC
  MONK said, "Somebody must be hunting rabbits, or  whatever they’ve got down here to hunt."
  There were more shots. Men shrieked.
  "Rabbits don’t make noises like that!" Renny rumbled.
  "We might look into it," Doc said.
  The thicket where they had ensconced themselves was  one of considerable extent. There was a ravine with
  bamboo, palms  elsewhere, and the ground was sandy, spotted with some small shrubs,  most of them thorny.
  They worked through it rapidly, Ham dancing about  gingerly to keep the thorns out of his expensive suit. Doc
  Savage  carried the young woman with the remarkable golden hair.
  The shooting continued. There was also a new sound,  a loud droning, which started abruptly. Another
  droning joined it, then  another and another.
  "Planes!" Renny boomed.
  Sound seemed to be carrying unexpectedly well. They  ran for quite a distance before they sighted the planes.
  They saw the  first one just as it came up over the gently tossing fronds of palms.  Another followed it.
  Another. Then a fourth plane took the air.
  All four planes went away without preliminary  spirals or other time−killing movements.
  All four bore the yellow, blue and red markings of  Colombian war planes.
  The Colombian military airport, Cartagena unit, from  which the planes had taken off, was in an uproar. There
  was some reason  for it.
  Seven dead men, four not quite dead, and  approximately a dozen others were yelling as if they were going to
  die.  All wore uniforms, and they were scattered over the place.
  "It is war!" an officer ran around howling. "We have  been invaded!"
  "Nobody has declared war!" another shouted.
  "They don’t, anyway, these days! It’s the new  fashion!"
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  Doc Savage placed the golden−haired girl in a bamboo  thicket near the edge of the airport.
  "Watch her," he directed his aids. "And do not get  nearer than thirty or so feet from her. That may not be a
  sufficient  distance. There has not been time to make sure. But if you find  yourself getting ideas, get farther
  away from her."
  "What kind of ideas?" Long Tom asked.
  "Queer ones," Doc told him.
  Ham said dryly, "Monk will be in a predicament.  That’s the only kind of ideas he has."
  A LOT of curious people descended on the airport  before long, wanting to know what the excitement had
  been about, so it  was not difficult for Doc Savage to mingle without getting too much  individual attention. It
  was not even necessary to ask many questions.  Everybody was telling everybody else exactly what had
  happened.
  El Liberator 
  Amber O’Neel and his men raided the military airport to seize  planes. Desperate and bloody had been their
  job. And successful. 
  Doc Savage went back and joined his men. Met them,  rather. They were charging around in the jungle, and it
  was a wonder  they had not been discovered.
  "The girl’s gone!" Renny gulped.
  "Yeah!" Monk exploded. "I don’t see how she done it!  We never took our eyes off that clump of bushes
  where we left her! And  all of sudden, she wasn’t there!"
  "I hope to be superamalgamated!" gaunt Johnny added.  "It couldn’t have happened! It’s simply impossible!"
  "Yeah," said Long Tom. "It couldn’t happen, only—" 
  Doc Savage walked away from them into the thicket  where they had left the girl—and where the girl still lay.
  The bronze  giant glanced briefly at her, saw that she was as comfortable as  circumstances permitted, that
  nothing had happened to her, and went  back to his men.
  "She’s there," he told them.
  They ran, looked in the thicket, and came back.
  "She’s not!" they insisted.
  "Go away for a few minutes," Doc directed. "Run,  take some violent exercise—do something to get your
  minds on something  else. Then come back."
  They did so. When they looked into the thicket this  time, it was obvious that they saw the girl.
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  "So you caught her while we were gone," Monk told  Doc.
  "She was there all of the time," Doc told him.
  Monk’s facial expression indicated that he thought  of a great deal which could be said, but he said none of it.
  Finally,  after he had thought it over, he began to look scared.
  "Whew!" he squeaked thinly. "Whew!"
  Ham tittered at him.
  "You’re in the same boat with us!"
  Monk told him grimly. "We’ve all gone nuts!"
  Doc Savage’s voice had a reassuring quietness.
  "Your minds are perfectly normal," he said. "That is  one of the difficulties."
  "Huh?" Monk squinted.
  "The girl," Doc explained, "is a mental wizard."
  MONK swelled his chest and got purple. "Mental  wizard or no mental wizard, I don’t savvy what she did to
  us. First, it  was them brown O’Neel lugs, who thought they saw snakes, and which I  could explain, them not
  being very bright. But us, we’ve got highly  developed minds, and—"
  "The fellow who’s always modest," Ham said unkindly.
  Monk snarled, "Maybe you can explain it?"
  "She’s a mental wizard," Ham replied. "Didn’t you  just hear Doc say—"
  "A Spanish razzberry for you!" Monk snorted.
  Doc Savage said, "Come on over and we will see if  the girl still wishes to be stubborn."
  The young woman had shifted her position a little,  so as to lean against some soft bamboo shoots. She had
  not succeeded in  untying herself. It was, in fact, absolutely impossible for any one  tied as she was to get free,
  unassisted.
  Doc settled on one knee beside her and began  removing the gag.
  "What makes her hair that color?" Monk wanted to  know.
  Doc Savage drew some of the girl’s hair through his  fingers. It was very fine hair, each strand so slender that
  all of them  together had the effect of a golden vapor rather than many individual  hairs.
  "Gold−plated," he said.
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  "Gold—" Monk swallowed twice. "Listen, I’m a  chemist, and I happen to know you can’t gold−plate a
  human hair and  make it work, even by applying a base—"
  "This hair," Doc said, "is something new."
  Monk shook his head, then grinned doubtfully. "I’d  like to have a patent on the process. If gold hair looks as
  swell on  every woman as it does on her, I could make a million farming the idea  out to beauty parlors. I’ll bet
  Pat would kick in that much for the  process."
  Pat—Patricia Savage—was Doc’s cousin, a very  remarkable young lady who had probably the snootiest
  beauty  establishment in New York, and who was always wanting to risk her neck  in the wildest adventures
  which Doc Savage encountered.
  Doc finished removing the golden−haired girl’s gag.
  "Let us hope," he said, "that you will refrain from  taking advantage of us."
  She replied nothing.
  "Can you read minds?" Doc asked her.
  The girl was quiet for so long that it seemed again  that she was not going to answer.
  "Not," she said, "unless I am very familiar with the  other person."
  Her words were like her beauty—they could now see  the strange, almost too perfect nature of her beauty. Her
  words were as  perfect as if they had been said over and over thousands of times in  practice. Her voice was
  delicate, bell−like.
  Homely Monk hung his jaw in surprise. Words, voice,  they were unlike anything he had ever heard before.
  She seemed to throw a spell around her. Nothing  visible. But it was very real.
  Doc Savage asked abruptly, "Where did you come from?"
  "Telling you would do no good," she said. "You would  not know of the place. No one of your—of what we
  call the  outlanders—has ever heard of it, or learned of it and come back to  tell. But wait! There is now one.
  The aviator, David Hutton."
  JOHNNY, the gaunt geologist and archaeologist,  explained what had happened.
  "Thaumaturgical prodigiousness, ineluctably," he  said, solemnly. "David Hutton’s evanescence attained
  infraanagrammatistic preponderation."
  Even Ham, who knew a lot of big words himself, and  was used to Johnny’s jaw−breakers, looked slightly
  stunned.
  The golden−haired girl asked, "What language was  that?"
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  Johnny fingered his monocle and peered at her to see  if she were kidding.
  "English," he said.
  "The part of it ordinary people never use," Ham  elaborated for her.
  "Oh," said the girl. "That explains why I did not  know them. All the English I know is that which was
  brought to us by  such white men as happened to—well, decide to spend the rest of their  lives with us." She
  looked at Johnny. "What did he say about David  Hutton."
  Johnny descended into the ordinary man’s vocabulary.
  "David Hutton tried to make a nonstop flight from  Rio de Janeiro to the United States ten years ago, when
  planes weren’t  so much. He was never heard from again."
  "Until to−day," Doc Savage said, quietly.
  Johnny gasped, "You mean—the tall thin guy—who was  knifed and finished off with a poison arrow?"
  "David Hutton, world war aviator, ace, and one of  the finest airmen of his day," Doc Savage agreed. "There
  was, if you  had your attention called to it, a resemblance between the man and his  earlier pictures. He had an
  angular bony distinction."
  Big−fisted Renny looked at the young woman and  frowned. "Look here, miss, that poor flier had copper rings
  around his  ankles. His legs had been chained. Just what had happened to him during  the last ten years?"
  "The same thing that has happened to a lot of  others," the girl said.
  WHILE her words were the words that would be spoken  by one using slangily free speech, they were
  machine perfect.
  Doc and the others did not say anything for a minute.
  "You have a name?" Doc asked.
  She said, "Z."
  "Z?" Ham gave her a nice smile. "Name or initial?"
  "A name," she said. "In our language, it is a sign.  In yours, it could be spelled out. Zuee. Uhsee. Zee. Make it
  simple. Z."
  "How did you and the aviator happen to be in that  old plane?" Doc asked.
  Instead of answering the bronze man, the  golden−haired girl studied him. Her appraisal was interested, but
  somewhat along the vein of a science student confronted with a new  specimen. At first, it was that way.
  Later, she seemed to become a bit  more human.
  "What a remarkable Klantic you would make," she said  unexpectedly.
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  "What?" Doc queried.
  "Klantic."
  "What is that?"
  Instead of answering, she said, "I can show you  where that man who calls himself El Liberator O’Neel is
  heading  for."
  "Can you guide us by air?" Doc queried.
  "Yes," she said, "because that is the way I left the  spot."
  Chapter X. A JUNGLE AND FOUR PLANES
  THE plane had six motors, working in tandem in three  groups, but turning six propellers. It mounted seven
  machine guns,  could carry several tons of bombs, but carried none now.
  It could fly from New York to Cartagena and back  without refueling, with a crew of four pilots, two radio
  operators, a  captain, a mate, seven men to operate the seven machine guns, two bomb  experts, and perhaps a
  war correspondent or two. It had cost the  Colombian government almost two hundred thousand dollars.
  The Colombian government had loaned it to Doc  Savage, and had asked no questions about what he wanted
  to do with it.
  "Some bus!" Renny said admiringly, handling the  controls.
  "It should be," bony Johnny told him. "Doc perfected  the original design."
  Renny glanced over one shoulder. "I wish he’d  perfect some design to get information out of that
  golden−haired girl.  Since we had the talk immediately after O’Neel stole the Colombian  army’s airplanes,
  she hasn’t added another word of information."
  "She makes me nervous."
  "She makes Monk and Ham nervous, too. Monk, nervous  because he’s afraid she’ll fall for Ham, and Ham,
  vice versa."
  The jungle was below. The swampy kind. Just how bad  a jungle it was, the map makers indicated when they
  spread over most of  the region of the legends, "Existence doubtful," or "Existence  unconfirmed," to qualify
  rivers and lakes.
  Renny, using binoculars, said, "Monk and his pet ape  would sure be at home down there."
  Back in the rearmost compartment of the plane—a dark  room for the developing of aërial
  photographs—dapper Ham was telling  homely Monk the same thing. 
  "You jungle−bred zodiac sign!" Ham was gritting.  "Why didn’t you leave that insect on the cruise ship? We
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  made an  agreement to leave both our pets behind this time!"
  Monk sneered, "I saw you sneaking Chemistry out, so  I got Habeas, too."
  "I saw you getting Habeas Corpus, then I got my  Chemistry!" Ham declared.
  "You doubt my word?"
  "Yes, you ape!"
  "You fashion plate! You menace to the bar! I’ll  break you in two!"
  "Liar!" Ham finished.
  The pets under discussion—Chemistry and Habeas—were  arrayed behind their respective owners. Chemistry
  was a remarkable  member of the anthropoid family—chimpanzee, orangutan, ape, stunted  gorilla, nobody
  knew which. Chemistry’s main point was his almost  unearthly resemblance to Monk. There was only a
  hundred or so pounds  difference in their weight.
  Habeas was Habeas Corpus, elephant−eared,  spindlelegged, wire−bristled Arabian hog. Habeas had
  undergone more  training from his owner, Monk, than is received by the average college  student. Not all of it
  had been wasted.
  LONG TOM, the electrical wizard, who had been  talking to the girl, Z, now moved into a seat beside Doc
  Savage.
  "Listen, Doc. There’s something phony about that  girl."
  "Yes?" Doc’s face showed no expression.
  "While we were trying to locate a plane to follow  O’Neel’s gang, she picked up a newspaper. She could
  hardly read it. I  showed her a telephoto picture. She thought I was kidding her when I  told her it came over a
  wire. She didn’t believe that it was possible.  She was really high−and−mighty about it."
  He paused and shook his head violently.
  "She wanted to know how she could learn how pictures  were sent over the wire, so I gave her my own new
  book on advanced  telephoto work. Well, a minute ago, I got to talking to her again, and  dang me for a dry
  battery if she don’t know as much about telephoto as  I do!"
  "She read," Doc told him, "your book."
  "Listen, you mean to tell me she read that book once  and remembered everything in it? Why, there’s words in
  that book, and  obscure rules, that I had to do a lot of research on myself. That book  is really advanced."
  "And this girl’s brain is something like you’ve  never encountered before."
  Long Tom sank back in the seat. "I thought I’d seen  some amazing memories in my time, but she’s got one
  that stops me."
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  Doc Savage had his unusual flake gold eyes fixed on  the jungle below. There was a calmness about the giant
  bronze man, and  it seemed never to leave him, no matter how fast things happened. It  partook somewhat of
  that calmness resting upon a lion in a cage, and  when he moved, the calm effect still persisted.
  He went back to the girl. She was reading Long Tom’s  book. Some electrical engineers could have read that
  book and not fully  understood more than the first chapter.
  "Making out all right?" Doc asked her.
  "Oh, yes," she said. "I am over to the part about  electro−magnetically guided atomic stream scanners."
  Doc happened to know that was the last chapter.
  "It is very interesting," she said. "There is no  such thing as electricity in—where I came from. But I do not
  agree with  Major Roberts, or Long Tom as you call him, when he says that bending  cathode scanning streams
  by means of—"
  Doc listened. She had read the book all right, and  she had remembered what she read. Moreover, she had
  picked out  practically the only weak point in Long Tom’s theories. It was amazing.  Some trace of
  astonishment must have shown on Doc Savage’s bronze  features, for the girl stopped speaking suddenly.
  Her finger tips settled rather tightly against the  cabled muscles in one arm.
  "Tell me," she requested, "am I such an unusual  creature, measured by your standards?"
  "Well," Doc admitted, cautiously, "you are not one  that comes along every day."
  "I do not mean that. Am I so strange as to be bad  company? Does my—my——"
  "Mental power," Doc supplied.
  "Yes. I have a fabulous brain, measured by your  standards. I can do things with it which you may think
  impossible. For  instance, I can by the very intensity of thought, cause men to think  what I wish them to
  think—within certain limits, of course. I can do  other things. Does this—this ability, make me repugnant?"
  "Mental development takes care of itself," Doc  suggested. "You, with your intellect, will know how to make
  people like you."
  She shook her head. "I mean, will they like me  without my consciously and cold−bloodedly making them?"
  Doc studied her beauty. "I do not see how they could  help it."
  Renny, who had been glancing over one shoulder from  time to time, said, "Maybe that girl is halfway human,
  after all."
  Long Tom had also been watching. He chuckled.
  "Maybe Doc is, too," he said.
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  DOC SAVAGE had a rule. He had several rules, but  this one was invariable. It was necessary for the efficient
  functioning  of his little organization. It was essential in order that his work of  fighting evil and aiding the
  oppressed might continue.
  He never permitted himself to think of falling in  love. It would only give his enemies—and they numbered
  legions—a means  of striking at him indirectly. The life which he led was too perilous  for any woman to share.
  The fact that he adhered to the rule had given Doc  the reputation of being lacking in certain human qualities.
  His aids,  while not ladies’ men—excepting Monk and Ham—were decidedly human, and  they had waited a
  long time for Doc to show signs of falling in love  with some one.
  They invariably watched the advent of an especially  pretty and intelligent girl with hopeful—or anxious,
  depending on the  girl—expectation.
  "Brains," Renny rumbled, just over the motor roar.  That’s the kind of female that’ll trap Doc. A brainy one,
  and not a  looker. I always said so."
  "I wouldn’t say this one was exactly a witch for  looks," Johnny said, critically. "In fact, I should say she was
  eminently attractive."
  "Yes," Renny agreed. "She’s just about the most  lovable thing I’ve seen in some time."
  In the rear of the plane, Monk and Ham had stopped  fighting.
  "I think," Monk was saying, "that I could go for  that girl in a big way."
  "She’s a sweet thing," Ham agreed.
  Monk should have all but dropped dead from surprise  at Ham agreeing with him on anything. But he didn’t.
  "Yes," he said. "She’s just wonderful. Man, oh, man!  I’ve never thought of getting married—much. But if I
  could get a wife  like her!"
  Long Tom, the pale electrical wizard who had been so  critical of the golden−haired girl a bit previously, now
  showed strong  evidences of a thaw.
  "She’s remarkably intelligent," he said. "And I  don’t think she’d hurt a fly. I know she wouldn’t. Isn’t she
  showing us  how to find O’Neel and his thugs?"
  "You think she’s sweet?" Monk asked.
  "I do."
  They all gazed with mooning eyes at the girl.
  Doc Savage chanced to look up. He saw the  love−struck gazes. They seemed to remind him that he had been
  looking a  bit that way himself during the last few moments.
  For a fraction of a second, Doc’s small trilling  noise came out distinctly, and with a faintly startled quality.
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  Doc got up hastily, switched on the automatic plane  control, smiled at the golden−haired girl, excused
  himself, hurried  into the back of the plane, and then stood there watching his five  aids. He called Long Tom.
  "That girl," Doc told him, "is using the power of  her incredible brain to make us all fall in love with her.
  You’d better  tell the others to watch out. Tell them to think about other things,  and not to look at her. In other
  words, keep their minds off her."
  "Great jumping cupid!" Long Tom exploded.
  He went to the others and told them what Doc had  divulged. He also added an idea of his own to the
  information.
  "I think she was turning loose her mental  come−hither on Doc, and the rest of us just happened to be around,"
  he  said.
  THE possibilities of the strange powers which the  girl seemed to possess were not productive of a peaceful
  frame of mind,  once they started thinking about it. Not that it was distressing to  have such a ravishing young
  lady make you like her. Oh, no!
  "Holy cow!" Renny said, trying to keep his booming  voice down to a whisper. "She might get us jealous of
  each other and  start us fighting!"
  "Fat chance!" pale Long Tom sniffed. "We’ve been  working together for years, and we’ve never fought
  among ourselves yet."
  "Listen!" Monk put in. "She practically don’t have  to make me jealous of Ham at all, before I’ll wring his
  neck!"
  They talked it over, and it seemed funny at first,  something to wisecrack about. The funny angles of it
  somehow exhausted  themselves after a while. The thing had serious possibilities, and they  began to see them.
  "Where could she have come from?" Long Tom pondered.
  "Wherever that lost aviator was for the last ten  years," Renny pointed out. "She came from the same place."
  "The way she talks, I gather she considers her home  shut off completely from the outer world," Ham put in.
  "Well," Renny contributed, "if her country is full  of people like she is, I’ll bet life there isn’t monotonous."
  The big−fisted engineer did some thinking, and a  slightly cheerful look came over his long, puritannical face.
  That was  a bad sign, because Renny somewhat contrarily registered gloom when he  was happiest, and when
  he looked even moderately cheerful, it was time  for ordinary peace−lovers to take to storm cellars.
  "Holy cow!" he mumbled. "When we get to this place  where she’s from, I wonder what we’ll find?"
  "And I wonder how we’ll know whether it’s really  there," Ham said, grimly. "Considering that the girl made
  those other  fellows see snakes where there weren’t any, and made us think we  weren’t seeing her when we
  were, I wonder what’s in store for us?
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  "Suppose there are others in her country like  her—whereas we are only ordinary men—how in the name of
  common sense  are we to know what we think we see is really what we see, and not  something this girl or
  somebody else is making us see?"
  "Eminently elucidated," said Johnny.
  Monk complained, "I dunno which would be worse—Ham,  if he used sentences like that all the time, or
  Johnny’s big words, if  he didn’t know any little ones."
  The homely chemist looked at the golden−haired girl,  who smiled at him, so that he looked as happy as a
  small boy with a  lollypop.
  "Oh, me," he sighed cheerfully. "If she’s a sample  of whoever lives wherever she came from, I for one will
  struggle very  hard to put up with ‘em."
  THE golden−haired girl could not read a map. Doc had  the latest land charts, although they would not be a lot
  of help after  the first few hundred miles, which their big plane, at its present  speed, would not take long
  traversing.
  The bronze man conferred with her over the chart. It  meant nothing to her. He explained about how the
  distances were  depicted. She caught on quickly.
  "Here," she said, and placed a finger, then drew it  in a circle to show an approximate number of miles away,
  but without  indicating a definite direction.
  "What direction?" Doc asked her.
  "Direction?" she repeated, pronouncing it perfectly.  "I do not know what that is."
  It was not the first word she had heard which she  had never heard before. That much it had been possible to
  ascertain by  observing her closely. Usually, she had been able to tell, from what  was being said, what the
  word meant.
  "Direction—north, south, east and west, we call  them," Doc told her. "You get them off a compass."
  "I do not know what a compass is," she said frankly.  "Do you have one?"
  Doc took her forward and showed her the  compasses—three of them on the plane, because with one or two, it
  is  impossible to tell always which one is off.
  "David Hutton had one of those in the plane which we  didn’t—which he flew," she said.
  "Did you watch it?" Doc asked her.
  "Yes. Because he did, I did, also." She pointed.  "There is no mark there which showed on his compass."
  Since practically all compass dials look alike,  there could be only one explanation. These plane type
  compasses were  made so that only a part of the dials showed at a time.
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  "Swing the plane in a slow circle," Doc requested  Renny, who was flying the plane now.
  Renny did so.
  The girl watched the compass dial, said, "There!"
  The dial had rotated, and the markings on the  opposite side had come before the aperture in the instrument
  panel.  Doc, able to box a compass instantly, directed Renny.
  "Hutton flew northwest by north. We will fly the  direction directly opposite, which is southeast by south."
  The bronze man indicated, on Renny’s chart, the  distance which the girl had stated; roughly, their destination
  lay from  their present position.
  "Holy cow!" grunted Renny. "Nearly fifteen hundred  miles! We haven’t a chance in a million in flying that
  far and hitting  any specific point, with only a compass course to guide us, and not  knowing how the air
  currents ran the day Hutton flew it."
  Doc Savage said, "Angle to the right, then the left,  and try to cross a region which the girl will recognize."
  That was successful. Two hours later, the girl saw  jungle which she said she recognized, and pointed out the
  direction  they were to take.
  Monk peered at the jungle, which from the air looked  remarkably monotonous and devoid of landmarks, and
  said, "I’d give a  lot for that girl’s memory." He eyed the young lady covertly and let  out a rapturous sigh.
  "But I’d give a lot more for her herself."
  "You’ve got, you know," Ham told him, "your pet hog."
  "Habeas," Monk grinned, "ain’t jealous:"
  THE spot they were heading for was very nearly on a  line with the equator. That meant heat. Cartagena had
  not been cool. It  was winter, bitterly cold in New York, which meant summer and heat down  here. And the
  equator meant even greater heat, and the jungle, humidity.
  Humidity! It came up at them like steam off a  boiling kettle, so damp that their clothes got clammy and they
  seemed  filmed with perspiration. Habeas Corpus, Monk’s pet pig, lay in the  back, beside a crack around a
  door which was leaking air, and panted.
  Chemistry, Ham’s pet what−is−it, stood back and  chucked various articles—spoons, cartridges, shoes, and
  they had to  lock up the binoculars—at Habeas. The pets got along about as  peacefully as their owners, which
  meant no noticeable peace.
  Every one but Ham, who never shed an item of his  remarkable clothing if it could possibly be helped,
  discarded coats and  shirts. The fact that they opened the plane’s windows seemed to have no  effect.
  The sun became hotter, and rivers steamed, and Renny  flew low in order that the girl might be sure of her
  landmarks.
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  Johnny, using binoculars, watched the jungle. Then,  abruptly, he put the glasses down and sat back, looking
  sober.
  "Stomach ache?" Long Tom asked.
  Johnny used much smaller words than usual when he  answered.
  "I saw a native village down there," he said. "They  had a fire out in front of one of the huts, and were all
  gathered  around it, drying and smoking several objects."
  "What?" Long Tom wanted to know.
  "Human heads."
  Doc Savage had been observing the girl, and it was  obvious that she knew where she was going. She was
  certain about her  landmarks. Frequently—and absolute proof that she had been this way  before—she called
  her landmarks before they were reached.
  Doc asked her several questions. He asked her  exactly what her country was like. He asked her what Klantic
  was, or  who. He asked her what the secret of Klantic was. And he put some other  queries intended to gather
  some general information.
  To all the questions, the girl gave him a sweet  smile.
  But something was bothering the golden−haired lady.  Something that started as nothing much, and grew
  more serious as she  thought about it—and looked covertly at Doc Savage. It was obvious that  the bronze man
  was having some effect on her ideas.
  Doc, for his part, kept well reserved. His men, who  were familiar with the bronze man’s inscrutability, could
  tell that Doc  was very much on edge, tense.
  "He’s scared—" Monk chuckled.
  "You ape discredit!" Ham sneered, cutting in. "The  tight spots you’ve seen Doc in, and no sign of fear, and
  you say—"
  "Scared that the girl is gonna do her stuff on him  any minute and make him fall in love with her," Monk
  finished. "Why  don’tcha let me finish when I start to say somethin’, you shyster  lawyer!"
  Doc Savage went to the rear of the plane, which was  unoccupied and began going through his two−hour
  exercise routine. He  had not yet had time this day for it, and he never permitted a day to  pass without
  expending not less than two hours on the exercises which  had given him the agile senses and almost
  incredible physical strength  which he possessed.
  Doc’s aids, who had seen the exercise routine often,  paid little attention, but the girl, Z, stared in amazement.
  IT was some hours later before Z got around to what  was bothering her. It could be noted that she had
  worried about it  during Doc’s exercises, and finally she got up and came to the bronze  man’s seat. She leaned
  close, that her voice might penetrate the motor  roar.
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  "I have been misleading you," she said.
  "Lying, you mean?" Doc asked.
  She nodded, said precisely, "That is what it amounts  to."
  Doc made no comment, and after a moment, she went  on. 
  "I am using you," she said slowly, "merely to get me  back to my—to my land, I guess you would call it."
  "But you are also taking us to where El Liberator  O’Neel is going?" Doc queried.
  "Yes."
  "Then how have you lied?"
  She was suddenly almost desperately earnest. "You do  not understand! O’Neel is going to his end! Oh, he
  will not die! But to  a man like him, what will happen to him will be a great deal worse. His  punishment will
  be much more severe than anything you will inflict."
  Doc told her, "We will go ahead, anyway."
  She shook her head violently. "You mustn’t!"
  "O’Neel," Doc told her, "killed several men. That is  enough to keep us on his trail. But this mystery has its
  other angles,  too. Very interesting angles."
  She put a hand on his arm. "You do not understand!"
  "No?"
  "You will receive the same thing that is going to  happen to O’Neel!"
  Doc said mildly, "We are not usually threatened by  so charming a young lady."
  SHE shook her head. "I am not threatening you. I  have nothing to do with it. I could not help you if I would.
  It was all  arranged—centuries ago."
  "It sounds even more interesting."
  She showed some faint signs of a temper. Her fingers  dug at—not into—the corded bronze of his arm.
  "Go back!" she gasped. "Land me somewhere in the  jungle and I will take my chances!"
  "Impossible."
  "You’ve got to!" she gasped. "Why, even now,  O’Neel’s planes are down, and he and his men have met a fate
  which they  never dreamed—"
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  Renny’s great voice roared, "Three of O’Neels’s  planes! Dead ahead, and below!"
  "In the air," Monk squeaked loudly. "They’re coming  this way."
  "Holy cow, yes!" Renny added. "This steam is so  thick I didn’t see ‘em at first."
  Big−worded Johnny chimed in, "A quadrigeminous  member is ensconced on terra firma."
  "I guess," Monk decided, "he means that the fourth  plane is on the ground. Probably it’s disabled."
  "That explains how we overhauled them," Renny  boomed. "One plane had to make a forced landing, and the
  other three  came down also to help make repairs."
  There was, unexpectedly, a sound as if some wild man  had beaten a sudden, mad flurry against the hull of the
  plane with his  fists. It was accompanied by the sounds machine−gun bullets make going  through the
  things—fortunately not men—in a plane’s cabin.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" Renny said. "They think  they’re going to kill us!"
  Chapter XI. WHAT MONK SAW
  RENNY had flown in planes being shot at before. He  rolled, sideslipped, got out of the rain of slugs from
  O’Neel’s  attacking ships. Simultaneously, Renny eased over to make room for Doc  to get into the other
  pilot’s seat.
  Monk, clipping slugs into a machine pistol,  squeaked, "How’d they know we were in this plane? How come
  they  attacked us right away?"
  "This is a Colombian war plane, ignuts," Ham told  him. "We’re out of Colombia a long ways. What would a
  Colombian war  plane be doing here, if not hunting these birds? Naturally, they jumped  us."
  "I don’t like that name you called me!" Monk  complained. 
  Bullets came into the plane’s cabin and stitched a  neat design, geometrically semicircular, on the cabin floor
  and in the  ceiling. 
  "I don’t like that, either!" Monk squeaked. "Renny,  you tryin’ to get us shot?"
  As a matter of fact, Renny was doing some very good  flying. Doc Savage said so as he eased into the other
  pilot’s seat, and  Renny looked very gloomy, which meant he liked the praise. He settled  back to watch some
  flying that was flying.
  The plane was big. It had been built to carry a lot  of bombs high and far, and to fight if necessary. It was one
  of the  latest design war giants of the air. But the attacking planes were also  the latest. Colombia was not so
  far behind with her air force.
  Three against one, the odds. But one was a  scientific master who had long realized the importance of
  airmanship,  and had studied it as he had studied many things, with an absolute  intensity of concentration that
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  amazed those who saw.
  Doc flew. The big plane had been banking, rolling,  in an effort to escape. Under Doc’s handling, it whipped
  straight for  the opponents.
  "Monk!" he called. "Among our equipment is a case  numbered A311. Bring it!"
  The bronze man’s voice carried through over the  motors’ roar without being unduly loud, and Monk heard
  and leaped to  comply. The after section of the plane was loaded with a number of  cases—metal boxes, very
  light, which contained the innumerable  scientific gadgets which Doc had occasion to use.
  They had been aboard the cruise ship. Doc and his  aids had sailed on the cruise ship on a vacation, but they
  had taken  vacations before—and had them terminate in as choice mêlées as hell  ever spawned.
  Monk came forward with case A311.
  "Open it," Doc said, "and release the contents  shortly after we pass those planes."
  They went past the three stolen war planes with a  sobbing howl of engines, and a gnashing of lead against
  metal and wood  as a single machine gun found them. Considering that each of the  attacking planes carried
  two gunners aft, who could shoot in almost any  direction, it was remarkable flying.
  Monk began emptying the contents of the cylinder  which had been in case A311 through the plane window.
  Monk wore a big,  expectant grin. He thought he knew the contents of that cylinder.
  Doc Savage zoomed their big plane at the three  attackers. Now, he continued on downward. Like pups on the
  trail of a  big dog they think they’ve scared the other planes fell in behind.  Their machine guns shuttled and
  sent out long whiskers of tracer  bullets. Doc rolled his big ship, arched it a little, sank it some.  Only a few of
  the machine−gun bullets came close.
  Monk watched the other planes. Expectancy held the  big chemist’s ample mouth open.
  "All right, Doc!" he called abruptly. "That got  them!"
  Doc pulled the big plane out of its dive.
  Behind and above, the three pursuing planes were  sliding slowly toward the jungle below, and the clearing in
  which stood  the fourth plane which had never taken the air. The motors of all three  planes had stopped.
  MONK, his big grin bigger than ever, tossed the  empty case A311 into the rear of the plane.
  "It worked like a charm!" he told the golden−haired  girl gleefully. "It always does! Me and Doc invented that
  stuff!"
  "What is it?" the girl asked.
  "A chemical vapor," Monk explained. "It works like  the stuff that comes out of fire extinguishers. Forms a
  vapor that  mixes with the air and makes it noninflammable in combination with  gasoline, so that their motors
  stopped. Like I said, just like the fire  extinguishers of the chemical type."
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  "What," asked the golden−haired girl, "is a fire  extinguisher like?"
  Monk frowned at her. "Listen, are you kidding me?"
  "If you mean lying to you to entertain myself, the  answer is that I am not!"
  Monk squeaked, "You’re the doggonedest combination  of absolute genius and abysmal ignorance that I ever
  saw!"
  He was actually somewhat piqued at the young lady,  because he thought she was putting on an act. But as he
  frowned  critically at her, he felt something distinct happen to him.
  A wave of absolute good feeling toward the young  lady swept over Monk. He felt the thing happen distinctly.
  The  sensation was as plain as if he had been out in the cold and had come  in where it was warm. One moment
  he was piqued at the golden−haired  young lady; the next, he was liking her.
  "Blazes!" Monk gulped, and fled.
  He joined Doc.
  "That gal can sure do things to you!" Monk sighed.  "Boy, am I scared of her!" He peered downward, saw that
  they were  circling back. "Doc, whatcha gonna do?"
  "The vapor with which we stopped their motors  settles, being heavier than air," Doc said. "We will wait until
  it is  clear, then go back and drop anaesthetic gas bombs on El Liberator  and his crowd."
  Monk grinned, "El Liberator O’Neel will have  the notebook he took off that aviator, David Hutton. It’ll
  explain just  what is behind this mystery." Monk glanced over one shoulder at the  young woman. "It’ll explain
  her—and them trick clothes  she is wearing!"
  "Holy cow!" Renny boomed. "This thing is about over!"
  Their motors, one after another, made coughing  noises and stopped.
  HAD the world vanished from under them, the effect  could hardly have been more startling. Renny, the
  engineer, who was  also something approaching a wizard as a plane mechanic, was out of the  co−pilot’s seat
  instantly.
  "It has to be the fuel!" Doc called. "Each engine  has its individual ignition, so it can’t be that."
  Renny was not long finding the trouble. He crawled  up into the big wing, which held the tanks, and was
  instantly  floundering in gasoline.
  "Tanks riddled!" he yelled.
  Instantly, Doc Savage put the big plane down in a  sharp glide.
  "The original design of this type of ship," he said,  quietly, "called for the new−type tanks, surrounded by
  sponge rubber  and chemicals, which cannot be punctured by bullets. I merely glanced  at the tanks in making
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  an inspection before we took off. They looked  like the prescribed tanks."
  "Somebody worked a cheap graft, and put in a less  costly type of tank when the ship was built." The
  big−fisted engineer  made a rumbling noise. "Me, I’m in favor of shooting all grafters!"
  Doc Savage, testing the gliding angle of the plane,  found it would reach a broad, yellow river about two miles
  to the  southward. He made no comment about the tanks.
  Had he been aware they were not the bulletproof  type, he would have taken more pains to see that no bullets
  found them.  It was not often that such details slipped by him.
  The jungle was an incredible green mat below. They  were much too close to it for peace of mind. There did
  not seem room  for a man to stand anywhere. Behind them, of course, was the clearing  where El Liberator
  O’Neel’s planes had by now landed. But if  Doc’s party attempted to come down there, they would get a
  reception at  which they would be hopelessly outnumbered.
  The river was better. This big plane was equipped  for descending on water as well as land.
  Monk, ogling the vastness of the jungle for  something better than the river, gave a sudden, violent start. He
  leveled an arm.
  "Look!" he squawled.
  They all glanced instinctively back at the clearing  in which O’Neel’s planes stood, O’Neel and his men
  clustered about  them, no doubt wondering what on earth had stopped the motors.
  "No!" Monk howled. "This other way! Look!"
  He was pointing in the opposite direction.
  They all stared in the direction which he was  pointing. Their expressions became slightly blank.
  "You stringing us along?" Renny demanded, gruffly.
  "The great chemist," Ham said, sarcastically, "has  finally gone as simpleminded as he looks."
  Monk had been watching them, to observe their  expressions when they looked. Now he shifted his gaze back
  to the  direction he was pointing. His jaw fell. His little eyes blinked  rapidly.
  He had been pointing to a vast area of jungle over  which steam lay like a fog—and nothing else.
  Monk began to get somewhat pale. He sank down in a  chair and swallowed rapidly. In fact, he looked so
  flabbergasted that  the pig, Habeas, ran up, sniffed of his trouser legs, and squealed.
  Ham shed his sarcasm and snapped, "Just what did you  see, Monk?"
  Monk’s throat made some word movement without words  before he managed to speak.
  "Wait’ll we land, and I’ll talk about it," he said,  his voice very small. "I wanta think it over. Maybe I could
  have been  nuts! If I really saw what I think I did, then I’m nuts!"
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  MONK looked appealingly at Doc Savage, who was doing  something in the cockpit besides flying the plane.
  Monk craned his neck.
  Doc was using the regulation aërial camera with  which the big bombing plane was equipped. Modern
  bombers are expected  to take pictures, for their superiors, of the damage their bombs do.  This camera was
  operated by a trigger from the pilot’s cockpit, and was  automatic.
  Monk ran forward, looked at the camera controls, and  saw that Doc had it pointed in the same direction
  which the homely  chemist had requested every one to look.
  "So you saw it!" Monk gulped.
  "Well, apparently," Doc agreed, quietly.
  "Yeah, apparently." Monk rubbed at his eyes. "I  don’t believe there’s such a thing, either!"
  Doc Savage nursed the plane along carefully. It  would just about make the ominous−looking yellow river.
  Renny, Long Tom, Johnny and Ham crowded close behind  Monk, and they had overheard enough to realize
  that Monk really had  seen something.
  "What was it?" Long Tom barked.
  Doc said, "Wait a moment! This landing is going to  be difficult. Stand by for accidents."
  The river, they could see now, was dotted with  snags. Moreover, the stream had no too great a width.
  Renny rumbled, "The durn thing is a creek!"  and ran aft where he could grab and salvage some of the
  equipment cases  if necessary.
  THE golden−haired girl, Z, got out of her seat and  came forward, to stand just behind Doc Savage, and close
  to him. She  watched the bronze man’s handling of the controls tensely.
  "She’s scared!" Monk told Ham in an aside. "She  feels encouraged just by being close to Doc. The big bronze
  guy has got  her groggy!"
  Monk was wrong about the girl’s reasons for standing  where she was. He knew that an instant later.
  The girl fell suddenly over Doc’s shoulder and  grabbed the deperdussin type control wheel. She fell upon the
  wheel  with all her strength, wrenching, twisting.
  It was the most critical instant of the descent. The  girl was strong, far stronger than it seemed possible in so
  exquisitely  moulded a body.
  Doc’s clutch at the instant was light on the wheel,  for lightness goes with skill. And there was only feet to
  spare at  either side.
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  The ship veered. The right wingtip snagged a tree.  Around came the heavy craft. It struck a wall of trees and
  vines.  Propellers kept going, chewing up branches, flailing vines. One wing  crumpled. A snag of dead
  hardwood came spearing through the hull,  missing pale Long Tom only when he gave an agile leap.
  The uproar subsided, and there was the moment of  tense silence which usually follows disasters.
  The girl broke it.
  "I wrecked David Hutton’s plane when he landed near  El Liberator O’Neel’s men," she said. "I did it that
  same way. He  was not expecting it either. He did not know I had been watching what  he did to the plane to
  make it do different things."
  Chapter XII. TOO FAR IN!
  MONK, his voice plaintive and more than ever  sounding as if it belonged to a small boy rather than the funny
  hunk  that was Monk, began speaking.
  "It was a man, lying on his back on some sort of  couch on the ground," Monk said.
  There was a brief pause. No one else said anything.  Monk was somewhere back in the wreckage of the plane.
  They craned their  necks, but no one could see him.
  "This man," Monk said, "was a mile from his head to  his toes."
  Monk’s voice sounded small and seemed to be getting  smaller.
  "He couldn’t have been much less than a mile long,"  Monk continued. "And I should judge he was about two
  hundred yards  across the shoulders."
  Doc Savage was up and working through the plane’s  wreckage. Ham joined him. They said nothing. Monk
  must have been in the  very rear of the plane when it crashed.
  Monk went on, "I was just wondering what it would be  like if the mile−high guy should swat us, when bingo!
  He must  ‘a’ done it!"
  Ham groaned, "Poor Monk! He’s delirious! His head  must have been bashed in!"
  Ham sounded as if he were about to cry, which was  remarkable, since Ham, at least a dozen times within the
  last  twenty−four hours, had expressed the hope of seeing Monk meet a violent  and early end.
  They found Monk on his back staring out through a  hole at the hot sky.
  "You all right?" Ham demanded anxiously.
  "Heck, yes!" Monk sat up. "I was just thinkin’ out  loud sorta, over what had happened durin’ the last few
  minutes."
  "You do the craziest things!" Ham drew back and gave  Monk a violent kick in the ribs. "That’s for worryin’
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  us!"
  Monk squawled, got up wanting to fight, and Doc  said, "Would it interest you gentlemen to know this plane
  is sinking?"
  It was. It had not penetrated the growth on the side  of the river sufficiently to be held, and it was working
  back,  settling, water gurgling into the hull.
  There was a wild rush now. None of them had been  more than skinned and bruised a bit, and they floundered
  about  furiously, trying to get all of their equipment out before the plane  sank.
  They succeeded, and even got a line from the plane  to the huge branches of an overhanging tree and made it
  fast so that  the plane, once settled to the bottom, would not drift away.
  "We’ll be able to float the thing, I think," said  big−fisted Renny. "It may take time, but we can repair the
  craft, I  believe."
  "Optimist!" said sharp−tongued Ham. "Fat lot of good  it would do! We have no gasoline!"
  Monk put in, "Stick to your petitions and court  phenagling, you shyster! These motors can be made to burn
  alcohol."
  Ham jeered, "And I suppose alcohol grows around  here?"
  "Something like that," Monk agreed. "You can distill  it out of certain jungle plants."
  Ham, who hated to be caught showing any ignorance,  especially before Monk, looked ready to explode.
  Monk stalked off triumphantly, lost some of his  dignity when he fell over a vine, and joined Doc.
  The bronze man was carefully inspecting, to see if  it was damaged, the aërial camera which had been a part
  of the plane  and which he had removed.
  Ham came up and said peevishly, "I can’t see why you  went to the trouble of saving that camera, Doc."
  Monk squeaked, "Simple."
  "Like you, eh?"
  "Doc," Monk said, with dignity, "took a picture of  that mile−high guy I saw sleeping on the ground just
  before the plane  landed and cracked up in the trees and stuff."
  A NUMBER of strange things had happened since this  adventure had started. But the little group had not yet
  come to the  point where they accepted the sighting of men a mile high as if it were  an ordinary event. The
  stunned silence persisted until Monk broke it.
  "Listen, I ain’t kidding nobody," said the homely  chemist. "I saw what I’m tellin’ you I saw."
  Still, no one said anything.
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  "The mile−high guy was lying on a sort of pallet,  and the jungle was thick all around him," Monk went on.
  "The guy was  naked except for a kind of a leather skirt—" He paused and looked  surprised. "Say! It was a
  skirt that looked just like the one David  Hutton was wearing!"
  Monk paused and looked around at them. He got no  comments.
  The homely chemist continued: "This mile−high guy  had a tanned face, and he was built for the rough stuff,
  what I mean.  I’ll bet the biceps muscles in his arms were fifty feet high."
  Ham began to titter with laughter.
  "Why the giggles, shyster?" Monk growled.
  Ham cackled, "You’ve been hypnotized again! This  girl has got you seeing things!"
  Monk snorted. "Let’s see what the camera shows!"
  Doc Savage had been working with the camera. It was  of an ultramodern type, containing its own developing
  compounds, which  produced, instead of a negative alone, a completed picture in a very  few moments. The
  picture was of a size sufficient to bring out plenty  of detail perceptible to the naked eye.
  Doc spread the picture for all to see.
  "There!" Monk exploded triumphantly. "Let’s hear you  giggle that fellow off, Ham!"
  Ham looked, and his eyes seemed about to fall out.
  The big man was about as Monk had described him.  Perhaps he was not a mile high. It was hard to tell. But
  the jungle  growth—huge trees, obviously—near the long couch on which the giant lay  was an indication of
  his size. These trees seemed no taller than lawn  grass.
  "You can see that he’s asleep," Monk said, calmly.  "He’s got his eyes shut!"
  The golden−haired girl came over to them—she had  been standing a bit apart—and looked once at the
  photograph. She saw it  as if she were seeing a familiar thing.
  She looked steadily at Doc Savage.
  "You have come too far now," she said. "You will  never go back."
  Doc Savage pointed at the mile−long man in the  photograph.
  "Who is that?"
  "It is Klantic."
  KLANTIC had a straight nose, a rounded but not  overly obstinate chin, a high forehead, and otherwise a fine
  aristocracy of feature which was effective. Contour of the body  indicated a developed physique, but in
  general, the head was large in  proportion.
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  Klantic was dressed in nothing but an apronlike  garment which looked as if it were leather, except that it was
  unlikely  that any leather would be stout enough to make a garment for a man a  mile high. That is, a mile, if
  he stood up.
  Renny looked at the golden−haired girl, then asked,  "What color was his hair, Monk?"
  "You’re right," Monk said. "It was the same color as  hers."
  Renny, still looking at the girl, asked, "Any  relation of yours, that big guy?"
  "I," she said, "am the bride of Klantic."
  "Holy cow!" Renny gulped, and could think of nothing  else.
  Ham put in, "But what is Klantic?"
  The girl did not tell him. She put her lips together  firmly, turned and walked off. When it was evident that she
  was going  to walk away in the jungle, Ham snapped, "I’m going to take charge of  her."
  He ran after the young woman, who by now had  disappeared. There was a sound of a brief struggle in the
  thick  tropical growth, after which Ham came back with the young woman and the  makings of a spectacular
  black eye.
  "It’s about your style, fighting with a woman," Monk  told Ham unkindly.
  "It wasn’t a fight," Ham pointed out. "I didn’t  strike back."
  The girl still wouldn’t talk.
  They began the work of examining the plane. Doc  Savage, removing outer garments down to the silken shorts
  he wore which  were designed to serve as bathing trunks, dived into the yellow river  and examined the plane.
  The others made fast lashings which held it to  the bank.
  The growth was so tangled, there being practically  no bank on which to stand—only a wall of roots, vines
  and gnarled  branches—that any kind of work was very difficult.
  Doc came up, caught a branch, and swung out of the  water. His metallic features were expressionless.
  "The ship can be salvaged," he said. "But it will  take weeks of work."
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" Johnny murmured. "This  leaves us in a jam."
  Doc said, "We have one immediate chance."
  "What?"
  "El Liberator 
  O’Neel and his planes," the bronze man explained. "The vapor which  clogged their motors will be effective
  inside the cylinders until it is  cleaned out and wiped off the spark plugs. That will take them some  time. We
  may be able to reach them." 
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  The others hastily began grabbing up equipment  cases, and they were all shortly in motion toward the
  clearing in which  O’Neel’s four planes had last been seen.
  THEY started out at a run. Very shortly, they were  almost at a standstill. The jungle was fabulously thick.
  The number of  growing things which had thorns on them was remarkable.
  "Blazes!" Monk complained. "Every time I move,  something sticks me!"
  They were by now as wet as if they had just crawled  out of the river, but it was perspiration instead of river
  water. The  salty sweat smarted their eyes. They panted, and their faces began to  look queer.
  Monk, who had lately acquired—from some feminine  admirer, it was suspected—a wrist watch which had,
  among other  ingenious gadgets, a barometer and thermometer incorporated into it,  stopped to eye his wrist.
  What the tiny thermometer told him made him  appear hotter if anything.
  "Whew!" he exploded. "This thing says it’s a hundred  and twenty−five, and the humidity in here must be
  something awful!"
  "Don’t you ever spread good news?" snapped Ham, who  had his sword cane out, slicing at the jungle growth.
  Renny, after a bit, boomed, "It’s gonna take us a  couple of days to reach them planes at this rate! By that
  time, they’ll  be gone."
  Doc Savage stopped them. He indicated Monk.
  "Monk and myself will go ahead, since we can travel  faster than the rest of you," the bronze man advised.
  "You others will  keep on, traveling a compass course. The four planes are about  north−northeast from here."
  Monk grasped the bough of a tree and swung atop it.
  Ham looked up at him and said, "I always did say you  should stick to jungles!"
  Monk ignored him. He jumped, seized another bough  with his long arms, and swung to a third branch. Doc
  Savage followed  him, and in a moment was leading. Chemistry, Ham’s pet monkey, started  to follow them,
  but a volley of expletives from Monk sent the animal  back.
  It was actually possible for the men to travel  faster by the aërial route than on the ground. The jungle was a
  mat  below, more open up here. But they by no means equaled the speed of a  sprinter. Monk, sweating,
  grunting, doing his utmost, had an idea that  Doc was holding back to about half the speed he could have
  made.
  "The planes are not far ahead," Doc said finally.
  "Could they have taken off without one hearing  them?" Monk wanted to know.
  "No chance."
  They found the clearing before long. It bore a  certain shape—like the head of a long−eared rabbit—which
  made it easy  to identify. They stood for a long time and stared, and Doc Savage’s  small, fantastic trilling
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  noise came out of nothingness, made an eerie  melody for a time, then ebbed away as gradually as it had come.
  There were neither planes nor men in the clearing.
  It was the right clearing. Marks made by the planes’  landing wheels could be distinctly discerned. The tracks
  of men,  depressions in the lush tropical grass.
  "They got their motors cleaned up and flew away,"  Monk muttered.
  "Impossible," Doc told him quietly. "We would have  heard them."
  "But they’re gone," Monk pointed out.
  Doc Savage went forward. Monk started to follow,  noted just how alert the bronze man was, and eased back
  into shelter.  He glanced at his machine pistol to make sure it was not on safety.
  Watching closely, Monk saw Doc Savage go over the  clearing with a quick thoroughness, and finally stop at
  a point near  the northern edge. The bronze man stood there for some time. Monk went  over and joined him.
  Monk was fifteen feet away when Doc said sharply,  "Keep back! Come around behind me!"
  Monk did as suggested, then saw the reason why.
  "Huh!" grunted Monk. "What made them round places on  the ground?"
  What Monk referred to was a series of roughly oval  depressions, more than one in a cluster, and the clusters
  spaced some  distance apart. The weeds and brush had been mashed down and crushed in  these depressions,
  and the earth appeared flat and packed, as if it had  sustained quite a weight.
  Monk stood back and surveyed the marks generally.
  "Good night!" he exploded. "These things look like  big tracks of some kind! But what would make tracks that
  size?"
  Doc Savage asked, "Did you ever see a panther track?"
  MONK squinted at the marks. Then, apparently without  thinking about what he was doing, he backed away
  from them.
  "Look here!" he burst out. "They’re shaped like  panther tracks, all right, but each one of them toes is bigger
  than a  washtub, and each whole track is bigger than anything that would be  made by the biggest elephant that
  ever lived!"
  Monk waited, but Doc Savage made no comment.
  Monk demanded, "You mean to tell me a panther made  them tracks?"
  Doc countered, "Do you remember your mythology?"
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  "You mean my ancient Greek, Roman and such? I been  tryin’ to forget it ever since it was crammed into me
  in high school,  but I may still remember a little of it."
  "Recall the legend of a character who went around  with a panther?"
  Monk squinted. "Yeah. Somebody named Nemo, or maybe  Nemo was the name of the panther, or maybe it
  was somebody else."
  Monk waited for Doc to comment, but the bronze man  said nothing.
  "Well, what of it?" Monk wanted to know.
  "My wish was merely to suggest the connection." Doc  said.
  "Huh? Well—huh! I’ll be superflabbergasted, as  Johnny might say! You mean this old character out of
  mythology has  grown a mile high, along with his panther, and is walking around in  this South American
  jungle with the panther, which has also grown? If  you do, I hate to think what this world is coming to!"
  Before Doc Savage could make any answer, if he had  intended to, there was a rustling in the brush, and
  Renny, Long Tom and  Johnny stepped out. Ham brought up the rear, guarding the strange  golden−haired girl.
  They looked around and wanted to know where O’Neel’s  men and the four stolen Colombian war planes had
  gone to.
  Monk rolled his small eyes at them, a remarkable  effect in itself. "You lads remember the mile−high guy I
  saw?"
  "I have a hunch," Long Tom muttered, "that I’m going  to remember him in my sleep for days to come!"
  "He’s got a panther, it seems, built about on his  own scale." Monk pointed to the tracks.
  The others stared. They said nothing for some  minutes. 
  "Some kitty!" Long Tom said finally, in a small  voice. 
  The girl, Z, spoke. There was something distinctly  like utter fear in her voice.
  "Please!" she cried out desperately. "Get away from  this spot at once! It is the only thing that can save your
  lives!"
  Chapter XIII. FEAR JUNGLE
  THE girl’s voice started the feeling of terror. The  stark look on her features continued it. But there was
  something else  that made it grow, made it mount until the men there in the clearing by  the enormous,
  mysterious tracks, although they were brave men—men who  had been through fantastic perils in their time,
  and had surmounted  unusual dangers—began to grow pale and dry of mouth.
  This other quality that terrified them was something  unseen, something as undefinable as the so−called
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  dramatic build−up.  Dramatists will take characters in a play, and by having them do  certain things, build up a
  feeling of awful horror, although the  audience is not told at any time that they are supposed to be  horrified, or
  have any reason to be horrified.
  It was thus here. Before long, the slightest rustle  in the surrounding jungle caused violent starts and an absurd
  tendency  to flee.
  Doc Savage stepped forward, grasped the girl by both  arms and said, "Stop it!"
  Her strange eyes returned his hypnotic stare, and  the fear did not leave her face.
  "Stop it!" Doc repeated. "You are using your  hypnotic powers to frighten us into leaving this spot. Stop it! If
  you  continue to attempt to influence us with your so−called mental  magnetism, we will simply give you a
  drug that will make you  unconscious!"
  Monk, understanding what had made him scared, sighed  so loudly that he almost choked.
  "Blazes!" he gulped. "So she was making me  scared! Boy, I was right at the point where I was afraid to look
  for my  shadow!"
  "Your 
  shadow," Ham said shakily, "would scare anybody almost any time!" 
  The feeling of fear which had laid hold of them  seemed to be growing less, although it by no means went
  away entirely.
  Stark terror was still on the golden−haired girl’s  face.
  "Young lady, you’d better stop registering so much  terror!" Ham told her.
  She stared at them desperately.
  "I cannot help it!" she gasped. "I am terrified!  I did attempt to think you into being frightened a moment ago.
  That was because I was scared and wanted you to take me away from here."
  Doc’s aids exchanged glances.
  "Why are you scared?" Monk asked her.
  She pointed at the tracks, the gigantic panther  prints that, if by some incredible stretch of natural laws should
  have  been made by a real beast, were the tracks of such a monster as the  human mind could hardly conceive.
  "I have seen," she said shrilly, "the monster that  made those tracks! I know what It is—what it will do—what
  will happen  to us if we are caught!"
  Monk produced his supermachine pistol from its  armpit holster, and from a pocket dug out a drum holding,
  not "mercy"  bullets, but high−explosive slugs which, if placed carefully enough,  might conceivably blow the
  sides out of a battleship.
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  "I could change the shape of Pikes Peak with this  thing," he said, exaggerating. "Bring on your overgrown
  pussycats!"
  THE girl said nothing more, although they asked  questions. She seemed offended that they had not done as
  she wished.
  "She’s spoiled," said Ham.
  Ham had managed to preserve the immaculate  perfection of his clothing throughout the hectics of the plane
  wreck  and the encounter with the jungle.
  They went over the clearing now, searching. In  several spots, they found smears of oil, and at one point the
  stench of  spilled gasoline was strong.
  There was human blood at only one spot, and not much  of it there.
  The giant panther tracks led to a near−by creek  which was narrow, but deep, and just about arched over with
  thick  jungle growth.
  They stood there on the creek bank and listened, but  there was only silence—infinite and absolute—broken at
  long intervals  by the wind rustle of some bough. These latter sounds were scarce,  because there was little
  breeze, and that was becoming less.
  They stood on the banks of the creek and were  baffled.
  "The big pussy got in and swam either up or down the  stream," Ham decided.
  Big−fisted Renny emitted a rumbling snort that would  have done credit to a hippopotamus.
  "If you ask me, this whole thing is goofy!" he  boomed. "The thing is ridiculous!"
  No one seemed to have any comment on that. A man a  mile high asleep on a pallet in the jungle! A gigantic
  panther’s  tracks! Four planes and maybe a score of O’Neel thugs, utterly  vanished. Ridiculous? Of course!
  But that did not alter the reality of  it.
  Doc Savage’s aids were not carrying as many boxes of  equipment as they had started out with.
  "What became of your packs?" Doc asked.
  "That jungle got the best of us," Renny said. "We  figured we could cache the stuff, and go back for it later."
  Long Tom added, "It really didn’t save us much time.  We found some sort of game trail through the jungle,
  and it led us  right this way. That accounts for our getting here so quickly."
  Doc Savage studied the creek into which the giant  tracks vanished. His trilling came very briefly.
  "We had best get our packs," he said. "If we are up  against what it appears we are up against, we will need all
  of our  equipment."
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  As they walked back toward the clearing from which  the planes had vanished, gaunt Johnny took occasion to
  study the layout  of the huge tracks.
  "The giant animal," he said, "seems to have made  several trips. Anyway, manifold peregrinations are
  manifest."
  They did not waste time in the clearing. The return  through the jungle was difficult until they reached the
  game trail.  They trotted along it without incident—until the girl wrenched to a  stop with a low cry.
  When they looked at her, she was pointing.
  "Huh!" Monk grunted. "What’s wrong with her?"
  "She has just discovered the big cat’s tracks are  along this trail, too," Doc Savage said.
  His aids looked as if they had just discovered  themselves standing in cold water. They peered closely, and
  saw what  their lesser trained eyes had missed.
  The big cat’s tracks were here and there along this  trail.
  MONK said distinctly, "I don’t like to seem to be a  guy who don’t want to get ahead, but I suggest we do our
  getting in the  opposite direction!"
  Doc Savage vetoed that.
  "We will continue," he said. "But we can be careful."
  They were amply careful.
  The equipment cases lay some distance off the game  trail, Renny explained, and guided them in the proper
  direction. He  stopped before a mat of vines which covered a section of the earth.
  "We stuck the stuff under here," he said, and lifted  the mat of vines. "Holy cow!"
  There were no cases under the vines.
  There were only two gigantic panther tracks.
  Astonishment reacted on them variously. Johnny  slowly stuck his monocle in his eye, a gesture which had
  persisted from  the day when he actually used it as a monocle, long ago before Doc  Savage’s surgical mastery
  had returned the use of an eye injured in the  great war.
  When the magnifier hurt his eye, Johnny opened the  eye wide and let the monocle drop to the end of its black
  ribbon.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" he breathed.
  Big−fisted Renny—one fist filled with a machine  pistol—peered all around.
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  "I don’t see the thing," he rumbled.
  "I don’t want to!" Monk told him.
  Renny waved his weapon generally. "But how did any  cat as big as this one—leopard or any other kind of
  cat—pack off our  boxes of equipment?"
  "Perhaps in its teeth," Long Tom suggested.
  Monk turned around and frowned critically at the  girl. "I wonder if you or anybody else is making us imagine
  all  this?" 
  For once, the young woman answered a question. "You  can be sure you are seeing just what you think you
  see!"
  "Is this big cat dangerous?" Monk wanted to know.
  "You saw what happened to O’Neel and his planes,"  she retorted.
  "We didn’t see anything!" Monk pointed out.
  "Then you can make a guess."
  Monk evidently made a guess, for he was silent a  moment. Then he donned a pained expression.
  "I got too much imagination," he said. "When I start  guessing, I durn near scare myself to death."
  Doc Savage put in sharply, "It might be a good idea  if we stood by what is left of our plane!"
  They kept in a tight group now, and their eyes were  never for long in one place. They saw and heard nothing,
  and the jungle  was more quiet—more quiet than it should have been. All of the wind had  stopped now. There
  were no birds, or if there were any, they kept quiet  and out of sight. It was melting hot.
  They came to the river bank, looked, then stood  there for a long time, not speaking, not even glancing at each
  other.  They were silent.
  Finally, having stood it as long as she could—if her  expression was any guide—the golden−haired girl made
  a long, sobbing  sound and sank down and covered her eyes.
  "They know we are here," she sobbed. "They are  everywhere around, watching us. We cannot escape!"
  That was enough to take their minds off the fact  that their wrecked plane wasn’t where they had left it.
  THE plane was simply gone, along with the ropes that  they had used to tie it to the bank—ropes hastily
  contrived out of  vines, for the most part. The ropes had not been cut, with the ends  left dangling. They had
  simply disappeared.
  No tracks were on the bank. They looked thoroughly.  They all had super−machine pistols in their hands, and
  each weapon was  charged with the high−explosive cartridges, the most deadly they  carried.
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  Doc Savage, however, carried no gun. He never  carried one. He believed that dependence on a gun got a man
  in a habit,  and that once the man was without his gun, he was helpless.
  The girl, after her one desperate cry that "they  were everywhere around us," had said nothing.
  Monk, after seeing and hearing nothing said, "You’re  trying to kid us, young lady."
  She said nothing. Her face was set, white, and there  was a look on it. The look caused Monk to shiver when
  he glanced away.  He addressed Doc Savage.
  "Doc, what the heck’s goin’ on here?"
  Instead of answering, the bronze man said, "We will  head for Klantic."
  "You mean the mile−high guy I saw, and the one you  took a picture of?"
  "Right."
  Monk hesitated, sighed and said, "Well, he’s the  only thing I’ve seen around here big enough to whip that
  tiger or  leopard or whatever was making them tracks."
  Renny asked, "But how about looking around here?  Whatever took the planes and our equipment left some
  sign, it’s almost  certain."
  Doc Savage, without making explanations, without  arguing, said, "My suggestion is that we push ahead
  without delay."
  Renny asked no questions, offered no other suggested  courses of action.
  "Then that’s what I’m in favor of doing," he said.
  "It may save our lives," the girl said, "but if it  does, it will be because we are lucky."
  They all noticed that she was including herself  among those endangered.
  THE jungle continued its utter silence as they  continued on their way. The game trail which they had
  followed earlier  now proved to lead in an undesired direction, and they had to take to  the jungle.
  The stupefying heat caused them to remember  something that they had overlooked in the excitement of the
  plane  crash—the water canteen.
  "Whew, I’m thirsty!" Renny complained.
  "Me, too," Monk agreed. "I’m sweated out until I got  no more moisture left than a dried apple."
  "A dried prune would be more like it," Ham had  vitality enough to add.
  Doc Savage, as was natural because of his superior  strength and agility, ranged ahead, seeking out the easiest
  routes and  quicker going, covering twice and possibly three times the distance the  others did, and still finding
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  it necessary to wait for them.
  It was during one of these moments when Doc was  ahead that they heard the bell−voiced man.
  There was some doubt at first that the bell voice  belonged to a man. It had a fantastic ringing quality.
  Moreover, the  sounds it was making were not recognizable as words, although it might  have been
  speaking—or chanting—a tongue which none of them had ever  before heard spoken.
  This particular jungle was infested with an  ordinary−looking bird which had a strange clanging cry, and
  which was  called a bell bird.
  "Maybe that bird has learned to talk," Monk  suggested. "Maybe somebody has split one’s tongue, like they
  do  magpies’, and—"
  "Shut up, stupid, and let us listen!" Ham grated.
  They listened, but the strange bell−like voice ended  almost at once. They hurt their eardrums trying to hear it
  again, but  it did not come.
  Monk said, "My vote is that it was a bird."
  Then they noticed the golden−haired girl. She had  changed. Her terror was gone. She was radiant.
  They asked her about it, but she refused to answer,  and looked scared again, although they felt somehow that
  she was acting  now, although she had not been acting earlier.
  Going on, they kept a watch on the girl. But the  heat was so intense, the going so difficult, that they did not
  watch  her any too closely as long as she was with them.
  They did not see her stoop swiftly and pick from  under a distinctive scarlet leaf a three−inch length of hollow
  reed  which was closed at each end with a wooden stopper.
  They did notice the girl when she stopped suddenly  and pointed.
  "Water!" she said. "I want a drink!"
  The water had escaped the notice of the others. It  seemed to be a spring, tiny, probably fairly cool. There was
  some sign  around to show that it had been used by animals, so it was probably all  right.
  The girl dashed forward, sank to her hands and knees  and scooped up water. They let her go first, because
  they were  naturally polite gentlemen.
  They did not see the girl dump the contents of the  hollow reed—a yellow powder which dissolved instantly
  and did not stain  the water—into the spring.
  AFTER the girl, Monk sank beside the spring and  drank. He drank for a long time, and when he arose, he
  looked  distressingly full.
  "I sure took aboard enough to take the wrinkles out  of my hide," he grunted.
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  Then he tried to have Habeas drink out of the spring  ahead of Ham, and there was almost a fight. While it still
  raged, Doc  Savage came up.
  "Swell water," Monk grinned. "The young lady, here,  saw it first."
  "She did?" Doc said.
  Something in the way the bronze man said that caused  Monk to look suddenly sober. But he brightened
  almost at once.
  "Oh, she drank out of it ahead of us," he said.
  He did not know that the girl had imbibed before she  dumped in the yellow powder.
  Doc was last to sink beside the spring and immerse  his features in the clear water.
  Monk, watching the bronze giant, abruptly began to  open and shut his mouth. He put his hands over his
  middle, pressed  hard, then down heavily. Continuing the sitting movement, he lay on his  back, shut his eyes,
  and all of his movements seemed to stop.
  Ham, Johnny, Renny, Long Tom did exactly the same  thing, not in succession, but all at once, with whatever
  difference in  timing there was favoring the order in which they had drunk.
  Doc Savage got up from the spring with great haste.  He ran to his men with great haste. Then his haste
  seemed to leave him  completely; he became interested in the sky, staring intently at such  of it as could be
  seen through the trees.
  He lay down like the others.
  Chapter XIV. THE BIG MAN
  THE girl, Z, stood contemplating the motionless men,  then went to them in quick succession and tested for
  artery pulsation  in their wrists. She nodded over each man, as if satisfied.
  Then she picked up one of the super−machine pistols,  and stepped aside a few paces, put her back against a
  huge tree, and  waited. The manner of her holding the pistol showed she had, by  observation, learned how the
  weapon worked. She was very tense.
  Before long, the strangely bell−like voice which had  sounded earlier came again. It emanated from bushes
  only a few yards  distant.
  "Are they dead, any of them?" it asked.
  The language which the voice spoke was the same one  which it had spoken earlier—a tongue none of Doc
  Savage’s men had  recognized.
  "They are all alive," replied the golden−haired  girl, in the same language. "I did not employ too much of the
  drug. The  spring from which they drank was quite a pool."
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  "I knew you would know the location of all the  springs, and that they would be thirsty," said the bell−like
  voice.  "That was why I concealed various tubes of the drug along your course,  under red leaves, where you
  could find at least one. Were they  suspicious when I called the information to you?"
  "They do not understand our tongue."
  The bell−voiced man now appeared. Several things  were remarkable about him. First, his age, which was
  great. Secondly,  he was a bag of bones, thinner even than gaunt Johnny, Doc’s  archaeologist.
  Finally, he had the same golden hair as Z, and he  wore a leather apron, as had David Hutton—and the
  fabulous giant Doc’s  party had located from the air. The apron, however, was more ornate  than the other two.
  The girl went to him and bestowed upon him a very  ardent and quite Americanized kiss.
  "I love you," she told him.
  He eyed her slyly. "What is that? Love? A new  word you have learned while you have been gone?"
  Z’s hauntingly beautiful eyes slanted the briefest  glance in the direction of Doc Savage.
  "No," she said, "I learned the word long ago from  one of the other white men who chanced to find this place.
  He was fat  and had a very high opinion of himself."
  The bell−voiced man squinted at her. "But perhaps  you have learned more clearly just what the word meant?
  No?"
  "One never keeps anything from you, do they, Ki?"
  Thin, golden−haired, bell−voiced old "Ki" smiled and  changed the subject. He pointed to Doc Savage and his
  men. "Who is  their leader?"
  "Which one would be your guess?" Z countered.
  Ki pointed instantly at Doc Savage. "There. He is  the most remarkable physical specimen I have ever seen."
  "He is their chief," Z agreed.
  "Do you think he is Klantic?"
  Z hesitated. "He does not seem to know what Klantic  is."
  "He would not necessarily know," Ki replied. "The  one who is Klantic will be guided to the spot, and will
  crumble the  statue perhaps by some power greater than we understand. A divine  power. With the crumbling
  of the statue, which only the true Klantic  will ever accomplish, all knowledge will be released to that one."
  Z seemed to think deeply.
  "If he is Klantic, I will be glad," she said  finally. "As glad as I am that you are my father."
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  THE bell−voiced old man now clapped his hands loudly  and rang out a sharp command.
  Men began coining out of the jungle. They moved  quietly, making neither noise or stirring the bushes. There
  was a  military precision about their manner.
  These men carried weapons. At first glance, they  looked like the most ancient of man’s means of killing at a
  distance—the bow and arrow. But they were a bit more than that. Bows  and arrows, all right, but the arrows
  were tipped, not with sharp  points, but with tiny bags of something that was evidently intended to  be
  scattered when the arrows struck.
  The girl noted the number of the armed men.
  "I am glad you travel well−protected," she said.  "Aug and his men are about."
  Ki eyed her sharply. His ancient face had become  suddenly worried. "How do you know?"
  Instead of replying directly, the girl went back and  began telling a story that started here in the jungle prior to
  her  appearance in the vicinity of Cartagena.
  "David Hutton escaped, and I discovered him before  he got out of sight," she said. "I confronted him. He
  tricked me, and  managed to knock me senseless. He carried me to one of the planes—his  own—put me in it,
  and got the plane into the air. He must have been  escaping secretly for many days and working on the plane,
  because it  was ready for the air. We flew for a long time—"
  "But why did he take you along?" Ki interrupted.
  "He wanted," said Z, "proof that the story he had to  tell his people and his world were not the ravings of a
  demented man. I  was to be his proof."
  "Very effective," Ki agreed. "Hutton was not a fool."
  The girl went on with her recital—O’Neel, the Hutton  diary, the Hutton murder, Doc Savage’s intervention,
  the pursuit. She  got around to where O’Neel’s planes had been found missing.
  "I WRECKED Doc Savage’s plane because I knew we were  almost here, and they had seen the—the big
  man," she said. "Then,  around O’Neel’s missing planes, we found what looked like the gigantic  tracks of a
  panther. I do not think they deceived Doc Savage, but the  tracks amazed his men. Doc Savage insisted on
  pushing direct for—the  big man, so he must have guessed that the tracks were made carefully by  men."
  "Giant panther tracks!" Ki rang grimly. "That is  Aug’s old trick, when he commanded our frontier guard. He
  claimed the  fake panther tracks terrified the natives and kept them away from the  vicinity. He even had an
  elaborate arrangement of wooden blocks to tamp  down the grass and soil and make the tracks."
  "He is probably using the blocks again."
  Z said pointedly, "Aug is roving the frontier again,  when he was ordered not to do so. That can mean only
  one thing."
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  "Yes," said Ki. "It means he is hoping to meet men  drifting in here from the outside world—men carrying
  those remarkable  weapons which they call rifles. Aug could use a few rifles."
  "Aug now probably has all the rifles he desires. And  another weapon, like a rifle only worse, known as a
  machine gun. He may  have some of them. O’Neel brought them, probably."
  Ki said, sharply, "Then we will not waste time here!"
  Chapter XV. PRISONER LEGION
  DOC SAVAGE and his five aids lay on a stone floor  that was cold, but clean. Walls and ceiling of the room
  in which they  lay were also stone.
  The only opening was one barely large enough for a  big man to crawl through, and this one aperture was
  closed by a method  ingenious and simple—a bar of heavy stone which dropped in a slot and  fastened there
  with a long peg which could only be reached from the  outside.
  Doc Savage and his aids had not stirred in the  slightest after being shoved into the dungeon.
  Outside, a guard, one of old Ki’s men, took measured  paces back and forth. It was dark, but there was a moon
  at intervals,  when the clouds uncovered it. The guard was sleepy, and he had  perfected, it appeared, a method
  of half dozing while still on his feet.
  The fact that there was a wall at each end of the  beat he paced was of some assistance; when he bumped into
  the wall,  having become too soundly asleep, it awakened him.
  But finally, at one end of the beat, he bumped into  something which was not the wall and which did not
  awaken him. It was a  round stone almost matching the guard’s skull in size, and it put him  asleep for the rest
  of eternity.
  The man who had wielded the stone said to some one  behind him, speaking Spanish, "One of us will be
  enough for this work.  Doc Savage and his men are still asleep, according to what Aug’s spies  have learned."
  "Not asleep," another voice corrected. "Senseless  from the potion which the girl mixed with the spring water.
  It is  expected that they will recover within two or three hours—"
  "This will take care of their recovery," said the  first.
  He turned a knife blade so that it glinted in the  moonlight.
  "Buenos!"
  They parted. One eased away into the night. The one  with the knife—he who had murdered the
  guard—scuttled forward and  dragged the peg out from above the bar that closed the cell where Doc  Savage
  and his men lay motionless.
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  THE second of the two stalkers had started away, but  he had not gone far before he stopped. He explained his
  reason for  stopping to himself in a mutter.
  "El Liberator 
  would take the skin off us both while we still live if this venture  fails," he mumbled. "And El Liberator’s new
  friend, Aug, looks  as if he would enjoy watching the skinning." 
  He waited, gaze fixed on the mouth of the dungeon.  The moving clouds made the moonlight tricky, and there
  was enough wind  to make small moaning sounds now and then. Twice, the furtive watcher  heard a sound
  which he took to be his partner doing the executing.
  One sound, there was no mistaking. It was a  strangled cry, an awful sound, just the start of it. After that, there
  was silence.
  A skulking form emerged from the dungeon opening and  glided swiftly away.
  Satisfied, the watcher himself departed.
  As the man sidled along the remarkable strangeness  of his surroundings became apparent. The moonlight had
  been penetrating  through an opening in a great stone ceiling overhead. When he left this  spot, it was very
  dark, and he used judicious dabs of light from a  flashlight to guide himself.
  It seemed that he had a charred stick, and with this  he had made marks on the stone floor where passages
  intersected. He  followed these marks.
  Eventually, he was confronted with the muzzle of an  automatic rifle.
  "It has been done," he said, in Spanish.
  "El Liberator 
  will be pleased to hear that," said the other, lowering the rifle.  "But where is your partner?" 
  "It was he who did the real job. I stood guard. He  will be here soon."
  "Doc Savage and his five men are dead?"
  "Not a doubt of it."
  "Bueno!"
  They were silent for a time. It was extremely dark.  Once, somewhere in the distance, there was
  ringing−voiced conversation,  and a faint, far−away glow from crude, burning torches.
  "I wonder," said one man finally, "if it is wise  that El Liberator should combine forces with this local, Aug?"
  "Under the circumstances, very wise," retorted the  other. "Aug had enough men to greatly outnumber us."
  "This Aug, will he stick by us?" pondered the first.
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  "Probably. As I gather it, he is ambitious to get  exactly the same thing El Liberator is after."
  "Yes. At first, I thought Aug was a disgruntled  local chief who wanted our guns to help in taking over the
  government.  But he does not seem to care about the government. What he wants is the  secret of Klantic."
  There was a brief silence.
  "And what I want, most of all," said one man  finally, "is to know just what this secret of Klantic is. If El
  Liberator were wise, he would tell us."
  "Why do you think that would be wise?"
  "Men who know just what loot they are after are  better fighters."
  The first man laughed. "El Liberator is more  clever than that. He knows that we know that only a big treasure
  would  attract him. Curiosity makes for greater greed." 
  They stood there muttering, giving no indication of  intending to go any place, or having anything on their
  mind. 
  Finally, a big figure which had been lurking in the  background came upon them silently, seized them, and did
  something  skilled and violent to the backs of their necks, around certain spinal  nerve centers. The men fell
  senseless.
  WHEN the two O’Neel patriots could move again, they  found a giant bronze man crouched over them. The
  bronze man had  appropriated their flashlights, and he used the beam of one to give  them a good look at his
  features.
  "Doc Savage!" one croaked.
  "But you are dead!" the other muttered, and added  several words intended to preserve him from evil spirits.
  "Your friend who was to use the knife was slightly  surprised to find me awake—or he will be when he
  awakens," the bronze  man said, quietly.
  Neither prisoner replied anything.
  "So O’Neel and some native chief called Aug have  combined forces?" Doc queried.
  They held their silence.
  Doc Savage said, "How would you two like to die?"
  They almost didn’t answer that, either; then one  said, "It is well known that you never kill a man."
  "Not a physical death," Doc replied calmly. "A  mental one. How would you like it? A simple thing which can
  be done to  your necks so that you will become idiots and forever remain so?"
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  Doc was bluffing. The operation he mentioned was  possible, but it was work for an equipped operating room
  and plenty of  time.
  The two prisoners did not know. What they did know  was that this bronze giant had a reputation all over the
  world. He was  a fellow you did not fool with. They answered the question.
  "O’Neel and Aug have combined," they said.
  "How many men have they, altogether?"
  "About two hundred," one of the prisoners estimated.  "And it seems that the rest of the population will
  probably swing to  their side. The present rulers are two persons, a father and his  daughter, known as the
  custodians of the secret of Klantic."
  "What are their names?"
  "The man is called Ki, and the girl is the one we  had prisoner for a time. They call her Z."
  "What else do you know?"
  "Very little."
  Doc asked specific questions, and they really seemed  to know no more than they had told.
  The bronze man put them back to sleep with the  skilled manipulation which produced the paralysis. The state
  of  immobility would last a long time, perhaps days, unless it were  relieved.
  Doc left them lying there and went back to the  dungeon where his men and the would−be murderer lay.
  During the return,  Doc followed the same route taken by the partner of the would−be  murderer.
  THE would−be murderer was making sounds very like  the one he had made when Doc seized him as he was
  about to use his  knife. Doc bent over him. The man was in the paralytic state, but  making the noises anyway,
  a condition which sometimes prevailed. Doc  worked on his spinal nerve centers a bit and he became silent.
  Doc next left the dungeon cell, moved carefully  through the darkness to a near−by room, on the floor of
  which was  stacked their equipment—not the larger metal cases which they had  hidden, only to have vanish.
  This stuff was what had been on their  persons.
  Out of Monk’s clothing, Doc unearthed a case holding  an assortment of chemicals. He took this back to the
  dungeon, and began  making tests.
  Drugs are of certain types and act in certain ways.  They respond, depending on their types, to various
  stimulants or  antidotes. Tests, if skillfully enough made, will show which is which.
  When Doc had learned enough to go on, he mixed the  proper drugs from Monk’s pocket chemical
  assortment. His men, since he  dosed them all about together, awakened close to the same time. Monk  came
  out of it mentally still at the disastrous spring.
  "Boy, oh, boy!" he said. "That was sure good water!"
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  Then he looked around him, took in the situation,  and was astute enough to guess instantly what had
  happened.
  "Drugged!" he exploded. "That spring was drugged!"
  "Right," Doc agreed.
  "Where are we?"
  "The girl’s father, a very thin gentleman answering  the name of Ki, came for us with his personal guard," the
  bronze man  explained. "And it seems that birds of a feather have gotten together,  in that O’Neel and a local
  named Aug have combined."
  Big−fisted Renny rumbled, "How’d you learn all this  Doc?"
  "By neglecting to drink from the spring, and  therefore not having been unconscious at any time," the bronze
  man  explained.
  The others were quiet a bit, digesting this.
  "But what tipped you, Doc?" Long Tom wanted to know.
  "About the spring? That bell−like voice which rang  out a bit earlier. It was the girl’s father, incidentally."
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" said big−worded, skinny  Johnny. "You understood it?"
  "Probably because of being closer than the rest of  you," Doc explained. "The tongue was ancient Egyptian."
  "He could have been pretty darn close to me and I  wouldn’t have understood him," Monk offered.
  "Egyptian—here in the Amazon jungle?" Ham murmured.
  "There is no doubt of it," Doc said. "The girl, her  father, and others here speak it fluently."
  "Holy cow!" Renny rumbled. "Just where are we,  anyhow?"
  "Inside the big man we saw from the plane," Doc  replied.
  MONK started to inquire, "Inside the big—" and fell  silent, understanding suddenly that Doc meant the
  mile−high man, as  Monk had dubbed him.
  "I don’t get this," Renny said vaguely. "How can we  be inside him? I certainly don’t feel a bit digested."
  "The big man is of stone," Doc explained. "In other  words, it is Klantic, or an image of some one known as
  Klantic. It is  not as large as it appears from the air. The pallet is really a mound  which has been inclosed by a
  wall, making a defense against anything  less than modern artillery. The huge statue lies atop that,
  honeycombed  with passages and rooms in which these people live."
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  "But who is this Klantic? Who are these people? What  are they doing here?" It was Ham who fired the volley
  of questions.
  "You must think you got somebody in the witness  chair," Monk told him.
  "The answers to those questions," Doc said, "will  have to come out later."
  Monk apparently thought of something. He sprang to  his feet.
  "What about my pig, Habeas Corpus?" he gasped.
  "And Chemistry, my monkey?" Ham echoed.
  "I think the girl has them," Doc replied. "Now, it  is my suggestion that we start looking around this place. It
  should be  interesting."
  They crawled out of the cell. Monk, being nearly as  broad as he was long, had some difficulty negotiating the
  narrow  opening.
  "I wondered what made my shoulders so sore," he  grumbled, when finally through. "They must have bruised
  me cramming me  in there!"
  They filed silently past the murdered guard.
  "Just our luck to have ‘em lay the blame for that  onto us," Long Tom whispered. "We’d have trouble proving
  we didn’t kill  him."
  Renny, trying to keep his great voice down to a  whisper, but not succeeding too well, asked, "What part of
  this Klantic  statue are we in, anyway?"
  "The right arm," Doc replied. "By following  passages—" 
  A strange, croaking voice interrupted, saying in a  sepulchral and utterly strange tone, "Praise be to Jehovah,
  my  brethren, and hold up your heads. Let not fear take your hearts, but  keep Him there, and you may
  succeed."
  DOC SAVAGE and his five aids stopped instantly. It  was a long moment before the bronze man spoke.
  "Who is it?" he asked.
  "Glory be!" exclaimed the sepulchral voice. "Who on  earth are you gentlemen?"
  "Doc Savage," the bronze man said after a brief  hesitation, "and five friends."
  "New prisoners?"
  "Until lately," Doc admitted. "Just now, we are  trying to remedy that."
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  "May the highest success attend your efforts," said  the voice. "When I first heard you, I thought you were
  some of our  other poor unfortunates, trying a break for liberty. They had planned  their attempt for to−night,
  and I was just offering up a prayer for  their success."
  "Who are you?" Doc queried.
  "A missionary, Johnathan Brendel by name, come  twenty long years ago to bring Christianity to the upper
  Amazon. Twenty  years ago! I have been a prisoner since."
  "Good night!" Monk breathed.
  Doc asked, "How many more prisoners?"
  "Nearly two score," replied the missionary. "Half of  them are white men, and the others natives."
  Doc requested, "Name some of them."
  The missionary did so. Listening, Doc’s aids let out  low gasps of amazement, for what they were hearing was
  like the roll  call of the vanished men claimed by the mysterious vastness of the  upper Amazon.
  Name after name had made newspaper headlines time  and again when searching parties went into the jungle,
  and some of the  names were members of the searching parties.
  "They seize every one from the outer world who comes  near," concluded the missionary.
  "But why?" Doc asked.
  "They fear all who come near are trying to steal the  secret of Klantic."
  "Where is the secret?"
  "Sealed somewhere in the head of this gigantic  infidel statue in which we find ourselves," replied the
  missionary.  "The exact whereabouts is known only to the custodians or keepers of  the secret. These number
  two, an elderly and, I must admit, a rather  pleasant gentleman, and his daughter. They are named Ki and Z, as
  nearly as I can Anglicize the pronunciation."
  Doc Savage seemed to be considering. "Earlier  remarks of Ki and Z led me to believe the secret of Klantic is
  being  held for some one who will some day appear and claim it. Is there  something to do with crumbling a
  statue?"
  "A heathen belief, for which Jehovah forgive them,"  said the missionary. "They have a stone image of this
  heathen god,  Klantic, in their infidel idol house. They believe that some day the  deity Klantic will return in
  person, and the stone image will crumble  when he appears before it.
  "A silly superstition, holding forth that the stone  image is the guardian of the secret of Klantic who will be no
  longer  needed, once Klantic appears, hence will crumble."
  Doc asked, "Where is this image?"
  "In the idol house, situated, rather aptly, in the  head of this strange statue."
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  The missionary seemed to be speaking through a  dungeon door very like the one which had lately given
  Monk a squeezing.
  Doc moved close. "How many others are held near by?"
  "They are all in this arm," replied the missionary.
  DOC SAVAGE issued rapid orders in whispers.
  "Monk, you take Long Tom and work to the left. Find  the prisoners, explain that we plan a big break for
  liberty, and  release them."
  Doc shifted to Ham.
  "Ham, you take Renny and Johnny and work to the  right and do the same thing."
  Ham chuckled dryly, "For once, I won’t have to work  with that Monk!"
  Monk had a prompt retort. "You notice that it takes  three of you to do the work me and Renny will do."
  Perhaps some day a situation would happen along  which would be so tense that these two would forget to
  pointedly insult  each other at every opportunity.
  The missionary interposed, "Brethren, some of my  fellow unfortunates may choose not to change their lot.
  After all, we  are not unkindly treated, except when we attempt to escape. These  people here merely do not
  wish any word of the existence of this place  to get to the outer world."
  "They will be permitted to take their choice," Doc  told him.
  "I see you are a righteous man."
  "How about you? Going with us?"
  The missionary was thoughtful a moment
  "I am a peace−loving man, with a nature usually as  gentle as that of a lamb." He grabbed his dungeon bar and
  shook it.  "But sometimes I have a lion in me! Let me out of here!"
  Doc let him out.
  "Help my men release the others," the bronze man  suggested. "Then all of you wait for my return."
  With that, Doc Savage eased away and was lost to the  notice of the others. He carried, as he left the vicinity,
  the case of  chemicals which belonged to Monk.
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  Chapter XVI. UPROAR
  A CONSIDERABLE group of men were gathered in the  corridor when Doc Savage returned. They looked
  impatient, a bit  anxious. They were about evenly divided, half white and half natives.
  Monk served as spokesman.
  "Every durn one of ‘em has decided to join us, Doc,"  the homely chemist said. "We’ve got aviators,
  explorers, rubber scouts,  traders, escaped convicts and plain soldiers of fortune. Every kind of  a guy who
  would happen to drift into this forsaken jungle."
  "Did they all join us willingly?" Doc asked.
  "Sure," Monk said promptly, then took the first  opportunity to get a pair of skinned knuckles out of sight.
  "A few words from a purveyor of the Holy word  helped," said the missionary.
  Doc Savage said, "Our first need is planes. Aug and  O’Neel have them. They have probably dismantled and
  hidden them. It is  advisable, then, for us to seek out this Aug and his partner and see  what we can
  accomplish."
  "Big fellow," a man said, dryly, "You haven’t seen  this Aug, or you wouldn’t be so free about mixing it."
  Monk snorted, "And you haven’t seen this Doc Savage  do his stuff, my pal, or you wouldn’t have any
  doubts."
  "I never heard of Doc Savage," said the other.
  "How long you been here?"
  "Thirty years," said the man.
  The floor was of stone, good footing except that it  was pitted by feet that had trampled it in the past. The men
  formed  into a long file and moved silently. Doc Savage had been showing a  flashlight beam covertly, but
  now he kept it out.
  "Where were you gone for so long Doc?" Monk wanted  to know.
  The bronze man seemed not to hear, and Monk did not  press the query, knowing as he did that seeming not to
  hear was a small  habit Doc had when he didn’t want to answer a question.
  But a moment later, Doc asked, "How does it happen  that we have been able to do so much without being
  observed?"
  The missionary answered that. "There is only one  guard in this arm, which is devoted exclusively to
  prisoners. But at  all of the outer exits, there are other guards."
  "The one guard in this arm must’ve been the poor egg  who was murdered," Long Tom said.
  They came to the end of the arm, and Doc turned  promptly to the left. There was a branch in the passage, and
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  he took  the right one.
  "You seem very familiar with this place?" the  missionary suggested.
  Doc did not explain how he happened to know where he  was going.
  "Pass the word back to be very quiet," the bronze  man said.
  This was done. They moved slowly, but for such a  large body of men, they were unusually quiet. Every one
  had shed all  vestige of footgear.
  "Where are you going?" the missionary wanted to know.
  "Two of O’Neel’s men are available for questioning,"  Doc explained. "They probably can tell us where
  O’Neel and Aug may be  located, or how."
  Then Doc stopped. His breathed command brought the  entire column to a halt.
  "There is some one ahead," he told them.
  As the column froze in the darkness, the tramping of  feet could be heard, and a moment later, a squad of
  marching men  appeared. There were at least thirty of them, and they all wore leather  aprons as their only
  garment, and carried bows and arrows, the arrows  tipped with the little, fragile sacs.
  "The outer guard changing," the missionary  whispered. 
  A man in the column behind Doc screamed. It was  shrill and penetrating, jarred the stillness of the hallway.
  GUNS—Doc’s superfirers were the only ones his crowd  had—might as well have gone off, or a part of the
  ceiling fallen in.  The squad of marching guards kept their heads, deployed swiftly, and  started a charge.
  Doc Savage had started back along the line to  silence the man who had yelled. But it was too late for that to
  do  anybody good. Doc spun back, ran to meet the attack.
  Out of the Doc column popped the man who had yelled.  He ran toward the guards. He was some kind of a
  European. His frantic  cries gave the reason for his betrayal.
  "I warned you!" he screamed. "I warned you! Let me  go, please! Let me go back to my wife, my family!"
  He reached the guards, and one of them calmly  knocked him over the head with a rock.
  "Maybe he be forgiven!" murmured the missionary. "He  hoped to gain their favor by betrayal. I confess the
  same thought  entered my mind, and like Satan, was put behind me only with  difficulty."
  The guards were closer. Each had drawn an arrow from  his quiver, fixed it to bowstring. But they waited for
  close range.
  Doc rapped, "Our machine pistols had explosive  cartridges in them when they were taken from us! Shoot at
  the ceiling,  ahead of the guards! Tear it down in front of them! Do not kill any  one!"
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  Big−fisted Renny leveled his automaticlike weapon,  set himself against the expected recoil, covered his head
  against the  expected explosion as the bullet struck. They all braced themselves.  They opened their mouths
  wide, as artillerymen do to relieve some of  the concussion of big gun firing. Renny pulled trigger.
  The gun made a noise like a small rattail file  breaking.
  "Holy cow!" Renny gulped.
  He looked inside his gun.
  "Ammo drums been emptied!" he rumbled. "Ki and Z and  their gang must’ve done it!"
  Monk, somewhere in the darkness, said in a small  voice, "This reminds me of the time I went bear hunting,
  and Ham had  playfully taken the powder out of my cartridges."
  Renny asked, "What did you do?"
  "Boy, I set a new footrace record!"
  Doc Savage said, "A very good idea! Come on!"
  They were willing to run. It was the wise thing. The  guards were close, and armed, and greater in numbers.
  The men in Doc’s  little column put elbows to sides, tucked chins against chests, and ran.
  The man in charge of the guards rapped an order.  They halted, twanged their bowstrings, and arrows came
  arching. When  the arrows were close, they made hissings. When they hit, there was no  explosion, no
  shattering of steel or obsidian against the stone floor.
  There was a series of sounds as if rotten eggs had  been dropped.
  DOC veered to the missionary’s side. "What are their  arrows pointed with?"
  "A dust worthy of the ingenuity of the devil  himself!"
  "Specifically, what?"
  "The powder from inside a species of jungle  mushroom, or toadstool," the missionary replied. "The dust is
  treated  in some fashion with stuff they let from certain plants, and the venom  of certain snakes. Once you
  inhale it, you are in such instant agony  that you are helpless."
  "Fatal?"
  "Not if you are blessed with a strong body."
  The first flight of arrows did no real damage, for  the reason that Doc’s crowd got around a corner in the
  passage. The  corridor, furthermore, was not adapted especially to archery, being  narrow and not high. A great
  many of the arrows hit the walls and burst.
  Two arrows alone burst in the middle of Doc’s group.
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  "Hold your breaths!" Doc’s trained voice had a  crashing quality of authority that got obedience.
  Only one man failed to comply successfully. He had  been running; he was screaming and groveling and
  clawing at himself, at  his face.
  Doc ran to him, grabbed him, and carried him. The  man was in infinite pain. He gargled and tried to push his
  tongue  completely out of his mouth.
  The arrow dust burned when it made contact with  flesh, sharp, electric agony that was somehow like the
  touch of that  hideous sea creature known as a man−of−war. They gritted their teeth  and kept from breathing
  until they were clear of it. Even when they did  breathe, it stung their lungs and set them gagging and
  staggering.
  "Achoo! Ow−w−w!" 
  Monk squawled. "Talk about your—achoo! Ouch—tear gas!" 
  THEY sped ahead. The uproar had aroused the entire  interior of the giant, fantastic statue in the jungle. Men
  and women  were crying out. A low, undulating moan began to fill the passages and  chambers inside the stone
  man. It was the alarm.
  But the guards did not follow them.
  "They have no way of passing through the irritating  dust without being harmed," Doc guessed aloud. "They
  will have to take  another route in their pursuit."
  "That is what happened," the missionary agreed. "But  where, brother, now that our plan of catching Aug and
  O’Neel unawares  has failed, are we going to betake ourselves?"
  "The head section."
  "Their infidel temple—the quarters of the  custodians, Ki and Z?"
  "Right," Doc said. "Do you know the way?"
  "Very well indeed."
  Doc said, "Guide my five aids and the rest of the  party there!"
  Then the bronze man was gone, lost abruptly in the  darkness. However, Doc was back again almost instantly,
  as if something  had occurred to him.
  "Give me your machine pistols," he requested of his  men. "They are useless without ammunition."
  The five aids handed over their superfirers.
  "Is this every one of them?" Doc asked. "I want  every single one."
  They assured him that he had all of the machine  pistols.
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  Doc Savage carried the weapons away abruptly into  the darkness of the labyrinthine statue interior.
  Chapter XVII. SIEGE
  WHEN he had left his aids well behind, Doc Savage  did a thing which would have puzzled them, and maybe
  worried them a  little.
  Doc left the supermachine pistols lying in the most  public corridor, where they were sure to be found by the
  enemy.
  The weapons, when there was ammunition for them,  were terrible things. O’Neel and Aug and their gang,
  having taken Doc’s  equipment cases, would have ammunition for the pistols.
  After he had gotten rid of the guns, Doc worked  toward the sounds of most excitement. The bronze man was
  silence  itself, as elusive as a shadow.
  A running inhabitant of the statue came racing up,  and Doc faded into a niche. The runner did not pass; he
  was leaped  upon, quickly rendered senseless with the spinal pressure, and relieved  of his leather apron.
  The apron was really somewhat of a combination  trouser, an effective, efficient garment. Certainly, it was
  cool, which  was more than could be said of the atmosphere.
  The bronze man went more boldly now. His skin color  somewhat resembled that of the denizens of the
  Klantic statue, and once  he even managed to run through passages—the corridors were literally  streets—with
  a group.
  There was a great din. The strange moaning sound had  not let up, but kept going steadily, like some strange
  calf in  distress. It was probably a horn of some kind, a danger signal, an  assembly summons. There was
  something about it to bring out goose  pimples.
  In a huge room—about the chest of the statue—the  throng was gathering. Doc deserted the group he was
  running with and  skirted the crowd. Firebrands were burning around the central part of  the room, roughly
  encircling a stone rostrum on which a number of men  stood. Unnoticeable vents in the ceiling carried the
  smoke out. Doc  watched.
  A SQUATTY man with a lot of chest, neck and arms  stood on the rostrum. He had gold hair, but it was
  coarse and stood up  as straight as wire. He wore a leather apron, and two cartridge belts,  crossed, and two
  holsters holding automatic pistols.
  He waved his arms and howled.
  "I am Aug!" he was trying to tell them. "I am the  man of iron! I am the man who should be the custodian of
  the secret of  Klantic! You need an iron man for that job!"
  He went on to tell them more about the job being one  for an iron man, and how much iron he had in his
  system. He gave  examples. Mostly, they were hunting episodes, such as the time he had  throttled a jungle
  leopard, and the time he had tied knots in a snake  as big, he expressed it, as his own chest. It must have been
  a pretty  big snake. He looked tough.
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  He could talk, too. The crowd listened, and while  some of the older ones did not seem much impressed, the
  younger ones,  the ones who still thought about their bodies a good deal, kept their  mouths open and took it in.
  Doc Savage had great difficulty following the  monologue, for it was in ancient Egyptian, very unlike modern
  Egyptian,  which the bronze man could speak fluently.
  Doc had learned it from a famous scholar, who had  assured him that scientists had puzzled it out, guessing at
  some of the  sounds. They had, it seemed, guessed wrong, or the language as spoken  here had changed
  sometime.
  Doc kept his flake gold eyes roving, and before long  discovered an O’Neel patriot. The fellow wore a leather
  apron, but his  features gave him away. These natives were finer, more aristocratic,  although not so much so
  as Ki and Z. The patriot looked like an idiot  in comparison.
  The patriot seemed to have something on his mind. He  listened, or rather, watched the crowd, for it was
  evident that he had  no idea of exactly what was being said. But he knew the effect that Aug  and his chief
  were striving for, and he seemed satisfied.
  The man left the crowd, selected a torch from a pile  of the brands, and applied the end of it to a small fire
  which burned  near by for that purpose. The firebrands were kept in piles all through  the small city inside the
  statue.
  The patriot strode along boldly, and joined two more  of his fellows.
  The latter two had been watching a huge pile of  airplane parts—and the metal cases which held Doc Savage’s
  stores. The  material was in a room which was closed with a clumsy sort of door.  They were trying to get the
  door, which was of stone, shut, when Doc  Savage hit it.
  The impact of the bronze man’s charge carried him  inside.
  THE patriots were corkful of confidence, and so it  was a minute before they got themselves organized.
  Before one of them  got himself organized, rather. For in the space of a hasty breath, Doc  Savage had used a
  fist, a knee, the other fist, and two of them were  down, not entirely senseless, but unable to make much noise.
  The survivor tried to yell and fight. He did not do  a very good job at either. The yell fizzled when Doc
  gathered his face  in one hand. His fist blows landed. But they damaged little except  skin. The man looked
  utterly scared. The bronze man’s body was like  metal in more than looks.
  The fellow kept the utterly scared look on his face  after he became senseless. The paralysis which Doc
  inflicted by expert  pressure sometimes did that. The victims kept the same expressions on  their faces.
  Sometimes they kept the same thought in their mind  throughout, too.
  The three patriots disposed of, Doc Savage whipped  to one of the equipment cases.
  The case holding the ammunition supply for the  machine pistols was in front, plainly marked, and open, but
  Doc ignored  that. The case he chose bore another number, and when he opened it, it  held harmless−looking
  tin cans labeled "coffee."
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  The case had been opened—the lock was broken on it  as well as on the others. O’Neel and Aug must have
  searched everything.  Probably it had been an interesting search.
  Doc Savage carried an armload of the cans which  said, "coffee," when he left the room. He was more careful
  now. Most of  the population of the strange city seemed gathered in the big council  room. That made it easier.
  The stone walls were nowhere less than three feet  thick, and in many spots, much more massive. Several
  times, Doc Savage  paused to examine closely the construction of the place.
  The stones, giant blocks, were fitted together with  a surprising accuracy. Stone artisans and masons must
  have worked over  each piece painstakingly.
  The bronze man joined his companions without any  great difficulty. They were waiting in the section inside
  the head of  the great Klantic statue.
  They were not exactly comfortable.
  "We haven’t got a single gun," Renny complained.  "The first time they rush us, we’re sunk."
  Doc Savage said, "Wait here."
  The bronze man still carried his "coffee" cans. He  went back, and along the passages close to the head, he
  distributed the  cans. He put them in spots where they were not likely to be found. And  he made sure that at
  least one can was in each passage.
  Again, he joined his aids and the rescued prisoners.  They had gathered in a perfectly round stone room which
  was bare of any  decoration, either carving or painting, of any kind.
  Floating in the air in the middle of the room was a  stone statue.
  THE statue in the air was of some bright black  stone, and it was a man, dressed in a leather apron. The man
  was short  of stature, broad, and he had the same remarkable intelligent−looking  features that the rest of the
  Klantic dwellers had.
  "That is the original Klantic, or a statue of him,"  said the missionary. "When the real Klantic returns again, in
  the body  of some mortal man, that statue will crumble to pieces."
  The statue hung in the air, motionless. It was not  as expressionless as statues usually are. The artisan who had
  made this  one had been a master. The figure of the stone thing leaned forward,  and it managed to wear an
  actual expression of intense concentration  and expectancy, all focused on the door.
  "Kinda looks as if the stone guy was expectin’  somebody to come through the door," Monk offered.
  Renny, the engineer, boomed, "What gets me is what  keeps the thing hanging there in the air!"
  The missionary lifted his eyes piously.
  "They told me," he said, "that it was suspended  there by the spiritual strength of the original Klantic. That, of
  course, is an infernal lie. They never did let me close enough to have  a good look."
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  "There’s nothing to stop us now," Renny boomed, and  advanced.
  For a long time, he peered up at the statue. He  shaded his eyes. Finally, he removed his coat and tossed it
  upward. The  coat hit something above the statue and fell back.
  "Thin metal threads, the exact color of the ceiling  and walls, support it," Renny said, loudly. "Well, there’s no
  hocus−pocus about that."
  Monk squinted at the statue.
  "You say, if anybody crumples that, they get this  secret of Klantic?" the homely chemist asked.
  "Exactly," said the missionary.
  "Sort of a Gordian knot, only more so, eh?" Monk  struck an attitude of a magician about to say "presto
  chango" and bring  a rabbit out of a hat or an egg out of a bag just proven empty.  "Statue, crumble!" he
  commanded dramatically.
  There was a squealing and a squeaking and scampering  and into the chamber popped the two pets, Habeas
  and Chemistry.
  "Well," Monk grinned. "I get some results, anyway."
  He looked at the statue. It had not crumbled.
  Several men yelled far away through the passages.  Women shrieked. A modern automatic pistol made
  banging noises. They  could tell it was an automatic because it fired seven times very  rapidly, and they knew
  some of O’Neel’s patriots carried automatics  which held seven cartridges.
  "Sounds like they’re comin’ this way!" Monk  muttered. "Somebody must’ve seen us in here!"
  He was wrong. That became apparent when the noise of  howling, angry men and shrieking equally angry
  women came nearer, and  two running figures suddenly appeared.
  The runners were the elderly Ki and golden−haired Z.  Ki was taking the long strides of a distance runner, and
  Z short ones  of a sprinter. They were making about equal time.
  "Back," Doc directed. "Do not let them know we are  here, or they may not come in."
  They would probably have come in anyway, because the  girl looked at Doc Savage, and showed distinct
  relief.
  "Close the doors!" she ordered. "Aug talked the rest  of them into turning against us! They’re going to take
  away our jobs as  keepers of the secret of Klantic!"
  DOC SAVAGE closed the door because he had planned to  do so anyway. There was an opening in the door,
  in the nature of a  window, but with no glass, of course, through which they could observe  what happened
  outside. There was a hallway of considerable size outside  the door.
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  Renny ran about borrowing coats, and making a bundle  of them. He stuffed the bundle into the window.
  "That’s to keep any of those tricky arrows from  coming in," he explained.
  Ham, who had not hit it off with Z so well from the  first, was eying the young woman caustically.
  "What was wrong with your custodianship that they  objected to?" he asked.
  "Nothing," said the girl.
  Ham looked as if he didn’t believe that.
  The girl snapped, "You elect a president for your  United States every four years, don’t you?"
  "Yes," said Ham, "but what—"
  "Did you ever have one elected that didn’t catch the  devil, as you express it, before his term in office was
  out?"
  Ham squinted at the young woman, wondering how she  had learned so much about American politics.
  "Oh, some of the Americans here told me," she  explained. "The same thing has happened to my father and
  myself.  They’re simply tired of us. Everybody gets tired of anything. They’ll  get rid of us, and later on,
  they’ll wish they hadn’t done anything  about it."
  "Right now, it’s Aug?" Ham asked.
  "Yes," she said.
  "We’ll fix Aug," Ham told her, but as he said it, he  had no idea how they would fix Aug, or even keep Aug
  from fixing them.  Ham just felt that he should suddenly say something encouraging to the  girl, because she
  was really quite a remarkable young woman, and he was  abruptly feeling sorry for her.
  They looked about for weapons. Ki and his daughter,  it seemed, had half a dozen bows and several quivers of
  arrows, all  fitted with the strange toad−stool−dust points.
  "Who among you can use a bow and arrow?" Z wanted to  know.
  "Me," said Monk. "I’m a jack of all trades."
  Ham started to make some crack about that, but there  was a fresh burst of shouting outside. The inhabitants of
  Klantic were  evidently starting a charge.
  Chapter XVIII. THE KLANTIC
  DOC SAVAGE had been busy with Monk’s pocket  laboratory—really a collection of certain basic
  chemicals—and he had  mixed, in a glass bottle, a vile−looking concoction.
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  "Open the door," he requested.
  Long, bony Johnny opened the door. Doc threw his  bottle of mixture through. He threw it very hard, so that it
  broke a  short distance in front of the oncoming horde.
  Results were gratifying. The charge stopped. Angry  yells grew pained. Howls and squawls arose. Bedlam.
  Milling. Flight.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" said Johnny, in a mildly  pleased voice. "That was a short battle. What did you
  throw at them,  Doc?"
  "Some of Monk’s chemicals," Doc explained. "The  fumes stung their eyes and made their skins itch. It was
  harmless, but  something new, and they fled. They will be back."
  "We can keep them off again with another dose of the  stuff," Johnny suggested.
  "That," Doc told him, "was all of it."
  Bony Johnny, scratching his head and fiddling with  his monocle, walked over to thin old Ki, and addressed
  him in  English—small words.
  Ki, it developed, could speak English. In fact, as  Johnny speedily discovered, Ki was as much of a mental
  wizard as was  the young woman, Z.
  Johnny sought out Doc.
  "This fellow Ki seems to have the same remarkable  type of mentality possessed by that girl," he said. "I can’t
  understand  it. I wonder if these people are all as brilliant as that? If so, why  haven’t they advanced farther in
  scientific directions than they have?  Why are they here?"
  Doc said, "Suppose we see if the girl will answer  your questions."
  THEY went over to Z. The ravishing young lady had  been using her spare time to admire Doc’s unusual
  physique. She colored  a little, but Doc appeared not to notice.
  "You have not been very good at answering  questions," the bronze man told her. "Have you reformed yet?"
  "Well," she said, "you seem to be helping us. That  changes things, does it not?"
  It apparently did, but Doc did not comment.
  "These people here are Egyptians of an ancient  strain?" he asked. "They are the descendants of the picked
  forty men  and women whom the Pharaoh Klantic took with him when he vanished out  of Egypt about a
  hundred years preceding the dynasty of Pharaoh  Tut−Ankh−Amen."
  "Yes," said the girl.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" Johnny burst out. "Where  did you get that information, Doc?"
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  "You are an archaeologist," Doc told him. "You have  heard of the Egyptian Pharaoh Klantic, have you not?"
  "Yes," Johnny admitted. "Very little history of  Klantic is available, for some reason or other. He was
  apparently  greatly feared or considered a hoodoo, or something. At any rate, it is  known that he picked a
  score of the most remarkable women, and an equal  number of his most perfect men, and took a number of
  boats, his largest  Nile craft, manned them with many slaves, and sailed away. And that was  the last of him.
  "I have one of the few tablets in existence bearing  the story of Pharaoh Klantic. It happens to be just one
  among a great  many tablets, most of them more important historically. I am a  collector of Egyptian relics,
  you know. I had almost forgotten this  one."
  Johnny hesitated at the end of this long−winded  explanation, then shook his head.
  "My tablet," he said, "refers in some way to a  strange power which this Klantic had. The nature of the power
  is not  stated. I never took much stock in it. Just passed it off as a mistake  in translation on my part."
  "The power of Pharaoh Klantic was real," the girl  said levelly. "He found a secret. It was such an incredible
  secret that  he fled the civilized world of that day, in order that none might seize  and misuse its fabulous
  power."
  "What was it?"
  "Let me tell you the rest of the story first," the  girl said.
  There was a rumbling and muttering of voices outside.
  "I think they’re gettin’ ready to rush us out  there," Monk called.
  "Watch," Doc directed. "When it looks as if they’re  about to make the rush, call me."
  "Righto."
  THE girl said, "Klantic, his twenty strongest men  and his twenty most beautiful women—" She stopped and
  reddened slightly  again. "There were really more than twenty women, because Pharaoh  Klantic brought along
  some extra wives—they all, together with the  slaves, finally reached South America, and sailed up the
  Amazon. They  reached this spot."
  She paused. The yelling outside was getting more  ominous. 
  "Pharaoh Klantic’s slaves built this reclining  likeness of their master," she continued. "Rather, the slaves and
  their  descendants, for the work took many generations, and Pharaoh Klantic’s  descendants carried on."
  "I see," Johnny said, dryly. "Some of those old  Egyptians had great ideas. Take the pyramids. A bigger pile of
  uselessness, I can’t think of."
  The girl drew herself up.
  "This statue," she said, "had its purpose. It was to  receive the secret of Klantic, and keep it, until the world
  had  progressed to such a point where the secret would be safe in the hands  of the average man.
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  "When that day comes, Klantic is to return, his  spirit occupying the body of some mortal from the outer
  world. When  that one arrives"—she paused and pointed at the dangling statue—"the  statue will crumble to
  dust before him. By that sign will the spirit of  Klantic be known."
  "We heard about that," Johnny told her. "What we  want to know is what this secret is, anyhow."
  "My father and myself are the custodians," the girl  said. "We alone know where it is. It is hidden. When the
  reincarnation  of the great Pharaoh Klantic comes, and crumbles the statue, we will  produce the secret." She
  stopped, added, "We are descendants of  Klantic."
  Ham, who had been listening in, came over and said,  "This all sounds like a pretty tall story to me!"
  "If such a statue as this should be unearthed in  Egypt, it would not be considered so incredible!" Johnny
  snapped. "This  statue is not much larger than the Sphinx, and certainly smaller than  any pyramids."
  Ham shrugged, "All right, big words. It’s all  perfectly ordinary. It could have happened in Missouri."
  Johnny ignored the sarcasm. He turned to the girl.
  "Just what is this Secret of the Pharaoh Klantic?"  he asked.
  "The Pharaoh Klantic," the girl replied, "invented a  method of developing the human brain until it had
  incredible power."
  THAT was surprising enough to get a startled silence  of several seconds’ duration.
  "You mean that any stupid man could be made  brilliant?" Johnny demanded.
  "That is what the secret of Klantic can do," said  the girl. "Not only brilliant—mentally overwhelming. The
  power of the  thing surpasses anything your imaginations conceive. You have seen how  I make you think as I
  wish? How I influence your opinions? How I can  even make impressionable subjects see things which are not
  there?"
  "We saw that," Johnny admitted thoughtfully.
  "All right," the girl said. "Think of what an  unscrupulous person can do with that power. The human brain
  becomes so  developed that it will register the thoughts of others, and you can  make others do exactly as you
  wish. They will be helpless. You will not  have to use force. You just think—and they do it!"
  "Can you do all of that?"
  She shook her head. "I have never taken any of the  compound. My powers were inherited from my ancestors,
  and they are not  nearly equal to those which Pharaoh Klantic gave himself with the  secret."
  "Compound?" Johnny interposed.
  She nodded. "It is a mixture which is taken as food  is taken."
  "And it’ll make any stupid fellow bright?"
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  "It will."
  Ham, somewhat skeptical about the whole thing, and  cynical, as he always was, called out dryly.
  "Monk," he said, "We’re hearing about something that  may be your salvation."
  Monk ignored him. The homely chemist had an eye  fixed to the aperture in the door, and he was tense.
  Evidently the mob  outside was getting ready to charge.
  "We’re trapped here," the girl said. "There is no  escape from this room, except by the route which is blocked."
  Johnny put her back on the subject of the secret of  Pharaoh Klantic.
  "You people have lived here for centuries?" he asked.
  "Under the strict rules laid down by Pharaoh  Klantic," she responded. "Always, it has been managed to keep
  the  existence of the place from getting to the outside world."
  "Where is this secret?"
  She shook her head. "Only the one who crumbles the  statue will ever know."
  "All right," Johnny said. "But tell me more about  it. Will it make any man have mental powers beyond your
  own?"
  "Any man," said the girl. "Providing, of course,  that the brain is not diseased, or the person an idiot."
  "That lets Monk out," Ham decided aloud. "He’ll  never be helped."
  Monk, who probably didn’t hear that, yelled,  "They’re coming, Doc!"
  Doc ran to the door. The charge had started.
  DOC SAVAGE wrenched at the door, got it open, and  sprang outside.
  "Get some flashlight beams and torchlight on me!" he  ordered swiftly.
  The light was put on him. It brought out his  remarkable physique, and emphasized particularly the
  unafraidness of  his attitude. He lifted his arms, and so imposing was the picture that  he presented that the
  mob stopped.
  Or perhaps they knew they had him cornered, and  thought it wouldn’t hurt to stop and hear what he had to
  say.
  What he had to say was short.
  "For your own good, do not rush us!" he called, and  the reverberations of his powerful, trained voice
  probably carried  throughout the great statue.
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  These descendants of Pharaoh Klantic—and probably  his slaves—were not tall people, and over their heads,
  Doc could spot  El Liberator O’Neel, his men, and Aug. They were all together in a  compact body, and
  toward the front of the crowd.
  They had armed themselves with Doc’s supermachine  pistols.
  Doc repeated his warning.
  "To rush us," he called, "will mean death to many,  if not all of you!"
  They didn’t care for that. It was not what they  expected, was not an offer to dicker for a truce, or—this would
  have  been best of all—a plea to be spared.
  Doc whipped back inside the door a shade ahead of a  volley of arrows with dust−bag points. The arrows
  made poppings as they  burst against the stone door.
  "Whew!" Monk gasped. "I barely got these coats  jammed in the hole in the door in time!"
  Old Ki yelled, "We are doomed!" in English.
  "Not as long as we have life," the missionary told  him.
  Doc rapped, "Get down! Close to the walls!"
  "What?" some one among the freed prisoners exploded.
  "Crouch against the walls!" Doc called. "In a  moment—"
  It was sooner. The door fell in; the walls shook and  pieces dropped off; the floor changed and became less
  level, and an  enormous quantity of dust and noise came from everywhere.
  The first crash did not end it. A rumbling, roaring,  grinding followed. Falling stone. Shifting stone. The
  humans caught  outside made awful noises. Groans. Cries. Sobs. These sounds went on as  if they were never
  intended to stop.
  DOC SAVAGE called, "Any one hurt?"
  "One man crushed back here," Long Tom shouted.  "Piece of the wall fell on his legs. He’ll live!"
  Monk came scuttling to Doc’s side. "What on earth  happened?"
  "Remember, before we left New York on that cruise  ship, each of you turned in his supermachine pistol at
  headquarters to  have a new grip applied?" Doc asked.
  "Sure, but what—"
  "That grip was made of a composition containing a  radioactive substance," Doc told him. "The original
  purpose was to make  it easier to locate these deadly weapons if they were stolen. You know  that we have
  detectors which can locate radioactive materials at great  distances."
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  Monk said, "I still don’t see!"
  "What happens when a radioactive material is brought  near a common electroscope?" Doc asked.
  "The electroscope leaves fly apart, if properly  charged."
  "All right," the bronze man said. "If you attach one  electrical wire to one leaf, and another wire to a contact
  which the  leaf touches when it opens, the result is the closing of an electric  circuit, which can be used to
  explode a bomb. The actual arrangement  was a bit more complicated, but—"
  "Blazes!" Monk said, "I remember you making up them  bombs. Put them in what looked like coffee cans,
  didn’t you?"
  Renny, who had gotten to the door, taken a look out  into the corridor, and was now approaching, said, "It
  looks as if  O’Neel, Aug and their crowd were leading the charge."
  "Any of them alive?" Doc asked.
  "I’m going out to see."
  Chapter XIX. THE GOLDEN KNOT
  RENNY could have saved his time, and spared himself  a gory sight. The neck portion of the statue of Klantic
  had been made  of extra large blocks, and they had all come down.
  They found El Liberator O’Neel, Aug, and the  others several days later, after a great deal of hard labor and
  engineering ability had been expended moving the stones.
  "They just missed being grease spots," explained  Monk, who was a bit callous at times.
  The shift in attitude of the other dwellers inside  the great statue of Pharaoh Klantic was remarkable. Or
  perhaps it was  generalship on Doc Savage’s part. The bronze man urged Ki and the girl,  Z, to step out and
  assert their authority immediately.
  Results had been everything desired. Those of the  ringleaders who survived were even put in dungeons by the
  others, at  the girl’s command.
  Doc Savage and his aids, having disposed of O’Neel  and his killers—that they had died was not of Doc’s
  choosing, for his  attempt to prevent them rushing had been a genuine effort—began to have  thoughts of
  leaving.
  They asked many questions, but gave up finding the  secret of Klantic when they discovered it could only be
  accomplished by  violence.
  "After all, it belongs to these people," Doc  explained. "We can hardly play the part of pirates."
  "Then we’ll leave here soon?" Monk wanted to know.
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  "As soon as we can assemble the planes which Aug and  O’Neel dissembled," Doc agreed.
  They started work on the planes. It was promptly  ordered stopped. They became aware of a complication.
  They were not going to be permitted to leave!
  "THAT is a hell of a note!" This from big−worded  Johnny, who, while he might shatter the dictionary, rarely
  used  profanity.
  There was naturally a great deal of argument. Doc  and his aids put up a very logical case why they should be
  permitted to  leave. But they were not met with logic in return. They were met with  the simple statement that
  they would not be permitted to leave, and  that was that.
  News of the existence of the secret of Pharaoh  Klantic must never reach the outer world—until the
  reincarnation came  to get it, first crumbling the statue.
  Doc Savage said, "But is not every newcomer given  his chance to crumble the statue?"
  "Absolutely," said Z and Ki together.
  "I," Doc told them, "have not had mine."
  Z smiled at him sweetly. She had failed to make much  headway with the bronze man thus far, and she was
  daily becoming more  determined, it appeared.
  "You think you can crumble the statue?" she asked.
  "You yourself said the reincarnated one might never  know his power until he confronted the statue," Doc
  reminded.
  So they led him into the big statue room, which had  been repaired somewhat. What happened next was
  something that the  bronze man’s five aids remembered for a long time.
  Doc stood under the statue, after approaching it  with a measured, solemn stride. He seemed to be engaged in
  deep  thought. This mood increased, until there was a strange tensity in the  way he stood. He seemed gripped
  by some etheral power.
  His trilling sound came into being, and ran up and  down its fantastic scale rapidly. His arms began to rise.
  They were  stiff. The fingers were distended. The arms arose faster. The hands  came together with a distinct
  clap over the bronze man’s head. He stood  there.
  The statue of Klantic began to come apart! 
  A few particles fell off at first. Then they came away more  rapidly. A stream of them followed. 
  Finally, the whole remnant of the statue fell to the  floor, and burst into a small pile of dark dust.
  There was utter silence for a long moment. Then a  great cry went up.
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  "The Pharaoh Klantic has returned!"
  The day or two that followed was extremely hectic.  They tried to set Doc up in the style of a Pharaoh, and it
  seemed the  Pharaoh had lived very luxuriously indeed.
  In the present case, one of the luxuries, it  developed, was to be attractive Z. The new Pharaoh Klantic was
  supposed  to take her for wife. Every one supposed he naturally would. Doc was  conducted half through an
  ancient Egyptian marriage ceremony before he  discovered what it was.
  He got it stopped and got out of it by declaring the  ceremony was not grand enough to befit the new Pharaoh
  Klantic.
  In the meantime, Monk was the first to try out the  dark−red powder which was the secret of Klantic—the
  compound supposed  to give the one who used it a stimulated brain development.
  The old man, Ki, and the girl, Z, had produced the  red stuff from under the temple floor, near where the
  statue had hung.  The powder, they said, was all that was left and which had been handed  down through the
  centuries. There was no formula.
  "Chemical analysis will show us its content," Doc  said.
  But Monk wanted to try it first. He took some and  awaited results.
  "But how could the stuff work?" Ham muttered  thoughtfully, eying his arch−antagonist Monk as if he feared
  he might  develop into too much to handle.
  "It is possible," Doc said. "It may be merely a  stimulant. Body glands, the thyroid for instance, are made large
  or  small by either too much or not enough of certain substances."
  They all watched Monk anxiously.
  "What," Ham asked him finally, "Is it doing to you,  Monk?"
  "It’s giving me a belly ache!" Monk grimaced.
  That, it eventually developed, was all the secret of  Klantic was good for.
  DOC SAVAGE and his aids had no trouble, now,  assembling the planes in the nearest jungle clearing.
  They did not explain that the secret of Klantic had,  if it was ever of any value, become worthless by being
  kept for  centuries in such a climate. In fact, they were never sure about the  secret. Chemical analysis told
  them nothing. The ingredients were too  far deteriorated.
  Doc managed to leave Z behind, after some argument.
  Their plane—they all rode in one craft, and planned  to send back others for such of the prisoners as desired to
  leave—took  the air.
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  Only then did Doc Savage clear up something that had  been puzzling his aids. He had kept it to himself thus
  far.
  "Just how did that statue happen to crumble?" Monk  wanted to know.
  "Remember the Gordian knot?" Doc asked.
  "Sure. It was a knot and the guy who separated the  two pieces of rope which were tied together was supposed
  to become the  ruler of the world, or something."
  Doc said, "The fellow who finally separated the  ropes used a trick. He cut them with his sword."
  "Huh!" Monk exploded. "You don’t mean to tell me you  used—"
  "A trick," Doc agreed. "During my first escape from  the dungeon, I managed to locate your pocket chemical
  case. We had  already heard about this statue, remember? It seemed like a good idea  to have a look at it at the
  time." 
  Doc paused.
  Monk said, "I begin to see a light."
  "The stone was of a type which could be dissolved,  or its binding structure dissolved, with certain
  chemicals," Doc went  on. "Once it was soaked with these chemicals, it was only necessary to  toss on a
  concentrated bit of the chemical to complete the  disintegration."
  "Oh!" Monk said. "You did that last when you threw  your hands up in the air!"
  The homely chemist sat there and thought about it  for a while.
  "That," he chuckled finally, "is what I call taking  care of the Gordian knot."
  Ham, who always disagreed with Monk whether he was  right or wrong, snapped, "At least they didn’t have
  monkeys around in  those times to give them headaches with their looks!"
  "You—you shyster lawyer!" piped Monk. "I’ll tear you  apart! I’ll—"
  Ham, dodging a swinging fist, proceeded to defend  himself as best as he could with his sword cane.
  "Monk’s sure a terror when he gets going," boomed  Renny. "I wonder if them two will ever stop fighting?"
  THE END
   THE MENTAL WIZARD
  Chapter XIX. THE GOLDEN KNOT
  105
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Vault2.0.-.Fiction-and-audiobooks/Books/R/Robeson, Kenneth/049 The Mental Wizard.pdf