TEXT:  
   
  THE  DAGGER IN THE SKY 
  A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson 
   
  Originally published in DOC SAVAGE Magazine December 1939 
   
   
   
  DEATH NEVER FAILED TO FOLLOW THE MYSTIC SIGN OF 
   
  THE DAGGER IN THE SKY 
   
  A Complete Book-length Novel 
   
  by KENNETH ROBESON 
   
  Chapter I 
  THE DAGGER 
   
  THE street should be very clean. The 
  long-faced man had been sweeping it since 
  daylight. 
  He had appeared at dawn with a 
  broom and a cart—and his curiosity—and he 
  had been cleaning the street since, up and 
  down and back and forth, doing all his 
  sweeping in the one block. 
  
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  2 
  Twice he had been nearly run over. 
  First a truck almost got him; the next time it 
  was a taxicab, the driver of which leaned out 
  and swore for a minute and ten seconds 
  without once repeating himself, after which 
  the long-faced street sweeper walked over to 
  the cab driver and they had words in voices 
  low enough for nobody to overhear. The taxi 
  driver pulled his head back inside and drove 
  off meekly. 
  If onlookers were interested, they 
  probably thought the street sweeper had said 
  something like, “Beat it, or I’ll take this broom 
  and knock your ugly head off!” 
  As a matter of fact, the conversation 
  was slightly different. 
  “Doc Savage has not appeared,” 
  said the street sweeper. 
  “Any sign of the one from South 
  America?” 
  “None.” 
  “Well, you know the orders.” 
  “You bet.” 
  The long-faced man went back to 
  sweeping streets; he continued to sweep 
  back and forth, up and down, on the same 
  block. 
  The hours passed, and it got to be 
  four o’clock in the afternoon. Now and then 
  during the day a pedestrian had paused and 
  stared up curiously at the top of the huge 
  building which filled one side of the block. In 
  a number of instances, pedestrians had also 
  turned into the lobby of the skyscraper and 
  stood for a time gawking at the directory 
  listing the firms which occupied office space 
  in the building. 
  Two of these curiosity seekers came 
  out and stopped, purely by chance, so that 
  the street sweeper overheard them. 
  “Joe, you’re as crazy as a bedbug!” 
  said one. “His name wasn’t even listed in the 
  lobby.” 
  “Don’t care. He has his headquarters 
  on the eighty-sixth floor. I know a guy who 
  knows him, I tell you.” 
  “Then why ain’t he listed?” 
  “How would I know? Because of 
  guys like you and me, maybe—mugs who 
  are just curious. Would you want guys 
  barging in on you just to see what you looked 
  like? It must be hell to be a celebrity.” 
  The other gave his jaw a thoughtful 
  rub. 
  “It would be more hell,” he said, “to 
  do the kind of work that big bronze guy 
  does.” 
  The pair ambled away. 
  Soon after four o’clock a taxicab 
  nearly ran over the long-faced street sweeper 
  again. It was the same cab. They went 
  through the same display of tempers in order 
  to exchange a few low-voiced words. 
  “Hey, Sid, any sign yet?” asked the 
  cab driver. 
  “Nope.” The long-faced man scowled 
  disagreeably. “Say, I didn’t know this Doc 
  Savage—or the Man of Bronze, as they call 
  him—had quite so much reputation. You 
  know something? Half the people who pass 
  here gawk up at that eighty-sixth floor. I 
  thought you said the public didn’t know much 
  about him?” 
  “They don’t.” 
  “Then why do they gawk?” 
  “They’re curious, Sid. It’s what they 
  don’t know that makes them gawk, don’t you 
  see? They’ve just read wild stuff in the 
  newspapers. A lot of guess-writing by the 
  reporters. Stuff about Doc Savage being one 
  of the greatest scientists of this century, 
  and—well—a physical marvel and mental 
  wizard—those are the words they use. And 
  the other things they tell about him—the 
  things he is supposed to have done.” 
  “And that stuff isn’t true?” 
  “He’s overrated. Hell, every celebrity 
  is overrated!” 
  “This one had better not be half what 
  they seem to think he is,” said the street 
  sweeper grimly, “or I’m personally heading 
  for tall timber.” 
   
   
  THE 
  long-faced 
  man 
  had 
  endeavored at the beginning of his day to 
  give the idea that he was stoop-shouldered 
  and afflicted with a limp, but now he was 
  getting tired, and he frequently forgot to 
  affect both stoop and limp. He was not a tall 
  man, in spite of the lean length of his face. 
  He had dark eyes and hair; his face, once the 
  make-up was removed, would probably be 
  more 
  healthy-looking, 
  but 
  not 
  exactly 
  confidence-inspiring. 
  He did not seem overly happy about 
  his present job. 
  Suddenly—it 
  was 
  exactly 
  six 
  o’clock—the 
  man 
  stopped 
  sweeping, 
  chucked his broom in the cart, shoved the 
  
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  3 
  cart against the curb, and climbed into the 
  most convenient taxicab. It happened—not 
  by accident, either—that the cab was the one 
  driven by the man with whom he had talked 
  twice that day. 
  “Savage 
  leaving?” 
  asked 
  the 
  hackman. 
  “Yes. Just pulled out of that drive 
  from his private garage in the basement.” 
  “Which car?” 
  “That black one yonder.” 
  “Hell, that little jalopy? If I had his 
  reputation, I would have me a limousine a 
  block long, with a Jap to drive and two 
  Russian dukes to open the doors.” 
  “Sure. And attract so much attention 
  you’d get your head shot out from between 
  your ears inside of twenty four hours!” 
  The cab followed the small black car. 
  It was not a difficult pursuit, the pace being 
  slow and traffic not too thick, particularly after 
  they reached the vicinity of the Hudson River 
  water front. 
  The cab driver had been thinking. 
  “If I had that bronze guy’s reputation, 
  I would also have me a harem of chorus 
  babes,” he said cheerfully. Then he made a 
  clucking noise of disapproval. “I hear he 
  never has anything to do with women. What 
  do you think of that?” 
  The small black car halted before a 
  large, unimpressive looking brick warehouse 
  which was built so that it extended out into 
  the river, and bore a sign reading: Hidalgo 
  Trading 
  Company. 
  The 
  car 
  remained 
  stationary a moment, then big doors in the 
  end of the structure rolled mysteriously open. 
  “Radio-controlled doors,” the long-
  faced man muttered.  
  “Yeah. Say, Sid, I hear he uses more 
  different kinds of gadgets—” 
  “Drive to the plane. Quick!” 
  The taxicab swung right, gathered 
  speed for half a dozen blocks, then careened 
  out onto a ramshackle pier to which a 
  seaplane was moored. There was nothing 
  ramshackle about the plane; it was as fast a 
  thing as money could buy. 
  The pilot was a wide man with a 
  gloomy expression and a habit of frequently 
  looking all around him. 
  “Hello, Sid,” he said. “What goes 
  on?” 
  “Savage just went to his warehouse 
  hangar,” the long-faced man barked. He 
  scrambled into the plane. “Come on! Let’s 
  get this thing in the air!” 
  “What if he don’t leave by plane? 
  Hadn’t we better wait and watch?” 
  “And make him suspicious by having 
  us take off directly behind him? Don’t be a 
  dope! He ain’t as likely to suspect a plane 
  already in the air.” 
  They untied the plane and started 
  the motor, propeller slipstream flattened the 
  water, and the ship soon climbed up into the 
  afternoon sky. 
  “There he comes,” called the pilot, 
  looking down. 
  Far below, a lean, bronze-colored 
  seaplane moved out of the huge old structure 
  that pretended to be a warehouse. It nosed 
  into the wind, suddenly gathered speed, then 
  slanted up into the sky. 
  It flew south. 
  “Going south, Sid,” said the pilot 
  grimly. 
  The other man settled back, and his 
  long face became longer and slowly twisted 
  under 
  the 
  grease-paint, 
  street-sweeper 
  disguise, so that his manner and his 
  expression both were almost completely 
  frightened. 
  “This is exactly what we were afraid 
  of!” he groaned. 
  The pilot snorted. 
  “Why worry, Sid?” he said. “He’ll be 
  dead inside of three hours!” 
   
   
  THE day was cold, but not as cold as 
  it might have been, for the weather was not 
  seasonal. This was a late fall day. It had 
  been pleasantly warm, even a little sultry, 
  although 
  radio 
  predictions 
  indicated 
  a 
  blizzard boiling down from the north and the 
  sun was wrapped in a cold, purplish haze. 
  There was something unnatural about the 
  day. 
  Doc Savage flew the plane alone, 
  relaxed in the comfortable seat. The air was 
  sultry, the whole aspect of the world was 
  unpleasant, and he was glad to be heading 
  south on his first real vacation. 
  It was his intention that nothing 
  should happen to him—except eating and 
  sleeping and fishing—for at least a month. 
  Recently it had occurred to him that 
  he might be turning into too much of a 
  machine—becoming, in fact, as superhuman 
  as many persons thought he was. He did not 
  
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  4 
  like 
  that 
  idea. 
  He 
  had 
  always 
  been 
  apprehensive lest something of the kind 
  occur. The scientists who had trained him 
  during his childhood had been afraid of his 
  losing human qualities; they had guarded him 
  against this as much as possible. When a 
  man’s entire life is fantastic, he must guard 
  against 
  his 
  own 
  personality 
  becoming 
  strange. 
  Doc Savage’s existence had been 
  fantastic from the cradle. In childhood he was 
  turned over to science for training, and 
  scores of the leading scientists of the world 
  had contributed to building his body and 
  mind. The whole weird project—the scientific 
  endeavor to build a superman—had been 
  successful to an uncanny degree, possibly 
  because nature had already equipped Doc 
  Savage 
  with 
  a 
  strong 
  body 
  and 
  an 
  unhampered brain. 
  The training was no experiment, no 
  scientist’s crack-brained dream. There had 
  been a deliberate purpose, and the purpose 
  was to fit Doc Savage for a strange career, 
  the one he followed now. 
  The career was the unusual and 
  always 
  trouble-earning 
  one 
  of 
  righting 
  wrongs and punishing evildoers who seemed 
  to be outside the law, traveling to the far 
  corners of the earth, if necessary, to do so. 
  He had five assistants in this unusual 
  work. Each of the five was a specialist in 
  some 
  particular 
  science. 
  They 
  had 
  associated themselves with Doc Savage 
  because of a liking for adventure, and 
  probably admiration for the rather amazing 
  fellow who was Doc Savage. 
  Outwardly, even, Doc Savage was 
  unusual. His size was startling, although he 
  was proportioned so symmetrically that when 
  he stood apart from other men, and from 
  objects to which his magnitude could be 
  compared, he seemed of average build. His 
  skin had a perpetual deep-bronze tint given 
  by tropical suns, his hair was a slightly darker 
  bronze, very straight. But his eyes were 
  undeniably the most striking aspect of him; 
  they were a strange golden tint, like pools of 
  flake gold, and full of alert life, as if always 
  stirred by tiny winds. His unusual eyes gave 
  him the most trouble whenever he donned a 
  disguise. 
  He had made scientific discoveries in 
  a dozen fields that were half a century ahead 
  of the times; mention of his name was 
  enough to give the jitters to criminals in any 
  part of the world; he could be instantly 
  received into the presence of any president, 
  king or dictator in the world. 
  But he was getting worried lest he 
  not feel the same things, like the same 
  things, as an ordinary guy. He hoped that a 
  month of complete change would fix that up. 
  It would be his first real vacation. 
  He landed at the big transatlantic 
  seaplane base in Baltimore and watched the 
  plane refueled, then entered the comfortable 
  restaurant. For dinner he deliberately ordered 
  one or two dishes which scientists claimed 
  people would be better off if they never ate. 
  On this vacation he wasn’t going to live 
  scientifically if he could help it. He spent two 
  hours over dinner. 
  Sid, the long-faced man, watched 
  Doc Savage come out of the restaurant. The 
  pilot of Sid’s plane—the craft had followed 
  Doc’s ship carefully to Baltimore—stood 
  nearby. 
  “There he goes,” Sid muttered. 
  “Take 
  a 
  good 
  look,” 
  the 
  pilot 
  suggested. “It’s probably the last anybody will 
  ever see of him.” 
  They kept their eyes on Doc Savage 
  while he climbed into his plane—a group of 
  airport attendants and fliers had gathered to 
  admire the advanced design of the ship—and 
  taxied out into the bay. The breeze was 
  offshore at this point, so it was necessary to 
  taxi far out in the bay in order to take off into 
  the wind, the proper way. 
  It was very dark out where the plane 
  stopped and turned. 
  Sid made an uneasy growling noise. 
  “We had better follow him.” 
  “Why?” asked the pilot. 
  “Just to be sure we haven’t guessed 
  wrong.” 
  The pilot did not favor the idea, but 
  Sid was evidently in charge, so they returned 
  to their own fast plane, which they had 
  moored nearby, and climbed in. 
  A moaning comet passed them in the 
  darkness, climbing skyward. 
  “There he goes,” Sid said. “Keep 
  track of his lights.” 
  They whipped over the water, went 
  on step with waves rattling against the 
  pontoons, then arched up and lined out after 
  the Doc Savage plane, the white taillight of 
  which was barely discernible. Their own 
  lights they kept extinguished. 
  
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  5 
  Clouds 
  dropped 
  behind, 
  and 
  darkness gave way to remarkably bright 
  moonlight. 
  “He may see us,” Sid warned. 
  “What if he does? It’s too late for him 
  to do anything about it.” 
  Sid 
  did 
  nothing 
  but 
  look 
  apprehensive and frightened. He watched 
  tensely. 
  “Look!” he squalled. 
  Intense white light had flooded the 
  cabin interior of the Doc Savage ship. It was 
  flame. Peculiar flame, like the blaze that 
  comes from old-fashioned photo flashlight 
  powder. But there was no smoke. The flash 
  was momentary, then gone. 
  The plane rolled over slowly, as if 
  tired, and began falling. It tumbled for the first 
  few hundred feet, then went into the madly 
  erratic falling horror known as a tailspin. No 
  smoke came from the ship, no flames. 
  It did not hit the earth squarely. It 
  struck at a slant, nose first, scooping up a 
  long cloud of dust that got fatter. Out of this 
  dust the plane came hopping, what was left 
  of it. The carcass rolled possibly a hundred 
  yards, then stopped. 
  The black dagger then appeared in 
  the sky. 
   
   
  Chapter II 
  SID HAS A STORY 
   
  THE 
  blade, 
  at 
  a 
  conservative 
  estimate, was two hundred feet long. The hilt 
  was less, perhaps fifty feet, while the cross 
  guard was twenty feet or so in length. It was 
  black, intensely black, even in moonlight, 
  which tends to make all things seem gray. 
  The resemblance the thing bore to a 
  dagger was instantly noticeable. The long 
  blade came to a needle point; the whole thing 
  lying, roughly, in a north-and-south direction 
  across the sky, the tip pointing to the south. 
  Sid, his body full of tense muscles, 
  stared at the phenomenon. His long face was 
  jammed against the plane window. 
  The dagger remained in the sky—it 
  was a few hundred feet directly above the 
  spot 
  where 
  Doc 
  Savage’s 
  plane 
  had 
  crashed—for a long time. The interval during 
  which the black dagger was in existence 
  seemed an age. Probably it was at least a 
  minute. 
  Then the thing faded, vanishing 
  rather quickly and appearing to turn into a 
  dark haze, then into nothing, so that the ugly 
  black aspect was evident to the last. 
  Sid made a rattling noise when he 
  tried to speak, cleared his throat. 
  “We bub-better go down and look,” 
  he said, stuttering a little. 
  Doc Savage’s plane had hit in a field 
  which had been fall-plowed and harrowed, 
  which accounted for the dust when the craft 
  struck. The soft ground was a poor spot for a 
  landing, but a level meadow lay adjacent, 
  and Sid’s pilot landed there. 
  “You go look,” the pilot directed. 
  “But—” 
  “I’ll stay here,” the pilot said, “and 
  watch our plane.” 
  His voice was harsh, determined. 
  Sid cursed him, said, “Damn you! 
  You’re not taking any chances!” 
  “The hell with you! I was hired to fly, 
  and that’s all.” 
  Sid approached the plane warily. He 
  carried a flashlight, used it. The fuselage of 
  the Doc Savage ship had shed wings, 
  undercarriage, part of the tail, and was 
  almost a ball of metal. He worked for a while 
  before he got the door open; it came off 
  entirely, and he fell sprawling with it. 
  He got up, looked inside the cabin, 
  said, “Ugh!” in a sick voice, and backed 
  away. 
  The cabin interior was charred, 
  blackened. Paint had curled, hung to the 
  metal in scabs; leather of the seats was 
  darkly scorched. There could have been no 
  living thing in the cabin, for it was as if a 
  tongue of white-hot flame had licked the 
  place. 
  Sid tried to force himself to crawl into 
  the plane. He wedged half in, put his hand on 
  a seat; the metal was still hot to touch, and 
  the leather crumpled and broke and springs 
  and stuffing jumped out, making a slight 
  chugging sound. The seat stuffing struck Sid 
  in the face, and he cried out and staggered 
  backward. 
  Suddenly his nerve collapsed. 
  He snarled, “I didn’t like this in the 
  first place,” and whirled and ran for his own 
  plane. 
  He had covered about half the 
  distance back to his plane—he was climbing 
  through the brush-tangled fence which 
  separated the meadow from the plowed 
  
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  6 
  field—when Doc Savage tripped him, fell 
  upon him and clapped his hand over his 
  mouth to prevent an outcry. 
   
   
   
  Doc Savage tripped Sid and clapped his hand  
  over his mouth to prevent any outcry! 
   
  UNFORTUNATELY Sid had made 
  noise in falling. 
  The plane pilot yelled, “Hey, Sid! 
  What the devil’s wrong?” 
  Doc Savage called, “Nothing. I just 
  stumbled.” In a much lower tone, a whisper, 
  Doc said, “Monk! Get that man at the plane.” 
  “Boy, watch me get ‘im!” replied a 
  voice that might have belonged to a child. 
  The owner of the small voice—he 
  was nearly as wide as he was tall—jumped 
  out of the brush and ran toward the plane. He 
  traveled with a gangling lope that was 
  something like the gait of an ape in a hurry. 
  The pilot took alarm, jumped back in 
  his plane, and batted the throttle with a palm. 
  The engine was turning over. It whooped; 
  slipstream scooped up a cloud of dry grass. 
  The plane rolled. The apish fellow, Monk, 
  chased it. Once he almost closed large, hairy 
  hands over the rudder edge, but didn’t quite 
  
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  7 
  make it. The plane picked up its tail and fled 
  aloft into the night. 
  Monk stopped and went through a 
  remarkable performance of jumping up and 
  down and squalling. 
  He went back to Doc Savage and 
  reported: “He got away.” 
  Sid had been staring with both his 
  mouth and his eyes open as wide as they 
  could possibly get. Now he came around to 
  believing the fact that Doc Savage was still 
  alive. 
  “But you . . . you died in that plane!” 
  he muttered. 
  Monk snorted, asked, “Should we 
  disillusion him, Doc?” 
  “It would do no harm,” the bronze 
  man said. 
  Monk got a great deal of pleasure 
  out of enlightening their prisoner. “Whoever 
  you are, you ain’t as wise as you figured. Doc 
  saw that a plane was following him as soon 
  as he left New York, and when he landed in 
  Baltimore for dinner he saw you were 
  watching him. So he went to a telephone and 
  called me and Ham, and we came down in 
  our fastest plane and staged a little circus for 
  you.” 
  “Circus?” 
  “Well, it’ll be a circus before we’re 
  done with you. Did you ever hear of radio-
  controlled aërial torpedoes? You should 
  have. They were invented as far back as the 
  World War.” 
  “But you took off in the plane from 
  Baltimore,” Sid mumbled. 
  “There’s where you’re wrong. I’m 
  explaining it. Doc just taxied down to the end 
  of the bay where it was dark, connected the 
  radio-control robot on his plane to the 
  controls—all of our planes are equipped with 
  the robots, incidentally, because we’ve used 
  this stunt before—and then Doc jumped 
  overboard and swam to my plane. We simply 
  sent the other plane off the water, controlled 
  it by radio, like you control an aërial torpedo, 
  waited until we saw you take off in pursuit, 
  and followed along to see what would 
  happen.” 
  Sid shuddered, remembering some 
  of the things he had heard about Doc 
  Savage, and realizing that more of it was true 
  than he had supposed. 
  “Where is your plane now?” he 
  asked. 
  Monk stuck a thumb at the sky. “Up 
  there.” 
  “But how did you get down?” 
  “Parachutes,” said Monk, “while you 
  two were landing your plane. You were too 
  busy to notice.” Monk got down and took hold 
  of Sid’s neck. “There’s just one thing,” he 
  added, “that will keep you from losing your 
  ears.” 
  Sid took a deep breath. 
  “You’ve got me all wrong,” he 
  insisted. “I’m perfectly willing to tell you 
  everything I know about this fantastic affair.” 
   
   
  “YOU can start off,” Monk said, “with 
  what happened to Doc’s plane.” 
  Sid groaned. “I don’t know.” 
  “What was that white flash of light 
  inside the plane? What burned the interior of 
  the cabin like it is?” 
  “I haven’t a vestige of an idea,” Sid 
  said. “I wish I did have.” 
  Monk 
  opened 
  and 
  closed 
  his 
  hands—the hands were sprinkled with hairs 
  resembling rusty shingle nails—and asked, 
  “Do you know who I am?” 
  “You are Lieutenant Colonel Andrew 
  Blodgett Mayfair, better known as Monk,” Sid 
  answered. “You’re a famous chemist, and 
  you’re also one of Doc Savage’s five 
  assistants.” 
  “You’re just half-right,” Monk advised 
  him. “I’m also the guy who is gonna tie a knot 
  in your neck if you don’t tell a better story.” 
  “I’m doing my best.” 
  “What was that black thing in the sky 
  that looked like a dagger? What made it?” 
  “I wish I knew,” Sid said. “I was 
  following you in hopes of finding out.” 
  The homely Monk was not a patient 
  soul. 
  “That 
  dagger-shaped 
  thing 
  was 
  crazy, and I want it explained!” he shouted. 
  Sid spread his hands helplessly. “I’m 
  trying to tell you that the thing is also going to 
  kill me.” 
  Monk stared at him. “Kill you?” 
  “It’s a long story,” Sid explained. He 
  looked at Doc Savage forlornly. “I’ll tell you 
  how you became involved in this. You 
  probably don’t know. When I first found out 
  that my life was in danger—when I first 
  realized that, fantastic as it was, the peril was 
  very real—I decided at once to go to you for 
  help. You help people who are in strange 
  
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  8 
  trouble, I’ve heard. Almost immediately I was 
  told that you would be killed, and the exact 
  time was set.” Sid held his wrist close to his 
  eyes and squinted at a watch in the 
  moonlight. “The time set was exactly the 
  moment your plane crashed.” 
  Monk said, “You haven’t explained 
  how you happened to be following Doc.” 
  “I can clear that up easily. I wanted 
  to see this fantastic thing if I could. I wasn’t 
  sure—well, it was hard for me to believe such 
  an unbelievable thing could exist.”  
  “Who was the pilot who got away?” 
  “Merely a man I hired. There was 
  another man I hired in New York to help me 
  trail Doc Savage—a taxi driver.” 
  Monk snorted. 
  “Now suppose you tell us,” he 
  suggested 
  skeptically, 
  “what 
  this 
  black 
  dagger is.” 
  Sid’s long face grew longer. “Do you 
  believe what I have already told you?” 
  “Oh, sure!” 
  “That’s what I was afraid—you’re 
  skeptical. So there’s practically no need of 
  me telling you the rest.” 
  “Why not?” 
  “You certainly won’t believe the rest.” 
   
   
  THERE was silence for a while. Doc 
  Savage listened. Noise of the plane in which 
  the long-faced man had come was gone from 
  the moon-whitened sky. Nor was there any 
  sound of his own ship, the one in which Monk 
  and Ham, his two associates, had picked him 
  up in Baltimore. 
  Ham was supposed to be following 
  Sid’s plane. 
  Monk said, “What’s your name?” 
  “Sid. Sid Morrison.” 
  “All right, Sid Morrison—let’s have 
  the part of your story you think we won’t 
  believe.” 
  Sid tugged at his long jaw and 
  squirmed. 
  “The black stone was probably in 
  existence hundreds of years ago,” he said. 
  “At least, it is mentioned in the legend history 
  of the ancient Incas of Peru. It is variously 
  referred to, one mention designating it as the 
  black soul of Kukulkan, the part that was evil 
  and cast out by Kukulkan, who was the 
  supreme deity of the Mayans and some of 
  the Incas. Another legend is that Kukulkan 
  had an evil rival, who was defeated and 
  turned into a stone that was as black as the 
  evil one’s sins. It was an accursed stone, 
  then. It has been accursed all down through 
  history. All who touched the stone, or had 
  anything to do with it, met a violent demise. 
  And always their death was signaled by the 
  appearance of a black dagger.” 
  Sid frowned and stared at them. His 
  voice was low, his manner intense. 
  “Legend accounts for the black 
  dagger by saying that it was with a dagger of 
  black obsidian stone that Kukulkan laid low 
  the evil one.” 
  Monk stood there and thought about 
  the story for a few moments. 
  “Does the legend,” he asked sourly, 
  “account for your standing here and telling us 
  such a mess of nonsense?” 
  Sid said, “A man named Juan Don 
  MacNamara sold the black stone to me. Juan 
  Don MacNamara is the son of President 
  Gatun MacNamara, of the South American 
  republic of Cristobal.” 
   
  (Author’s note: The name of the 
  republic, Cristobal, is a fictitious one, for 
  obvious reasons.) 
   
  “Where is this rock?” 
  “Juan Don MacNamara was to 
  deliver it to me. He was going to fly it up. I 
  presume he has already left Cristobal with 
  the stone.” 
  “You a stone buyer by profession?” 
  Monk asked skeptically. 
  “I am a collector of Incan relics,” the 
  long-faced man said. He became indignant. 
  “And furthermore, I’m through talking to you! 
  You don’t believe what I’m telling you. If 
  you’re fools enough to think I’m lying, that’s 
  your hard luck!” 
  Doc Savage made no answer. 
  Instead, the bronze man went over to the 
  crashed plane, used a flashlight which gave 
  a long thin beam of light and functioned off a 
  spring-operated generator instead of a 
  battery, and examined the cabin interior. He 
  did not crawl into the plane immediately; 
  instead, he took a small bottle from a pocket 
  case, removed a flat disk of a faintly bluish 
  hue, and tossed it into the cabin. He watched 
  the disk; it did not change color. That was 
  good. The tablet was a chemical test for 
  lethal gas, functioning somewhat in the same 
  fashion as the litmus-paper test used in 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  9 
  detecting acids. There seemed to be no 
  dangerous gas in the ship. 
  He climbed into the cabin and went 
  over the mangled, scorched interior carefully. 
  He 
  made 
  several 
  chemical 
  tests, 
  but 
  vouchsafed no opinion of the results when he 
  climbed out of the craft. 
  “Well, what made the white flash?” 
  Monk asked. 
  Doc 
  Savage 
  looked 
  at 
  Sid 
  thoughtfully for a moment, then answered, “It 
  is puzzling.” 
   
   
  Chapter III 
  DARK DEATH 
   
  LATER, Ham returned. His plane 
  came slanting down, then long funnels of 
  light jumped out of the wingtip floods, and he 
  executed a skillful landing. All of Doc’s 
  associates were experienced fliers. 
  “No dice,” Ham reported. 
  “The plane got away?” 
  “Yes, blast the luck. It flew north. Got 
  into those clouds before I could force it down, 
  and I lost it.” 
  Monk said, “A fine lot of help you 
  are!” 
  Ham—he was Brigadier General 
  Theodore 
  Marley 
  Brooks 
  on 
  formal 
  occasions—got out of the plane. He was a 
  lean-waisted man with good shoulders, a 
  rather handsome face (Monk always Insisted 
  Ham was fox-faced, but then Monk was 
  biased) and the wide, mobile mouth of an 
  orator, possibly developed by the amount of 
  talking Ham had done in courtrooms. Ham’s 
  clothing was sartorial perfection; it was a 
  common 
  saying 
  that 
  tailors 
  frequently 
  followed Ham down the Street to see clothes 
  being worn as they should be worn. He 
  carried a black cane. He was one of the 
  nation’s leading lawyers. His main interest in 
  life was his clothes. 
  Ham eyed their long-faced prisoner. 
  “What’s his name?” 
  “Sid,” Monk said. 
  “That his full name?” 
  “Full or sober, his name would still be 
  Sid, wouldn’t it?” Monk said. 
  Ham scowled. “Listen, you dopey 
  missing link, this is no time for those remarks 
  you think are gags.” 
  Doc Savage sketched briefly for 
  Ham’s enlightenment what they had learned 
  from Sid, Ham listening to the end of the 
  recital without a word. 
  Then Ham said, “I don’t believe it any 
  more than you do.” 
  “You saw that black dagger in the 
  sky, didn’t you? 
  “Yes, but—well, blast it! Such stuff 
  isn’t reasonable.” 
  They entered the plane, and Doc 
  lashed Sid to one of the seats, so that he 
  could not interfere with the operation of the 
  controls should he attempt resistance. The 
  bronze man himself rolled the plane across 
  the meadow, lifted it off, and pointed its 
  baying nose at the stars. 
  “New York?” Monk asked. 
  “Yes.” 
   
   
  THE 
  seven 
  hundred 
  and 
  sixty 
  thousand lights—latest estimate—of New 
  York City came into view, and they were not 
  particularly bright, for the blizzard had 
  arrived. There were low angry clouds, 
  traveling fast, and the Hudson was crawling 
  with white-capped waves. 
  The plane bounced, pitched, all but 
  turned handsprings as they landed. Hard 
  particles of snow hissed against the windows 
  when the motors were throttled. They held to 
  their seats and taxied to the hangar, the 
  doors of which could be opened by tapping 
  out a combination on the short-wave radio in 
  the plane, this door opener being a gadget 
  similar to those long used in telegraph-relay 
  offices. 
  The hangar was a huge cavern of 
  dank 
  warmth 
  into 
  which 
  whirled 
  the 
  increasing outdoors cold, and a little snow. 
  Doc Savage drew Monk and Ham 
  out of earshot of their captive. 
  The bronze man said, “You two take 
  the flea run to headquarters, and be posted 
  in the street outside the building.” 
  The “flea run” was Monk’s term for 
  an underground tunnel in which a small car 
  traveled, driven by pneumatic pressure, 
  passing from the water-front hangar to the 
  eighty-sixth-floor skyscraper headquarters in 
  a few moments. 
  “In front of the building I will let this 
  fellow Sid Morrison escape,” Doc added. 
  “Monk, you and Ham trail him. We may learn 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  10 
  something about this mystery by following 
  him.” 
  Monk and Ham nodded, walked 
  away. Monk, who was an enthusiastic liar at 
  times, announced loudly, “O. K., Doc. We’ll 
  stay here and guard the plane. We’ll meet 
  you after daylight.” 
  Doc told Sid Morrison, “You will go 
  with me,” and they left the warehouse hangar 
  in the plain dark car in which Doc had driven 
  to the place that afternoon. 
  It 
  was 
  dark, 
  the 
  streets 
  were 
  unusually deserted, and the swirling snow 
  made the ball of light around every street 
  lamp resemble a squirming white animal. The 
  hard snow pelted the car; the cold wind 
  flattened the clothing of pedestrians against 
  their bodies. 
  “Bitter night,” Sid Morrison muttered. 
  Doc glanced at him. The man 
  seemed genuinely afraid. But what he feared 
  it was hard to say. 
  They reached the towering midtown 
  building, the eighty-sixth floor of which Doc 
  Savage occupied. The bronze man parked in 
  front of the building, and they got out. Wind 
  tore at their clothing, pellets of snow pecked 
  at their skin. A newspaper, wind-tortured, 
  went scudding past on the sidewalk like a 
  gray ghost, and vanished in the darkness. 
  “Walk ahead of me,” Doc directed. 
  He pushed Sid Morrison into the 
  revolving door, then followed. With casual 
  deliberation, so that it seemed an accident, 
  he let a hand drag behind him, where it was 
  caught as the revolving door whirled, and 
  imprisoned. It was not painful; the rubber 
  wiper formed a cushion. 
  He went through the motions of 
  being trapped and struggling. 
  “Don’t you run!” he yelled, making his 
  voice so anxious that it was literally a 
  command for flight. 
  Sid 
  Morrison 
  fled. 
  There 
  were 
  several revolving doors in the bank. The man 
  dashed for the handiest, his long face 
  determined, whirled through it and was gone, 
  feet pounding into the night. 
  Doc Savage waited an appropriate 
  interval, 
  then 
  extricated 
  himself 
  and, 
  registering 
  proper 
  vexation 
  and 
  alarm, 
  sprang out onto the sidewalk. He ran up and 
  down the street a sufficient number of times 
  to make it look good, seeing nothing, hearing 
  only the hissing of the blizzard snow that was 
  like driven salt. 
   
   
  “HE’S dead!” Monk gasped. 
  Doc 
  Savage’s 
  metallic 
  features 
  became somewhat blank. 
  “Dead?” 
  “Come on. I’ll show you.” 
  The elevator in which Monk had 
  come up to the eighty-sixth floor was waiting. 
  It sank with them, making a faint sighing 
  sound. 
  Monk said, “We were trailing him. He 
  ducked into a doorway down the street. We 
  waited to see if he would come out, and he 
  didn’t, so we went in. We found him.” 
  Doc Savage looked at Monk with 
  steady curiosity. “You have seen dead men 
  before. It never affected you this way.” 
  Monk cleared his throat as if there 
  was tightness in it. 
  “The others,” he said, “weren’t killed 
  with a black dagger.” 
  The elevator doors opened with a 
  choking noise, their heels clicked on the 
  lobby tiles and they pushed out into the night, 
  with the wind beating at them. 
  “Ham’s watching the body,” Monk 
  said thickly. 
  The doorway was unlighted, and 
  there was a Space For Rent sign on the 
  windows to either side. Inside was a hallway, 
  long and dark, high-ceilinged. Halfway down 
  the hall, another corridor branched off like the 
  leg of a T. 
  Ham 
  stood 
  at 
  the 
  junction, 
  a 
  flashlight in one hand, a supermachine pistol 
  in the other. The weapon, one of Doc 
  Savage’s inventions, had the size of an 
  automatic and the bullet-emitting capacity of 
  a Lewis machine gun. 
  “Anybody show?” Monk asked. 
  “Nobody,” Ham said. He looked at 
  Doc. “This gets my goat. There’s a black 
  dagger sticking in his chest.” 
  “It’s back here,” Monk explained, and 
  led the way down the branching hallway. 
  There was a row of doors, all closed, 
  on either side. 
  Monk said, “Here’s what stood our 
  hair on end. You see this dust?” 
  The homely chemist cast a flashlight 
  beam across the floor, fanned it slowly. 
  Dust lay thick, for obviously the 
  hallway had been closed and unvisited for a 
  long time. There were footprints. Doc studied 
  the tracks intently. 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  11 
  “You see,” Monk said hollowly. “The 
  only footprints are those made by Sid 
  Morrison, and our own. There are no 
  murderer’s tracks.” 
  Doc asked, “How about the doors?” 
  “No tracks. The man went down the 
  middle of the hall, and hardly moved after he 
  dropped. There were no other tracks. We 
  looked.” 
  Doc Savage went forward, stood 
  looking down at Sid Morrison. The bronze 
  man’s face became tight and grim. He 
  glanced at Monk and Ham. They were pale. 
  He stated an obvious fact. 
  “I don’t,” he said, “see any dagger.” 
   
   
  WHOEVER—or 
  whatever—placed 
  the dagger had known enough of anatomy to 
  sink it in Sid Morrison’s heart. There was a 
  single stab wound, and when they turned the 
  body, it was evident the blade had gone all 
  the way through. There had been very little 
  red leakage. 
  Doc asked, “Between the time he 
  came into the building and you found his 
  body . . . how long?” 
  “Well . . . five minutes,” Ham 
  hazarded. 
  “You saw a black dagger?” 
  “It wasn’t imagination,” Monk said 
  stubbornly. “It was sticking out of his chest.” 
  “Who got it?” 
  Ham swore, something he rarely did. 
  “Nobody,” he insisted. “I stood right 
  here at the head of the hall. Nobody came in. 
  Nobody went out. I didn’t hear anything. And 
  believe me, I was listening all the time.” 
  Doc Savage went over the hall floor 
  again with a flashlight, giving it a minute 
  scrutiny this time. When he had finished, the 
  stubborn fact still confronted him—there were 
  no alien footprints. 
  Doc Savage said finally, “We’ll do 
  some telephoning.” 
  The bronze man occupied the entire 
  eighty-sixth, 
  the 
  topmost 
  floor 
  of 
  the 
  skyscraper. The place was divided into three 
  rooms, one of them being small and 
  furnished with a huge inlaid table, an equally 
  huge safe, and a number of comfortable 
  chairs. Adjacent was the library, containing 
  one of the most complete collections of 
  scientific tomes extant, and beyond that the 
  laboratory, a scientific wonder in itself. 
  Doc picked up a telephone. 
  “Long Distance operator . . . I want to 
  get hold of Juan Don MacNamara, son of the 
  president of Cristobal, a South American 
  republic. You might try Cristobal City, the 
  capital.” 
  While he was waiting, the bronze 
  man cut the telephone line in on an amplifier 
  which made the other half of the telephone 
  conversation audible to Monk and Ham. 
  There had been other occasions when 
  several of them had wished to hear both 
  sides of a telephone call. 
  The operator said, “There may be 
  some difficulty in routing your call. Cristobal 
  is at war with the neighboring republic of 
  Hispanola.” 
   
  (Author’s note: As in the case of 
  Cristobal, the name of Hispanola is also a 
  fictitious one for reasons which later in this 
  story become quite obvious.) 
   
  “It is important.” 
  “We will do our best,” the operator 
  said. 
  Monk, whose newspaper reading 
  rarely got beyond the comic strips, asked, 
  “When did this war start? I thought all of the 
  wars were in Europe and China.” 
  “This one began about a week ago,” 
  Doc Savage explained. “There has been a 
  boundary dispute between the two countries. 
  Hispanola seems to be the aggressor, and 
  suddenly sent troops into Cristobal, although 
  President Gatun MacNamara of Cristobal 
  had made a number of concessions in an 
  effort to assure peace. There is violent 
  fighting, I understand.” 
  Nearly an hour later, Doc’s call got 
  through to Cristobal City, and a heavily 
  accented voice said, “This is President Gatun 
  MacNamara’s secretary speaking. I am sorry, 
  but 
  the 
  President’s 
  son, 
  Juan 
  Don 
  MacNamara, is not available.” 
  “Where is he?” Doc asked. 
  “He left yesterday afternoon, flying 
  his own plane, for New York City. No word 
  has been received from him since.” 
  “Why was he coming to New York?” 
  “I believe the telephone operator said 
  you are Doc Savage—is that right?” 
  “Yes.” 
  “Juan Don MacNamara announced 
  publicly that he was flying to New York to see 
  you.” 
  “You sure of that?” 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  12 
  “Yes. 
  He 
  made 
  a 
  public 
  announcement.” 
  “Why was he coming to see me?” 
  Doc Savage asked. 
  “He did not state his reasons.” 
  More to himself than anyone else, 
  Doc mused, “That is queer.” 
  “We thought so too,” the distant 
  voice remarked. 
  “Have you ever heard of a man 
  named Sid Morrison?” Doc inquired. 
  There was a pause, evidently for 
  memory-fishing, at the other end of the wire. 
  “Never.” 
  Doc, after hesitating, asked, “What 
  about black daggers? Ever heard of them?” 
  The man at the other end of the 
  thousands of miles of telephone wire did a 
  rather baffling thing. 
  He made a strangled sound and 
  hung up. 
   
   
  Chapter IV 
  BLADE OVER JUNGLE 
   
  THERE is a saying that when you 
  visit the most Godforsaken outlands of the 
  world, you will invariably find two inhabitants, 
  one of them a Chinese storekeeper, the other 
  a Scotchman operating a bank. Which may 
  or may not be gospel, but at least illustrates a 
  nomadic proclivity of the Scotch race; 
  incidentally, one that is not exclusively 
  modern. 
  The first MacNamara—meaning the 
  first to reach Cristobal; the MacNamara clan 
  went as far back as Scotch history, one of 
  them helping slay MacBeth at Lumphanan in 
  Aberdeenshire in 1057—came to Cristobal in 
  1650. He was old Angus MacNamara, whom 
  Cromwell ran out of the forcibly united 
  commonwealth of England, Scotland and 
  Ireland. Old Angus was the first Scotchman 
  in Cristobal. He started a bank, naturally. 
  By 1930, the MacNamaras had 
  owned most of Cristobal, and lost it, several 
  times. In 1930, they staged the revolution 
  which 
  made 
  old 
  Gatun 
  MacNamara 
  president, and he had been doing fairly well 
  since. Not too well. Just fair. For the 
  MacNamaras had become, in somewhat less 
  than three hundred years, as native as any 
  inhabitant of Cristobal. And the inhabitants of 
  Cristobal were inclined to take more pride in 
  the beauty of their women than in the 
  business efficiency of their government or the 
  business efficiency of anything else. 
  Sanda MacNamara was a girl worth 
  anybody’s pride. She was long and well-
  shaped—well-shaped was putting it very 
  mildly indeed—and past generations of 
  Castilian mothers had given her marvelous 
  honey-blond hair, and the pleasant sun of 
  Cristobal had contributed a delightful sun-
  tanned complexion. The finest schools in 
  Massachusetts, London, Paris and Vienna 
  had given her manners and a rounded 
  knowledge of the world. The best modistes 
  on the Rue de la Paix furnished her with 
  frocks that contributed to her beauty, which 
  did not need any contributions. 
  Being the daughter of old Gatun 
  MacNamara had given her poise, because 
  when you are the daughter of a president, 
  you just naturally have poise. She had 
  learned riding at the Spanish Riding School 
  in Vienna, had learned tennis from Lenglen, 
  had been taught to fly a plane by one-eyed 
  old Prop Jackson who, if the records had 
  been straight, had shot down more planes 
  than Rickenbacker and possibly more than 
  von Richthofen, in the World War. 
  She was flying now, in her private 
  plane. It was a little low-wing job, honey-
  colored like her hair, a neat and fairly fast 
  little ship that could cover long distances and 
  descend, as necessity required, upon land or 
  water—or on the leafy mat of a jungle if it 
  came to that—with some chance of safety, 
  since its landing speed was low. 
  Sanda flew alone, mostly watching 
  the jungle which stretched to the horizons, 
  almost like a sea, except that it was a darker 
  and more ugly green. 
  She used, every so often, binoculars. 
  The glasses were to enable her to see her 
  brother’s plane, which was flying directly 
  ahead. She was, in fact, following her 
  brother. 
  She 
  was 
  not 
  particularly 
  tired, 
  although they had left Cristobal City, the 
  capital, yesterday afternoon. They had not 
  flown through the night; that was too 
  tiresome. The night had been spent in a 
  good-sized city which had two airports; she 
  had landed at one field, her brother at the 
  other. That morning, they had taken off at a 
  predetermined time. 
  While flying, Sanda MacNamara had 
  had time for a good deal of thinking. 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  13 
  She was still almost completely 
  baffled. 
   
   
  SHE switched on the little radio 
  transmitter in her plane, held the microphone 
  close to her lips, said, “Hello, Profile . . . are 
  you listening?” 
  She hoped this—calling her brother 
  “Profile”—would get a rise out of him. It had 
  always been a fighting word between them. 
  Juan Don, like all MacNamaras of Cristobal, 
  was more handsome than any male had a 
  right to be. He resented it bitterly. Once, 
  when he was young, his sister was sure he 
  had picked a fight deliberately to get his nose 
  broken, only to have a plastic surgeon do a 
  repair job that was an improvement on the 
  original. 
  Her brother’s voice crackled angrily 
  in her receiver diaphragms. 
  “Stop trying to talk to me!” he 
  snapped. “We can be located with a radio 
  direction finder, you know.” 
  “By whom?” 
  “I don’t know,” her bother snapped. 
  They began to follow a thin string of 
  water far below in the jungle, and it grew 
  larger, became a sizable river that was 
  yellowish in the sunlight. Heat waves made 
  the horizons deceptive, but it seemed to 
  Sanda that she could distinguish the sea, far 
  ahead. She consulted her chart. They should 
  be reaching the coast before long, so the 
  vague difference in the horizon ahead must 
  be the sea. 
  She was thinking about switching on 
  the ratio transmitter and asking her brother if 
  it was really the sea, when his voice clattered 
  in her ear with abrupt violence. 
  “Go back, Sanda! Quick!” 
  His 
  voice 
  was 
  full 
  of 
  ripping 
  excitement 
  “What’s wrong?” Sanda cried, then 
  realized her transmitter was off, and switched 
  it on and waited frantically for the tubes to 
  warm so that the set would radiate. 
  She stared ahead, and her eyes 
  widened with horror. 
  “Don!” she screamed. “Oh, Don! 
  What happened?” 
  She got no answer except the one 
  her eyes gave her. That was ugly. Puzzling. 
  For her brother’s plane was going down now, 
  spinning slowly around and around, and 
  turning over. Its descent looked slow, but that 
  was due to the distance. Actually, it must be 
  falling at terrific pace. 
  The black dagger appeared in the 
  sky while the plane was still falling. The girl 
  was watching, saw it come into existence, 
  could not explain how it got there. The 
  interval of its coming—it wasn’t there; then a 
  finger-snap 
  later, 
  it 
  was—occupied 
  an 
  incredibly short time. 
  The dagger stood in the superheated 
  tropical air near the falling plane. The length 
  of the thing was perhaps two hundred feet, 
  the span of the hilt a fourth of that, and its 
  color was deepest jet. 
  It faded, and was gone, before the 
  girl’s plane reached the spot. By then, her 
  brother’s ship had hit. 
   
   
  SANDA always believed that she 
  kept her eyes on her brother’s plane while it 
  was falling, and while it crashed. She saw—
  and 
  she 
  was 
  biting 
  her 
  tongue 
  and 
  screaming by then—the ship wobble out of 
  its spin, enough for it to hit the river on its 
  pontoons, as it should. There was a splash. 
  Water flashed out and glistened in the sun 
  like sheets of tin. 
  The plane bounced, hit, bounced; 
  each time, less water flew. Its speed dropped 
  to a hundred, eighty, sixty, forty miles an 
  hour. Later it hit the sand bar. It was a steep 
  bar. The floats stubbed into the sand, and the 
  plane flipped over on its back. 
  It lay there, the floats sticking up, like 
  a dead bird. 
  Sanda MacNamara’s lips moved but 
  no words came from them, and she jammed 
  the control stick forward, sent her plane 
  shrieking 
  down 
  toward 
  the 
  river. 
  Her 
  apprehension was a pounding frenzy inside, 
  and she had to force herself to level the 
  plane out and land on the river. After the ship 
  was on the water, she kept it riding fast, on 
  the rear of the floats. Long wake spread out 
  behind her, a rolling wave that climbed onto 
  the bank and broke into suds among the 
  tangled mangrove roots. The fact that 
  mangroves were on the banks told her she 
  must be near the sea, because mangroves 
  grow in salt water. Strange that she should 
  think of such a thing as what the man-groves 
  meant, she decided. 
  Her plane beached on the sand bar. 
  She sprang out. There was no movement 
  around the plane. Her eyes swept the sand 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  14 
  bar. There were no human footprints on the 
  sand. 
  She ran to the plane, looked inside. 
  The plane was empty. 
  “He’s safe!” she thought. Wild delight 
  bounded through her. 
  She looked around for tracks, and 
  there were none. At first that was a little hard 
  for her to realize. She breathed, “But . . . but 
  there has to be!” 
  She stood very still and stared at the 
  sand until she was finally convinced that 
  there was no trace of anyone having left the 
  plane. Nor could anyone have quitted the 
  ship without leaving prints. 
  She took a small automatic out of her 
  jacket pocket. There was nothing to be seen. 
  Nothing to be heard. Except the jungle and 
  its sounds. 
  The ship had not been damaged 
  noticeably. If righted and put afloat, it would 
  probably fly again. The cabin door was 
  closed, she noticed. It opened readily. She 
  climbed in. And when she climbed out again, 
  she was puzzled more than ever. 
  There 
  was 
  nothing, 
  absolutely 
  nothing wrong inside the ship as far as she 
  had been able to find. Even the ignition of the 
  motor seemed to be intact. There were no 
  bloodstains in the cockpit, no trace of 
  violence. 
  For a moment, while inside the ship, 
  she had thought that some kind of robot or 
  radio-directed control might have been 
  attached to the craft, but she had looked and 
  found no such gadget. She knew enough 
  about such things to be sure that the plane 
  did not contain one. 
  She stood on the edge of the sand 
  bar. 
  “Don!” she called. Then, “Don! Don!” 
  louder and louder until her throat was raw 
  with the effort. 
  A few tropical birds were frightened 
  away by the terrified incredulity of her voice, 
  but there was no trace of her brother. 
  She ran to her plane, very scared. It 
  had beached hard on the sand, and she had 
  to take her hands and scoop the wet grains 
  out from under the floats, then rock the craft 
  and shove before she got it out in the river. 
  There were a few alligators in the river, and 
  she hit one while the plane was gathering 
  speed, but it did no more than jar the craft 
  and give Sanda another bad moment. 
   
  Chapter V 
  MYSTERY COMES NORTH 
   
  A SHABBY-LOOKING old woman 
  walked into the Riviera Towers Hotel on 
  upper Park Avenue. Her clothing was cheap 
  and ragged and she wore a veil; she went 
  directly to one of the assistant managers at a 
  desk in the richly subdued lobby. You didn’t 
  meet anything so hackneyed as a room clerk 
  in the Riviera Towers. 
  “I’m 
  sorry,” 
  said 
  the 
  assistant 
  manager, “but we’re full up.” 
  “I doubt it,” said the woman. “You 
  happen to know me, Mr. Risetti. I usually stay 
  here. I am Sanda MacNamara, daughter of—
  ” she added this for the effect rather than 
  because she thought it really so important, 
  “President 
  Gatun 
  MacNamara 
  of 
  the 
  Republic of Cristobal.” 
  The assistant manager swallowed 
  several times, made a sound like a frog, and 
  gasped, “But . . . but—” 
  “Incognito,” Sanda explained. 
  The assistant manager remembered; 
  he had been reading his newspapers. There 
  was a war in Cristobal. 
  “Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Incognito, to 
  be sure.” 
  Sanda MacNamara was shown to a 
  room, and the assistant manager smiled and 
  rubbed his hands together and reached for a 
  telephone. He had a private dodge of his own 
  for picking up an odd penny now and then, 
  serving as stooge for the town’s most 
  snooping and unscrupulous columnist. 
  So 
  two 
  hours 
  later, 
  Gotham’s 
  yellowest newspaper broke a headline that 
  said: 
   
  CRISTOBAL PRESIDENT’S 
  FAMILY FLEES 
  Daughter Reaches New York 
   
  This was hardly the truth, of course. 
  But it made good reading. 
  By the time the newspaper hit the 
  street, Doc Savage, Monk and Ham had 
  arrived at the Riviera Towers. They rode up 
  to Sanda MacNamara’s suite. 
  “I am very glad you came,” the girl 
  said. 
  Monk gazed at Sanda and said, “So 
  am I,” after he got his breath. 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  15 
  Sanda had sent out to the Fifty-
  seventh Street shops where she bought 
  some of her clothes, and had ordered 
  dresses sent up from stock. Except for a 
  certain fatigue about her eyes and mouth, 
  she did not look like a girl who had just flown 
  several thousand miles from South America, 
  riding with terror all the way. 
  She 
  had 
  told 
  them 
  over 
  the 
  telephone who she was. That was why they 
  had come so promptly. 
  “I’m afraid,” Sanda said, “that you’re 
  going to be a little incredulous—particularly 
  about my brother, Don.” 
  They took chairs and were sitting on 
  the edge of them by the time she finished 
  telling about what had happened to Juan Don 
  MacNamara over the jungle. 
  “He just vanished,” she finished. “I 
  am sure he was in the plane, because I 
  talked to him a number of times. Once, he 
  commented on our location, if he had not 
  been in the plane he could not have done 
  that, could he? And after the plane crashed, 
  he had vanished. Vanished—and it wasn’t 
  possible for him to vanish.” 
  Monk said, “And you saw a black 
  dagger?” 
  “In the sky.” 
  “How big?” 
  “Two hundred feet long, maybe. 
  About fifty feet across the hilt.” 
  “You haven’t any idea what the 
  dagger was, how it got there, or where it 
  went?” 
  “Not unless the black stone had 
  something to do with it,” Sanda said. 
  “Black stone?” 
  “A black stone that is supposed to be 
  an evil deity which was turned into stone by 
  the supreme Inca deity called Kukulkan.” 
  Monk leaned back and closed his 
  eyes. 
  “Blazes!” he said. “And we were 
  figuring there wasn’t any truth to the story 
  about a black stone!” 
  The girl looked at them with such a 
  bewildered manner that Ham took it upon 
  himself to explain about the long-faced man, 
  Sid Morrison. Ham carried that story through 
  to the mysterious death of Sid Morrison in the 
  hallway, and the far more mysterious 
  vanishing of the black dagger which had 
  been the murder weapon. 
  Ham finished and stared out of the 
  window. “That happened three days ago, 
  when this blizzard was just starting.” 
  It was still snowing. The rooftops of 
  Manhattan were thick with white, and snow 
  was piled in great mounds in the main 
  streets, while many side thoroughfares were 
  impassable. “I didn’t know plane traffic was 
  coming through,” Ham added. 
  “It isn’t—not the regular planes,” 
  Sanda said. “I was lucky—and we have 
  mountains and blizzards in Cristobal.” 
  Doc Savage said, “Let us go back to 
  the 
  beginning 
  of 
  your 
  story, 
  Miss 
  MacNamara.” 
  Sanda had been studying the bronze 
  man. She was impressed. 
  “Beginning?” 
  “About this black rock. I don’t mean 
  the legendary history of the thing. The 
  modern part—why did you say it might have 
  something to do with the black dagger you 
  saw in the sky after your brother’s plane 
  started falling?” 
  The girl looked strange. 
  “The 
  whole 
  thing 
  is 
  wildly 
  unbelievable, isn’t it?” she said. “I didn’t 
  realize how foolish it sounded until I listened 
  to you put it in words just then.” 
  “What about the black rock?” Doc 
  persisted. 
  “During the last six months,” Sanda 
  explained, “at least fifty people have died in 
  various parts of Cristobal, and always they 
  have died with a black dagger that has 
  vanished, or a dark dagger-shaped object 
  has appeared in the sky at about the moment 
  of their death. We have a large Indian 
  population in Cristobal, descendants of the 
  Incas, and they are becoming upset to the 
  extent that it is a government problem.” 
  The girl shivered and went over and 
  turned more steam into the radiators. 
  “You see,” she added, “a rumor has 
  gone around that my brother had secured 
  possession of the black stone, and as a 
  result, death was striking the natives.” 
  Monk put in, “You mean that your 
  brother never had the stone?” 
  “Never. I’m positive.” 
  Monk persisted. “He didn’t have it, 
  then sell it to this Sid Morrison? Your brother 
  wasn’t flying north to deliver the stone to Sid 
  Morrison?” 
  “I’m sure not.” 
  “Ever hear of Sid Morrison?” 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  16 
  “No.” 
  “Then just why,” Monk asked, “were 
  your brother and you flying to New York?” 
  “My brother,” Sanda explained to 
  Doc, “became convinced that you were the 
  one man who could break the power of this 
  black stone, if there is such a thing. My 
  brother was convinced that he would have 
  trouble reaching New York. He asked me to 
  follow him, and try to get through to you if he 
  failed.” 
  Doc Savage said, “Then you are in 
  New York to ask us to investigate this thing?” 
  “Unusual mystery and people in 
  fantastic trouble are your specialty, aren’t 
  they?” 
  “In a way.” 
  There was a discreet tap at the door. 
  When it was opened, a man in a white coat 
  stood there saying, “Mr. Risetti, the assistant 
  manager, sent up refreshments with the 
  compliments 
  of 
  the 
  management.” 
  He 
  wheeled in a chromium cart, covered with a 
  white cloth, then turned and walked out. 
  Doc Savage said, suddenly and 
  loudly, “It’s a trap!” 
  He was not definitely suspicious of 
  the waiter, just making a test. 
  The “waiter” gave himself away. He 
  jumped wildly for the door. 
   
   
  DOC SAVAGE drove a hand into 
  one of his pockets, brought out a thin-walled 
  glass bottle, hurled this at the waiter. The 
  bottle hit the man’s back, broke. The 
  contents, 
  a 
  somewhat 
  colorless 
  liquid, 
  splashed 
  over 
  the 
  man—and 
  nothing 
  happened. 
  Monk and Ham clawed at their 
  clothing to get out gas-proof hoods—
  envelopes of transparent, airtight material, 
  fitting over their heads—which would serve 
  as temporary masks. They thought the was 
  gas. 
  Doc ignored the fleeing waiter. The 
  bronze man ran, scooped up the cart, 
  contents and all. The room had big double 
  windows, and outside there was a small 
  balcony. Doc opened the double doors, and 
  snow tumbled inside. Snow was two feet 
  deep on the balcony. He planted the table in 
  the stuff and closed the doors. 
  “Get clear!” he rapped. 
  They ran into the corridor. There was 
  no sign of the waiter; he had already fled. 
  Ham yelled, “We can telephone 
  downstairs and stop that fellow!” He raced for 
  the floor receptionist. This hotel had a 
  reception hostess at a desk on every floor. 
  Doc caught him, said, “Let him go.” 
  “Let him go?” 
  The explosion came then, a ripping 
  shock, followed by the jangle of breaking 
  glass, the loud thumping of things rolling. 
  Doc pulled a gas hood over his head, 
  opened the door of the suite they had just 
  left. The double doors to the balcony had 
  been blown in, furniture upset; the carpet 
  was split and scooped away from the bare 
  floor near the door. The balcony itself was 
  clean of snow, and some of the railing was 
  missing. Across the street, snow that had 
  been disturbed by the shock was still 
  cascading off roof parapets and window 
  ledges. 
  Walls of the room were pitted, and 
  jagged fragments of steel were embedded. 
  Some of the fragments had bounced off and 
  lay on the floor. 
  Doc used his handkerchief, picked 
  up one of the metal bits, saw that it was 
  coated with a sticky substance. 
  Vile, greenish-looking vapor was 
  boiling in from the window. 
  Doc closed the door hurriedly. 
  “Poisoned shrapnel and gas,” the 
  bronze man said. 
  “Then they were trying to kill us!” 
  Sanda gasped. 
  Monk and Ham, instead of being 
  nervous, seemed somewhat relieved, if 
  anything. As Monk expressed it later, there 
  was something creepy about black daggers 
  that vanished, but a bomb explosion was a 
  thing you could grasp. 
  Doc Savage carefully wrapped his 
  handkerchief around the shrapnel fragment 
  which he had picked up—there was no doubt 
  but that the sticky substance on the piece 
  was poison—and put it in a pocket. The 
  corridor was filling with people, all of them 
  excited. An officious-looking man who knew 
  nothing about what had happened, or why, 
  was shouting that no one should leave the 
  building. 
  “There is poison gas in that room,” 
  Doc told the house detective when he came. 
  “Keep everyone out for at least an hour.” 
  Doc entered an elevator. Sanda, 
  Monk and Ham followed. The operator did 
  not want to take them down, and eventually 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  17 
  Monk grasped him by the elbows, set him out 
  of the elevator, and ran the cage down 
  himself. 
  “It strikes me,” Monk said glumly, 
  “that we’re startin’ out kinda late to follow the 
  bomber.” 
  Doc Savage said nothing, did not 
  seem disturbed. He left the Riviera Towers 
  and walked down the street to a spot where a 
  car stood, front wheels cocked upon a 
  packed snowdrift. 
  The car door opened and a pair of 
  fists came out. 
   
   
  THE man who followed the pair of 
  startling fists was notable for the sadness of 
  his facial expression. The rest of him was 
  big, although hardly in proportion to the 
  hands, which could hardly have been 
  incased in quart pails. He gave them a look 
  of unutterable gloom. 
  “Holy cow,” he remarked in a 
  rumbling voice of astounding power. “What 
  went on upstairs?” 
  “A guy served us refreshments, 
  Renny,” Monk explained. “Say, how do you 
  happen to be here?” 
  The man with the fists and the gloom 
  was Colonel John “Renny” Renwick, who 
  liked to knock things about with his fists—his 
  boast was that he could smash the panel of 
  any 
  wooden 
  door 
  with 
  either 
  set 
  of 
  knuckles—and 
  who 
  was 
  noted 
  from 
  Patagonia to Cape Chelyuskin for his 
  engineering feats. He was another of Doc’s 
  group of five aides. 
  Renny looked up at the higher floors 
  of the hotel. 
  “Refreshments?” he rumbled. 
  Monk explained what he meant by 
  the term. Renny snorted. 
  “Was the waiter a little, wiry-looking 
  guy in a white coat?” the big-fisted engineer 
  asked. 
  “Yes.” 
  “Well, he came out of the hotel as if 
  the dogs were after him.” 
  “Which way did he go?” 
  “He had a car waiting,” Renny 
  explained. “A blue sedan. And did they take 
  off for the south! Holy cow!” 
  Monk made disgusted noises and 
  gestures, wailed, “If we could just have 
  followed that guy.” 
  Renny looked surprised. “Well, what 
  do you think Long Tom and Johnny are 
  doing? That’s why we were here.” 
  “What?” Monk’s eyes popped. 
  Doc Savage explained, “Renny and 
  Long Tom and Johnny were to follow us and 
  watch the hotel, in case anything unexpected 
  happened. In particular, they were to trail 
  anyone 
  who 
  seemed 
  to 
  be 
  acting 
  suspicious.” 
  Monk opened his mouth, then shut it. 
  He was astonished, but you rather became 
  accustomed to being 
  astonished 
  when 
  associating with Doc Savage. The bronze 
  man’s plans had an uncanny facility of 
  popping up at the most opportune and 
  unexpected times. Monk hadn’t any idea that 
  the others had followed them to the hotel; 
  Doc hadn’t told him. Monk wasn’t surprised—
  he rather suspected that he was aware of 
  only about one-hundredth of the plans and 
  precautions of the bronze man, judging from 
  the fact that one seemed to crop up exactly 
  when it was needed. It was this facility for 
  taking precautions that accounted for Doc’s 
  success, as well as for his having managed 
  to live as long as he had. 
  It occurred to Monk to glance at 
  Sanda MacNamara. She was staring at Doc 
  Savage in about the fashion Monk had 
  expected. He had seen many persons look at 
  the bronze man in that fashion—with the 
  sudden dawning of the realization of just how 
  amazing a fellow he really was. 
  Snow was stinging their faces, wind 
  was shaking their clothing. Renny had closed 
  the car door when he got out; he reopened it 
  now, and they climbed inside. The heater fan 
  purred faintly, and it was warmer than the 
  blizzard chill outside, yet not warm enough 
  for comfort. 
  “Johnny and Long Tom trailed the 
  bomber in a car?” Doc asked. 
  “Yes,” Renny said. 
  Early in their unusual career, Doc 
  and 
  the 
  others 
  had 
  discovered 
  the 
  convenience of having a quick and private 
  means of communication always at hand. 
  Radio served this purpose. So they had 
  installed 
  short-wave 
  radio 
  transmitter-
  receiver sets in their cars, boats, apartments, 
  planes and offices. They had formed the 
  habit of remaining, whenever possible, within 
  hearing of one of the radio receivers which 
  was switched on and tuned to the very short 
  wavelength they habitually used. 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  18 
  Doc switched on the radio in the car, 
  said, “Johnny . . . Long Tom.” 
  “I’ll 
  be 
  superamalgamated,” 
  remarked a scholastic voice, “if this isn’t an 
  ultrarefrigerated avocation!” 
   
   
  Chapter VI 
  THE FRIGHTENED RICH MAN 
   
  “THAT,” Monk explained, “is William 
  Harper Littlejohn, better known as Johnny. 
  He’s an eminent archaeologist and geologist, 
  and user of big words.” 
  Doc 
  Savage 
  said 
  into 
  the 
  microphone, “You still trailing that fellow, 
  Johnny?” 
  Johnny 
  answered, 
  using 
  small 
  words. Johnny habitually used his many-
  syllabled jaw breakers, but to Doc Savage, 
  who 
  probably 
  could 
  come 
  nearer 
  understanding them than anyone else, 
  Johnny was always careful to use ordinary 
  words. 
  “The man has driven to upper Fifth 
  Avenue, and has gotten out of the cab in 
  front 
  of 
  an 
  extremely 
  swanky 
  private 
  mansion. He talked with the butler who 
  opened the door, and he is just entering.” 
  “You’re sure he is the man?” 
  “Yes.” 
  “What address?” 
  Johnny gave the address, and Doc 
  Savage wheeled their car in that direction. 
  Sanda 
  MacNamara 
  contemplated 
  the bronze man thoughtfully. She was 
  puzzled. Her curiosity got the best of her, and 
  she asked a question. 
  “Back at the hotel,” she said, “just 
  how did your men know this fellow was the 
  right one to follow? You can’t tell me they just 
  looked at him and saw that he was excited. 
  Hundreds of people go in and out of that 
  hotel every hour, and your men couldn’t have 
  just stood there and picked out the right one.” 
  The car became stuck in the snow, 
  and the bronze man backed up, flung the 
  machine into the drift, and plowed through in 
  a cloud of leaping white flakes. 
  “You remember the bottle I threw at 
  the waiter as he took flight?” Doc asked. 
  “Yes,” Sanda admitted. 
  “The bottle burst and the liquid 
  smeared the man,” Doc explained. “The 
  liquid was a chemical preparation. When 
  examined with the aid of infrared light and 
  special 
  filtering 
  eyeglasses, 
  the 
  stuff 
  becomes a noticeable purplish hue. In other 
  words, the man was branded without being 
  aware of it. Johnny and Long Tom and 
  Renny simply watched the exits of the hotel, 
  using infrared projectors and filter spectacles. 
  The equipment was not conspicuous.” 
  “I see.” The girl settled back on the 
  cushions. “I’m beginning to understand 
  something that always puzzled me.” 
  “What do you mean?” 
  “It has nothing to do with this matter. 
  It happened about two years ago. Our 
  newspapers in Cristobal City published the 
  story that you were to appear in the city—I 
  think it was in connection with some 
  convention of medical-science experts on 
  tropical diseases, which was later canceled. 
  But for six months there was hardly a crime 
  of importance in Cristobal City. Our chief of 
  police told me the rumor of your coming was 
  responsible. I didn’t believe him.” 
  Doc 
  said, 
  “He 
  was 
  probably 
  mistaken. Some other factor must have cut 
  down the amount of crime.” 
   
   
  THE house was of hard gray stone, 
  and you looked at it and instinctively thought 
  of a bank. The windows were small, those on 
  the ground floor heavily barred, and the 
  entrance was austere. There were three 
  floors. The lot on which it stood was probably 
  worth a million dollars, even at post-
  depression prices. 
  “Looks,” Monk said, “as if it had been 
  built to bury somebody in.” 
  Johnny joined them. He was a 
  remarkably long bag of bones who affected a 
  monocle dangling from a ribbon, a monocle 
  he never used. He was thinner than it 
  seemed any man could be and still remain 
  healthy. He had been standing in a doorway 
  down the street, snow swirling around him. 
  He 
  began, 
  “Even 
  peripatetic 
  ratiocination—” 
  “Haven’t you,” Monk interrupted, “got 
  some little words?” 
  “Little one-syllable ones for Monk,” 
  Ham explained. 
  Johnny said, “What I started to say 
  was that ordinary reasoning wouldn’t lead 
  one to expect the man coming to a place like 
  this. Do you know who lives here?” 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  19 
  Ham—he could be depended upon 
  to know where all the aristocrats lived—eyed 
  the house. “The residence of Peter van Jelk,” 
  he remarked. 
  “Never heard of him,” Monk grunted. 
  “I suppose you’ve never heard of J. 
  P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., or Henry 
  Doherty.” 
  “You mean this Van Jelk is in a class 
  with them?” 
  “Not exactly,” Ham told him. “Van 
  Jelk could probably buy and sell any two of 
  them.” 
  “Did he inherit it?” 
  “He did not.” 
  “That,” Monk said, “makes him quite 
  a guy.” 
  “Where is Long Tom?” Doc asked. 
  “Watching the back of the place.” 
  “Long Tom” was Major Thomas J. 
  Roberts, who was a rather feeble-looking 
  fellow with the general complexion of an 
  inhabitant of a mushroom cave. He was 
  remarkably healthy, however. His specialty 
  was electricity. His nickname, Long Tom, had 
  come to him long ago, as the result of a slight 
  mishap with an ancient cannon of the type 
  called a long tom. 
  They looked in vain for him until a 
  crumpled newspaper, apparently a discarded 
  one, fell off the face of a snowdrift; Long Tom 
  had worked into the snow, covered himself 
  except for his face, which he had concealed 
  by 
  the 
  newspaper 
  perforated 
  with 
  a 
  peephole. 
  “Nobody has come out,” he reported. 
  Doc said, “The rest of you spread 
  out. Monk, you might come with me.” 
  Ham said, “I’ll take care of Miss 
  MacNamara,” and Monk looked disgusted. 
  The butler who opened the front door 
  of the mansion was thick-shouldered, had a 
  face which appeared to have been beaten 
  upon in the past. 
  “Sorry, but you really cawn’t be 
  admitted,” he said. 
  “We’re lookin’ for a guy, so don’t get 
  us riled,” Monk advised. 
  “Listen, pal, take a walk or I’ll bop 
  your teeth loose!” advised the butler. 
  He had lost his accent. 
  Monk said, “Start bopping, then!” and 
  feinted with his left. The man ducked—into 
  Monk’s right. Monk had arm muscles which 
  could 
  straighten 
  out 
  a 
  horseshoe—the 
  butler’s heels came perhaps two inches off 
  the floor. Doc caught the man. 
  “You watch him,” Doc said. 
  “O. K., but he won’t take no watchin’ 
  for some time,” Monk said, grinning. 
  Doc Savage walked down a hall that 
  had a towering ceiling and walls arrayed with 
  spears and suits of armor, all genuine and 
  none costing less than several hundred 
  dollars. The next room had a Joshaghan rug 
  tied with Ghiordes knots, richly colored and 
  with a silky, lustrous pile. It was a museum 
  piece. Very much of a museum piece. So 
  was the man who said, “I am Peter van Jelk.” 
   
   
  HE spoke the name—Peter van 
  Jelk—as if that ordinarily settled matters. He 
  said nothing more, but his tone implied that 
  having come into the presence of the 
  Untouchable Highest, they were expected to 
  remedy 
  the 
  impertinence 
  and 
  leave 
  immediately. 
  There was nothing artificial about his 
  regal manner. He was aristocracy. He was 
  perhaps fifty, his hair being smeared with 
  gray at the temples. He had good shoulders, 
  and either dieted and trained his waistline, or 
  wore a girdle. He wore pince-nez glasses, 
  rimless. His face, as a whole, was somehow 
  as coldly indomitable as the great stone 
  house in which he lived. 
  “Clark Savage, Jr.,” Doc said. 
  Van 
  Jelk’s 
  face 
  showed 
  some 
  respect, no approval. 
  “I have heard of you,” he said. “I 
  believe an associate of yours, Brigadier 
  General Theodore Marley Brooks, managed 
  to become a member of one of my clubs.” 
  Monk, who had come to stand in the 
  door, muttered, “—managed to become a 
  member—” and emitted a strangled sound of 
  mirth. 
  Doc said, “We are here looking into a 
  serious matter.” 
  “Serious matter?” 
  “About black daggers that have killed 
  some people,” Doc said. 
  Van Jelk’s hands gave a noticeable 
  jerk, his lips parted, and he took one step 
  backward. Then he got control of himself, 
  began coughing and brought a hand to his 
  mouth. After coughing several times, he 
  spoke in an almost ordinary tone. 
  “I don’t believe I understood you.” 
   
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  20 
   
  Monk went to pick up his hat—but instead, grasped Van Jelk’s ankles and jerked! 
   
  Van Jelk put up his chin, frowned 
  through his rimless eyeglasses. 
  “Morgan!” he said loudly. “What do 
  you mean, admitting these bounders. Throw 
  them out!” 
  “Morgan must be that funny-face 
  butler,” Monk said. 
  “Morgan!” Van Jelk called. “Come 
  here at once!” 
  Monk asked, “What do you expect 
  him to do?” 
  Van Jelk looked at Monk coldly and 
  said, “Throw you out.” 
  Monk, 
  who 
  detested 
  obvious 
  aristocrats, took off his rather sloppy old hat 
  and made the gesture of slapping it angrily 
  against his leg, but released the hat so that it 
  rolled across the floor and stopped near Van 
  Jelk’s expensive handmade shoes. Monk 
  then went over to pick up his hat, but instead, 
  grasped Van Jelk’s ankles and jerked. The 
  man fell, and Monk crawled on. For a while, 
  there was the noise of their heels and elbows 
  and fists knocking the floor. Van Jelk wore an 
  expensive suit, and Monk proceeded to tear 
  most of the pockets out of it without finding a 
  weapon. 
  A complete stranger to the truth 
  when he wanted to be, Monk made a loud 
  and convincing accusation. 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  21 
  “Two of them have confessed,” said 
  Monk grimly, “and we’ve got proof besides. 
  You’re guilty as hell, Van Jelk.” 
  The man became very pale. 
  “You . . . mean . . . about the black 
  rock?” he asked, his words hardly loud 
  enough to understand. 
  “Sure.” 
  Van Jelk’s eyes closed and his body 
  became loose. 
   
   
  OUTSIDE in the cold and blowing 
  snow there was the sound of five shots fired 
  close together, and mixed in with their noise 
  a roaring of a laboring automobile motor. 
  Someone shouted in a surprised, futile way. 
  Very briefly, one of the supermachine pistols 
  which Doc’s aids carried made its discharge 
  noise, a deep-throated note that might have 
  been made by a huge bullfiddle. The 
  automobile seemed to keep going. 
  Doc Savage went into the hallway 
  past the unconscious form of the butler, 
  Morgan. They had left the street door open, 
  and chill wind had brought in a little snow. 
  Doc stood in the door a while, then Ham and 
  the girl, Sanda, came up. 
  “One just got away,” Ham explained. 
  “He was the fellow who left the bomb at the 
  hotel. Emptied his gun at us.” 
  “No chance to follow him?” 
  “None. Garage opens on the side 
  street. Car came out like a bullet. Big sedan 
  with chains. Got away.” 
  “Renny and Long Tom and Johnny?” 
  “They’ve gone back to watching the 
  rear. They’re mad enough to fly.” 
  Doc said, “You might as well come in 
  out of the cold.” And after Ham and the girl 
  had entered, the bronze man glanced at the 
  young woman and asked, “Do you know this 
  Van Jelk?” 
  Sanda shook her head. “Never heard 
  of him.” 
  They carried Morgan, the butler, into 
  the room where Monk was waiting with Van 
  Jelk, and planted him on the floor. Doc 
  walked through various rooms of the house, 
  discovering that only those on the ground 
  floor were furnished. The upper floors, both 
  second and third story, were completely 
  bare. Nor were there any other servants. 
  Van Jelk had revived and sat in a 
  chair. He had been talking. Monk’s face was 
  blank with amazement. 
  “Listen to this, Doc!” Monk exploded. 
  Van Jelk stared at Doc Savage, his 
  face still pale. 
  “I thought of coming to you for help,” 
  he said, “but I was afraid.” 
  “Van Jelk, here, was one of the 
  partners of Sid Morrison, the man who got 
  stabbed with a vanishing dagger,” Monk 
  explained. 
  Van Jelk took out a handkerchief and 
  mopped his face, his hands trembling 
  noticeably. 
  “Make a short story out of it,” Doc 
  suggested. 
  “I’ll do that,” Van Jelk said. “Six 
  months ago, a group of wealthy men 
  including myself and Sid Morrison, all 
  interested in collecting ancient Incan relics, 
  got together and bought a sacred black stone 
  which legend said was the solidified soul of 
  the evil one who had been the strongest foe 
  of Kukulkan, the Incan-Mayan.” 
  Monk said, “You see, Doc. This 
  checks with what Sid Morrison told us.” 
  Van Jelk nodded, continued, “We 
  naturally placed no stock in the legend about 
  this stone—the legend that death would 
  overtake anyone connected with it. That is, 
  until—well, all kinds of disasters began 
  befalling us. Personally, I was badly hurt in 
  an automobile accident. My butler, an old 
  and trusted servant, was found at the foot of 
  a stairway with his head crushed. I . . . I do 
  not believe he fell down the stairs, because I 
  was in a room close by and I heard no 
  sound.” 
  “What gave you the idea the stone 
  was connected with this bad luck?” Monk 
  asked. 
  “I 
  saw 
  black 
  knives—and 
  they 
  disappeared.” Van Jelk looked distressed, 
  like a man telling a small-boy ghost story. “I 
  feel deuced silly, saying such a thing. It’s not 
  believable, you know.” 
  Morgan, the butler, revived and got 
  to his feet—awakening with the same idea 
  which he had held when he went to sleep, for 
  he squared off and made for Monk with his 
  fists. Monk rolled a chair, upset Morgan, then 
  sat on him while Van Jelk said, “Morgan! 
  Morgan—these men are our friends! They 
  are fighting the same evil thing as ourselves.” 
  The butler finally stopped struggling, 
  said, “You big brute!” almost tearfully. 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  22 
  “I hired Morgan,” Van Jelk explained, 
  “as a bodyguard. He is an ex-pugilist who 
  once was almost heavyweight champion.” 
  In a voice that was not particularly 
  excited, Doc Savage stated that there had 
  been an attempt to kill them at Sanda 
  MacNamara’s hotel, and that they had trailed 
  the would-be murderer here to Van Jelk’s 
  house. 
  Van Jelk said, “Will you describe the 
  man?” 
  Doc did so. 
  Morgan, on the floor, made a 
  rumbling. “That’s Moxie, the other bodyguard 
  you hired,” the disgruntled butler told Van 
  Jelk. “I never did trust that fellow.” 
  Sanda 
  MacNamara 
  had 
  been 
  listening, and now she shook her head 
  violently. 
  “My brother never had any black 
  stone to sell!” she snapped. “That makes 
  somebody a liar, doesn’t it?” 
  Van Jelk gave her a squelching 
  stare, consulted his watch, then said, “We 
  were to hold a meeting—myself, and the men 
  who bought this amazing stone from her 
  brother. We were to meet at Henry’s house 
  in—” he glanced at his watch again, “just 
  twenty minutes. You can ask the rest of them 
  who we bought the stone from.” 
  “We had best go to Henry’s house 
  then,” Doc Savage decided. 
   
   
  Chapter VII 
  THE FEAR 
   
  HENRY’S house was a thousand 
  feet in the air. Being situated on top of one of 
  the tower buildings in lower Wall Street, the 
  place had two advantages very convenient 
  for an exceptionally rich man—it was close to 
  the biggest money mart in the world, and it 
  was located in a section almost deserted 
  nights and evenings and on holidays, there 
  being no more lonesome sector in the city 
  than Wall Street at such periods. 
  If any wood had been used in 
  Henry’s house, it was not immediately 
  noticeable. 
  Construction 
  materials 
  were 
  glass, chrome, steel. Decorative material was 
  almost exclusively bright-colored paint. It was 
  a modernistic place to end all modernistic 
  places. 
  There were seven men gathered in 
  one of the rooms. 
  Van Jelk said, “I will introduce you.” 
  He did so, and it was almost as 
  though he had started at the head of the list 
  of top income-tax payers. “This,” said Van 
  Jelk, “is Burton Allsworth Arthur, of the Arthur 
  banking interests.” 
  B. A. Arthur was not only Arthur 
  banking interests—he was Arthur steamship 
  lines, railroads, aërial transport, assorted 
  factories; mansion in Palm Beach, duplex on 
  Park Avenue, estate at Newport, hunting 
  lodge in Scotland, chateau on the Riviera, 
  chalet in Switzerland, yacht at City Island, 
  polo ponies on Long Island, private planes 
  everywhere. One of those men who could 
  become slightly ill 
  with a cold, and the 
  stock market would take a general drop. 
  The startling thing about this group, 
  they realized as introductions progressed, 
  was that B. A. Arthur was probably the 
  pauper of the assemblage. Some of the 
  others, who had been more agile at dodging 
  publicity, were several times as wealthy. Doc 
  Savage and his associates had engaged in 
  enough financial manipulation themselves to 
  have a good general idea of the money 
  situation internationally, as well as in the 
  United States. 
  Ahmet Ben Khali, for instance, was 
  an unknown figure in America, but all through 
  the Middle East—his specialty was oil—his 
  name was uttered with either bated breath, or 
  with wildest ravings of profanity. He was a 
  very, very long, studious-appearing brown 
  man, until one looked at his face. Looking 
  Ben Khali in the eye at close range was 
  somewhat like exchanging stares with a 
  hungry hawk. 
  There was Lord Dusterman, the 
  arms 
  magnate 
  whose 
  munition-factory 
  holdings, although this was not generally 
  known, had been somewhat abbreviated 
  when Germany absorbed Czechoslovakia. 
  He was merely a big man. 
  There were seven of them. In 
  appearance alone, none of them stood out 
  particularly, or had salient characteristics. 
  They were not men who profited from being 
  noticed; rather the contrary. 
  Certain qualities they all had in 
  common: their complete self-possession—
  fabulous wealth gives a man that; their 
  obvious alertness of senses and their 
  probable sharpness of mind, these being two 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  23 
  facilities naturally ingrained in men having 
  money. And all of them, it seemed, held 
  varying degrees of contempt for others of 
  less worldly station. Not that they were 
  overbearing; these men had too much 
  cleverness 
  and 
  polish 
  for 
  that. 
  Their 
  condescension took the form of a calm 
  acceptance of their own importance. When 
  they entered a conversation among lesser 
  lights, they naturally monopolized it. They 
  were excessively polite to each other. 
  There was one exception, and Doc 
  Savage thereafter gave him more attention 
  than any of the others, without seeming to do 
  so. 
  “I am Henry Lee,” said the man who 
  was an exception. “And if you gentlemen will 
  excuse me, I must leave. I have an important 
  appointment. You are welcome, however, to 
  use my home.” 
  Doc Savage noticed that a visible air 
  of coldness settled over the group. 
  “You better stay, Lee,” said Ahmet 
  Ben Khali, after a long pause. 
  Lee obeyed the order. So would 
  have half the potentates in the Orient. 
   
   
  VAN JELK advanced and made a 
  rather calm speech. His aristocratic manner 
  did not seem out of place here, for all these 
  men had it. 
  “You gentlemen know Doc Savage, 
  either by personal acquaintance or by 
  repute.” Van Jelk smiled at Doc. “Tonight I 
  had the fortune to discover that Doc Savage 
  is interested in encountering and defeating 
  the 
  same 
  power—the 
  thing 
  we 
  have 
  variously referred to as a curse, a fiend, ogre 
  or damned impossibility—which we have 
  come to realize holds infinite danger for us.” 
  Lord Dusterman, in a voice that 
  barked like one of the machine guns his 
  factories turned out, said, “You mean the 
  black dagger?” 
  “And the black stone.” 
  B. A. Arthur, chairman of the board 
  of some dozen corporations, asked, “And 
  Doc Savage believed it?” 
  “He did.” 
  “I didn’t,” B. A. Arthur said. “Not I 
  when I first heard of the thing.” 
  Van Jelk waved an arm to include 
  the seven men assembled in the weirdly 
  modernistic room. 
  “We are a syndicate engaged in the 
  purchase of museum material,” he explained. 
  “All of us together purchased this black 
  stone, which was a sacred relic of the ancient 
  Incan nation. Our representative who did the 
  actual purchasing was Sid Morrison, an 
  expert at such things. The purchase was 
  made from Juan Don MacNamara, son of 
  President Gatun MacNamara of Cristobal. 
  Young MacNamara was to deliver the stone 
  to New York by plane yester—” 
  “That,” said Sanda MacNamara, “is a 
  pack of fibs.” 
  Van Jelk drew himself up and said 
  with some dignity, “I am not in the habit of 
  having my veracity questioned.” 
  Sanda had said very little since 
  arriving; evidently words had been gathering 
  inside her like steam. 
  “It’s being questioned now!” she 
  snapped. “I know my brother, and I know he 
  never had any black stone.” 
  “Perhaps your brother did not tell 
  you.” 
  “He’d have told me.” 
  “You insinuate we are liars?” 
  “Not insinuating—telling you it’s a 
  black-faced fact.” 
  “I see.” 
  “Furthermore,” said Sanda, “no one 
  can tell me there is such a thing as a black 
  rock that gives off a curse consisting of black 
  daggers that stab people, or whatever this 
  curse is supposed to consist of.” The young 
  woman stamped a foot in her vexation. “What 
  kind of a roomful of idiots are you to believe 
  such nonsense?” She turned on Doc 
  Savage. “You’re as bad as the rest of them.” 
  “You’re forgetting, Sanda,” Monk 
  pointed out earnestly, “that we saw the 
  daggers. Two of them. One in the air. One 
  sticking in a man.” 
  “I saw it too!” Sanda said sharply. 
  “Just as my brother’s plane fell.” 
  “You saw it—you still don’t believe 
  it?” 
  “I hope I’m not insane.” 
  “This discussion,” said Ahmet Ben 
  Khali, the Oriental oil magnate, “is not doing 
  us much good.” 
  Doc Savage had seated himself in a 
  chair; he got to his feet. 
  “I should like,” he said, “to question 
  Henry Lee in private.” 
   
   
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  24 
  A SLIGHT stir of surprise—it was not 
  pleasant—went around the room. The stir 
  was slight, which meant a good deal. These 
  were men of infinite wealth, therefore they 
  were tremendous gamblers, self-trained not 
  to show emotion. 
  Henry Lee got up suddenly. He sat 
  down again. He did not say anything. His 
  face, however, was not a pleasant thing to 
  watch. 
  Doc said, “If you will go into a private 
  room, Mr. Lee.” 
  Lord Dusterman said, exploding like 
  a gun, “No!” 
  “Which are my sentiments exactly,” 
  said Ahmet Ben Khali. 
  Doc Savage said nothing. Henry Lee 
  was far more nervous than the rest, and if 
  there was a weak-willed man in the room, 
  Lee was the individual. Young Lee controlled 
  one of the largest fortunes in the United 
  States, but unlike these other men, he had 
  not made the money himself, but had 
  inherited it. His life had been a procession of 
  scandals of the sort typical to a young man 
  with money and leisure and a character not 
  as strong as it might be. 
  Henry 
  Lee 
  took 
  out 
  a 
  silk 
  handkerchief and mopped his forehead. 
  Undeniably, he was in the grip of terror. 
  B. A. Arthur, the titan of American big 
  business, furnished an explanation. 
  “Sid Morrison was marked for death,” 
  he said grimly. 
  “And Henry, here—” 
  “Marked—how do you mean?” Doc 
  interrupted. 
  B. 
  A. 
  Arthur 
  hesitated, 
  looked 
  uncomfortable, finally growled, “This is more 
  unbelievable than any of the rest. But the fact 
  is that a black dagger appeared mysteriously 
  in thin air and scratched a warning on Sid 
  Morrison’s desk, then vanished.” B. A. Arthur 
  showed his teeth in an uncheerful kind of a 
  smile-grimace. “Sound like a crazy man 
  when I say that, don’t I?” 
  “I’ll say!” Sanda interrupted dryly. 
  “The warning came to Henry Lee in 
  the same way, except that the dagger 
  scratched the warning on a wall. Isn’t that 
  right, Henry?” 
  “Y-yes,” Henry Lee managed. 
  “This is Henry’s house,” continued B. 
  A. Arthur. “So we can readily show you the 
  warning.” 
  They moved, all of them, to an 
  adjacent room, a chamber with walls done in 
  royal blue, ceiling in faint cherry, with a 
  carpet as yellow as any canary. The 
  scratches were plainly discernible, and 
  spelled: 
   
        When comes the day 
           Named the Sea Animal, 
       A visitor to you, 
           The one called Ahpuch. 
   
  Homely Monk snorted, said, “Listen, 
  brothers, that doesn’t make sense. It ain’t 
  even poetry.” 
  “Ahpuch,” said B. A. Arthur, “was the 
  ancient Aztec lord of death.” 
  Monk pointed. “What’s the first part 
  mean—a day named the Sea Animal?” 
  Doc Savage said, “The Mayans and 
  some of the Incas named their days Small 
  Bird, Monkey, Rain, and so on. Their 
  calendar was divided into a cycle of fifty-two 
  years, each year having three hundred sixty-
  five days, with five very unlucky intercalary 
  days when they gave human sacrifices. Each 
  year had eighteen months, each month 
  twenty days, and there were four weeks of 
  five days each in a month. However, that is 
  beside the point. Authorities generally agree 
  that the day called Sea Animal was the 
  second day of the week.” 
  “Second day of the week would be 
  Monday,” Monk said. “That’s today.” 
  B. A. Arthur nodded grimly. 
  “That,” he stated, “is why we don’t 
  want Henry Lee, here, out of our sight. Not 
  even for a minute.” 
  “Don’t want him out of your sight?” 
  “If you must know,” snapped B. A. 
  Arthur, “we’re protecting his life!” 
   
   
  IT developed that the gathering of 
  the seven men at Henry Lee’s house was 
  nothing more nor less than a watch party to 
  see that nothing happened to the one of their 
  number whom they declared had been 
  marked for next death. They were, they 
  insisted, going to keep close watch on Henry. 
  They were not going to let him out of sight, 
  not even for Doc Savage to question him. 
  There was nothing to be learned from Henry 
  Lee that the others could not explain, and he 
  was nervous enough now, because of the 
  threat against himself, without being made 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  25 
  more distraught by having Doc single him out 
  for questioning. 
   
   
  Seven of the world’s wealthiest men saw Henry Lee in the chair—with a black knife sticking in his chest! 
   
  All of this was made clear, and Doc’s 
  party 
  retired 
  to 
  the 
  anteroom 
  for 
  a 
  conference. 
  If Doc Savage had any definite 
  opinions, or if he intended to voice them—
  unlikely at this point, since the bronze man 
  had the habit of keeping conjectures to 
  himself until they were proven facts—was a 
  point that remained unsettled, since a loud 
  and horrified yell brought them charging into 
  the room where seven of the wealthiest men 
  on earth were watching one of their number 
  who had been threatened with death. 
  Henry Lee was sitting in a chair. The 
  chair was entirely of metal except for the 
  cushion made of brilliant red leather. Henry 
  Lee sat in the chair as though he had 
  decided to relax completely and had leaned 
  back and slid down until the back of his head 
  had hooked and held onto the rear of the 
  chair. His arms hung loosely, one on either 
  side of the chair, with one of his hands by 
  chance half cupped so that the slow string of 
  red fluid—red as the chair cushion—that 
  oozed out around the black knife that was 
  sticking in his chest, trickled into the cupped 
  hand and leaked through the fingers to the 
  floor! 
   
   
  Chapter VIII 
  MILLIONS ON A BOAT 
   
  IT was Monk, the skeptic, who 
  emitted an astounded, unbelieving noise that 
  resembled a bark, then sprang toward the 
  man in the chair. Reaching the figure, Monk 
  put out a hand, hesitated as if half fearful, 
  then touched the black handle of the black 
  knife protruding from the body. Monk felt the 
  hilt with his fingertips, squeezed it. 
  “It’s real!” he barked. He turned 
  around and looked at Doc Savage and 
  pointed at the knife. “You see! There’s the 
  black dagger—just like we found it stickin’ in 
  Sid Morrison’s body.” 
  No one in the room said anything, 
  and no one moved except Doc Savage, who 
  took a flashlight from his pocket, went to the 
  chair, and blazed the white beam of the light 
  into Henry Lee’s eyes. The pupils of the eyes 
  did not contract to cope with the bright light. 
  “Who did it?” Doc asked. 
  “Nothing,” Van Jelk said. 
  “Nothing?” 
  Van Jelk braced himself visibly. His 
  skin had taken on the hue of lead. 
  “The black knife simply appeared in 
  the air,” he said. “Then it buried itself in poor 
  Henry’s chest.” 
  “The knife simply appeared?” 
  “Insane as it sounds—that’s what 
  happened. We all saw it.” He looked around 
  at the others and they nodded wordlessly. 
  “How close were you to him?” 
  “Me? About fifteen feet, I imagine. 
  None of us was much closer than that.” 
  Doc Savage said nothing, looked at 
  the men—the wealthy men—assembled in 
  the room. The bronze man’s flake-gold eyes 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  26 
  were more strangely alive than usual, and 
  there was something in them that vaguely 
  disturbed everyone upon whom they rested. 
  Lord 
  Dusterman, 
  the 
  munitions 
  magnate, said suddenly, “I’ve never been 
  able to stand the sight of a body!” He walked 
  out of the room, but came back almost 
  immediately bearing a sheet. He handed the 
  sheet to Monk. “You cover it, please,” he 
  requested. 
  Monk carried the sheet to the body, 
  spread it over the figure, then stepped back. 
  The sheet molded the form, showing in 
  particular the hump where the black dagger 
  protruded. 
  Monk said, “I’d like to see that 
  dagger disappear this time.” 
  B. A. Arthur went to the telephone 
  and picked it up. 
  “Wait,” Doc said quietly. 
  “But we’ll be in trouble if we don’t call 
  the police,” Arthur said. 
  Monk put in, “We’re the police. All of 
  us have commissions on the force.” 
  In the moments that followed, they 
  could 
  hear 
  an 
  electric 
  clock 
  running 
  somewhere, and the cold, intense sounds of 
  the 
  blizzard 
  outside. 
  Wind 
  whined 
  occasionally, and flurries of hard snowflakes 
  beat against the great windows. A radiator 
  started clanking, then stopped. Either a little 
  of the bitter cold outdoors had crept into the 
  room, or nerves were making them feel cool, 
  for there was a noticeable chill in the place. 
  One of the group, a sleek, wiry mink of a man 
  named Costervelt, who had twice been sued 
  by the government for income taxes, seemed 
  to have a cold, for he took out a handkerchief 
  and blew his nose. 
  Then Monk howled a howl that made 
  all his previous howls seem mouselike by 
  comparison, and pointed at the sheet-
  covered body. 
  “That dagger!” he squalled. “You 
  can’t see the outline of that dagger!” 
  The homely chemist then sprang 
  forward and whipped the sheet off the body, 
  and all of could see that the black dagger 
  was no longer there! 
   
   
  EMOTIONS of the men as they 
  viewed the impossible phenomenon were as 
  varied as the colors in a rainbow, and their 
  reactions almost as assorted. There was, 
  however, on the part of the seven wealthy 
  men—they had been eight at the beginning, 
  counting Van Jelk, but now Henry Lee was 
  dead—less shock and excitement than was 
  shown by Doc Savage’s aides. The bronze 
  man observed that, made a mental note of it. 
  He said suddenly, “I am going to search this 
  place, if no one has objections.” 
  “No one has objections,” said Ahmet 
  Ben Khali. 
  Doc Savage nodded and walked out, 
  but did not search the place. Instead, the 
  bronze man rode an elevator down to the 
  street. He had not put on his coat, and the 
  cold stabbed at him with needled violence, 
  and the wind got under his coattails and piled 
  them up on his shoulders. 
  There were compartments in his car 
  which held numerous chemicals and gadgets 
  of the type which he frequently found of use, 
  and from one of these niches he removed a 
  small cardboard box, which he pocketed. 
  With the box in his possession, he 
  waded back through snow that was almost 
  deep enough to get into his trouser pockets, 
  reached the building lobby and spent a little 
  time stamping snow out of his trouser legs, 
  shaking it out of trouser cuffs, before he 
  returned to the penthouse. 
  He found in the penthouse many 
  pale faces, much silence, and no new 
  developments. 
  Doc said, “My friends and I didn’t get 
  to finish that conference we were holding 
  when Henry Lee was killed. We will go ahead 
  with it now.” 
  He gestured. Monk, Renny, Long 
  Tom, Johnny, Ham and Sanda MacNamara 
  all filed into the vestibule. 
  Just before Doc left the room, he 
  fumbled in his coat pocket where he had put 
  the cardboard box, then took off his coat and 
  dropped it over a chair. 
  “Going to leave my coat here,” he 
  said. “Getting a little warm.” 
  He went out into the vestibule with 
  the others, closing the door. 
   
   
  IT was quiet in the vestibule. Even 
  moaning of the blizzard wind and pecking of 
  the hard snowflakes against windows were 
  shut out. 
  To the obvious surprise of the others, 
  Doc Savage said nothing and gave no 
  indication that he had anything to say, or that 
  they were going to hold a conference at all. 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  27 
  Finally, Monk, consumed with curiosity about 
  the death in the other room, and wanting to 
  keep in close touch with what was going on 
  there, reached for the door knob, his 
  intention being to rejoin Van Jelk and the 
  others. 
  Doc spoke one word quietly. 
  “Wait,” he said. 
  “What in blazes?” Monk asked. 
  “Give it about ten minutes,” Doc 
  suggested. 
  “Give what?” 
  Doc Savage did not answer. He 
  seemed to be listening. 
  Ham looked at Sanda and said, 
  “What do you think about this black-dagger 
  stuff now?” 
  The girl shuddered. “I can’t believe 
  such a thing.” 
  “You saw it.” 
  “I know.” 
  Monk muttered, “If you ask me, I 
  think we’re all going to be in the market for a 
  nice strong insane asylum, if this stuff keeps 
  up.” 
  Minutes 
  dragged. 
  Finally, 
  Doc 
  consulted his watch, said, “We might as well 
  go in now.” 
  Renny, first to reach the door, 
  opened it, then let out a startled roar. “Holy 
  cow! They’re all dead!” 
  He corrected his first impression 
  after making an inspection. They were all 
  unconscious. Van Jelk lay in a chair, but all 
  the others were on the floor, their forms piled 
  in assorted positions. 
  Renny was running from one to the 
  other when his knees became weak and he 
  stumbled, put his hands to his head. 
  Doc said quickly, “Get outside again. 
  There is still some of the gas in the room! 
  We’ll give it more time.” 
  They hurried out into the vestibule 
  and closed the door again. 
  “Gas? What gas?” Long Tom, the 
  electrical expert, looked completely puzzled. 
  “I went down to the car and got a 
  cardboard box containing a bottle of strong 
  anaesthetic gas,” Doc explained. “Pulled the 
  cork of the bottle while it was in my coat 
  pocket, then left the coat in there. The gas 
  vaporizes quickly, loses its strength after a 
  short time—five minutes or so.” 
  Long Tom asked, “The same kind of 
  gas we’ve been using for a long time in those 
  little glass anaesthetic bombs?” 
  “Yes.” 
  After they could comfortably return to 
  the room, Doc said, “Renny, you and Johnny 
  drive up to the Broadway district. On Sixth 
  Avenue you will find a number of trunk stores 
  which are open at this time of night, and 
  which cater to the theatrical trade. Get seven 
  trunks, each large enough to hold a man. 
  Preferably, buy trunks already used by 
  theater companies.” 
  Renny said, “I don’t get this.” 
  “These seven men wanted us to 
  protect them,” Doc explained. 
  “Yeah, but will putting them in trunks 
  protect them?” 
  “They will only be in the trunks until 
  we get them aboard a steamship.” 
  “Steamship?” 
  “One bound for South America,” Doc 
  said. “It sails at midnight. At this season of 
  the year, we can probably get short-notice 
  accommodations. Johnny will remain in New 
  York—well—keep an eye on things.” 
   
   
  THE steamship Rocket was not an 
  American 
  boat, 
  but 
  she 
  was 
  hauling 
  American goods, since it happened that the 
  merchandise was of a type that ships of 
  American registry could not haul. The 
  Congress 
  of 
  the 
  United 
  States 
  was 
  responsible for this. Congress had ruled that 
  the United States was strictly on the neutral 
  side of current or future war, and that any 
  materials sold to a nation engaged in war 
  would have to be sold on a strictly cash-and-
  carry basis. The warring nation must pay 
  cash, and carry the goods in some ship other 
  than an American one. 
  The Rocket had been built in 
  Sweden, which made her a good craft, 
  although she was no longer of Swedish 
  registry. She was in excess of four hundred 
  feet long, but she was not new and she 
  needed paint. She did not carry a large 
  passenger list, since passengers preferred 
  the more pretentious cruise liners which 
  made the South American ports at this 
  season of the year. Additionally, there was 
  the fact that the old Rocket was cargoed with 
  supplies for a warring country, Hispanola, 
  and the consular service did what they could 
  to 
  discourage 
  use 
  of 
  the 
  vessel 
  by 
  southbound Yankees. 
  Sanda 
  MacNamara 
  took 
  three 
  excited turns around one of the Rocket 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  28 
  passenger cabins, then planted herself in 
  front of Doc Savage and said, “I don’t get the 
  sense of this. I don’t get it!” 
  “Suppose you sit down,” the bronze 
  man suggested, “and tell us about this war 
  between Hispanola and Cristobal.” 
  The girl sank down in a chair and 
  clamped her hands together. She suddenly 
  looked very tired. 
  “Like all wars, it’s ugly and horrible,” 
  she said. 
  Doc Savage explained, “What I am 
  interested in is the background of this war 
  between Hispanola and your country—the 
  factors which led to it.” 
  The girl was thoughtful for a moment 
  “I may not be able to give a sensible 
  explanation,” she said. 
  “Why not?” 
  “There was nothing to cause this war 
  that we could see. No particular grievance 
  with Hispanola. The last war with Hispanola 
  was more than sixty years ago, and we lost, 
  but there was no grudge on our part. There 
  had been a border dispute, but that was 
  settled two years ago; amicably, everyone 
  thought. We had certainly done nothing to 
  arouse the antagonism of Hispanola.” She 
  looked at Doc Savage sharply. “I believe 
  what I am telling you is the truth. I am not 
  trying to lay the blame on the other side.” 
  Doc asked, “Just how did this ever 
  get started?” 
  “Like most of them—propaganda. 
  Suddenly, and for no reason that we could 
  understand, our neighbor Hispanola was 
  flooded with propaganda against Cristobal. 
  My father—our government—were painted 
  as 
  overbearing 
  and 
  belligerent. 
  The 
  Hispanola newspapers twisted every incident 
  to build up hate against us.” She grimaced. 
  “I’ll wager you that there has not been a 
  murder or crime in Hispanola during the last 
  two years in which the culprit was not 
  indicated as being from Cristobal. Lies!” She 
  clenched her hands. “They printed reams of 
  lies!” 
  “And the actual declaration of war?” 
  “There was none. Nations have 
  stopped declaring war lately, you know.” 
  “There 
  must 
  have 
  been 
  some 
  excuse.” 
  “There was—a fight on the border. It 
  was claimed also that Hispanolans were 
  being mistreated in Cristobal territory, and 
  that Hispanola had the right to protect these 
  people.” 
  “That idea,” Doc Savage said dryly, 
  “was used fairly successfully in Europe.” 
  Sanda shook her head wearily. “My 
  father doesn’t understand why there should 
  be a war. I’ve heard him say that time and 
  again.” She put a hand on the bronze man’s 
  arm. “I hope you believe me, because it’s 
  true.” 
  Monk and Ham came into the cabin. 
  “Well, we got aboard—with our 
  trunks,” Monk said, and grinned. “All but 
  Johnny. You said he stays in New York, 
  didn’t you?” 
  “Our seven guests all right?” Doc 
  asked. 
  “They’re a little peeved,” Monk 
  admitted cheerfully. 
   
   
  Chapter IX 
  JUNGLE QUEST 
   
  FOR four days and five nights things 
  were 
  rather 
  monotonous. 
  The 
  seven 
  prisoners gave no trouble whatever, which 
  did not mean they didn’t want to—nor that 
  they couldn’t have given trouble. They could. 
  Plenty. They were not only intelligent men; 
  they were clever and calculating, able to take 
  advantage of every point in their favor. 
  So Doc Savage kept them under the 
  influence of a drug concoction which was 
  harmless, but maintained a condition closely 
  resembling normal sleep. They arranged the 
  dosage so that each man revived at twenty-
  four-hour intervals, and was given some 
  exercise and food. Close guard was kept at 
  such times. 
  Monk and Ham managed to quarrel 
  fairly consistently. They had brought along 
  their pets, two animals that furnished 
  ammunition for dissension. Monk’s pet was a 
  pig he had named Habeas Corpus after the 
  law profession in order to irritate Ham, who 
  had no use for pigs in any form. Habeas 
  Corpus had long legs, a snout of prodigious 
  length, and ears that were almost wings. 
  Ham’s pet was a small chimpanzee—
  remarkable because of the astounding 
  resemblance the animal bore to homely 
  Monk—which he had dubbed Chemistry, a 
  name intended to aggravate Monk. 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  29 
  On the morning of the fifth day, the 
  Rocket engines stopped and the anchor went 
  down with a great deal of hoarse, grinding 
  noise. 
  “Trinidad,” Monk announced. “This 
  old ark is plenty fast.” 
  They had anchored out where the 
  big cruise liners usually dropped hook, and 
  lighters were swinging alongside weighted 
  with wooden cases which were to be loaded 
  in the Rocket hold. 
  Doc Savage gathered his aides 
  together. “You will watch the prisoners 
  closely,” he said. 
  He turned to Sanda MacNamara, 
  who had been the object of an abundance of 
  attention from Monk and Ham during the trip. 
  This morning she was efficient in slacks. Not 
  hard to look at either. 
  “Miss MacNamara,” Doc said, “will 
  you show me the spot in the jungle where 
  your brother disappeared?” 
  “We’ll need a plane.” 
  Doc nodded, told Monk and the 
  others: “The captain says the ship will be 
  here all day loading. We should be back 
  before night.” 
  Doc Savage produced grease paint 
  and darkened Sanda’s hands and face, then 
  his own. He brought out a rowdyish cotton 
  frock, such as the natives affected, for the 
  girl, and a tattered pair of duck trousers and 
  rugged shirt for himself. 
  “This is hardly necessary, is it?” the 
  girl asked. 
  “Impossible to be sure,” Doc told her. 
  “For almost five days now, nothing has 
  happened, and that in itself is a little 
  suspicious.” 
  Fresh fruit was being brought aboard 
  the ship through a hull hatch which opened 
  slightly above the waterline. Doc and Sanda 
  passed out through this, descended a short 
  stairway to a wet, tossing float, and the 
  bronze man hailed one of the black 
  bumboatmen who sculled a rickety old 
  dinghy. Doc spoke the fellow’s native 
  tongue—the black was out of the mainland 
  jungles—and 
  they 
  dickered 
  for 
  a few 
  moments over the cost of being sculled 
  ashore before money changed hands. 
  The black sent his old boat past the 
  swarm of half-naked stevedores busy strong-
  arming cargo up a long gangplank, or jacking 
  heavier boxes into cargo nets that were like 
  fish nets made of inch-rope. Doc studied the 
  stevedores, paid particular attention to the 
  faces of passengers lined along the rail. He 
  did not seem particularly pleased. 
  “Lots of Hispanolans on board,” he 
  remarked. 
  “I wouldn’t know,” Sanda said. 
  She was a little peeved. The bronze 
  man had enforced a suggestion that she 
  remain in her cabin; that had been easy 
  enough the first day or two while the ship 
  was in cold northern waters, but once it had 
  entered the Gulf Stream and lambent 
  sunlight, the cabin interiors had not been 
  attractive. 
  “You 
  are 
  the 
  daughter 
  of 
  the 
  president of a country that is at war with 
  Hispanola,” Doc pointed out. “And this ship is 
  headed for a Hispanola seaport.” 
  “It was your idea for me to get on the 
  boat!” Sanda snapped. 
  “It is also my idea for you to keep 
  your identity unknown.” 
  They hired a very large and very old 
  touring car piloted by a brown-skinned 
  maniac; they headed for the airport as fast as 
  the ancient collection of rattles would travel, 
  pedestrians and bicyclists scattering into the 
  roadside bamboo patches. There were fifty 
  bicycles to every car. 
  They received quite a ceremonious 
  greeting at the big Pan-American seaplane 
  base. There was even a reception committee 
  of local officialdom. 
  “I thought,” Doc Savage told the 
  manager of an aërial taxi service which 
  rented seaplanes, “that my radio messages 
  said this was to be a secret.” 
  The man grinned carefully, said: “Oh, 
  I knew you’d be broadminded about that. 
  Fact you’re renting one of my planes is a 
  boost. I need the advertising.” 
  Doc said nothing more. 
  They used a small seaplane, not as 
  new as it might have been. Doc tested it 
  carefully, borrowed parachutes from the 
  operations office before he took off. 
  Sanda made a dot on the map of the 
  South American jungle. 
  “There,” 
  she 
  said, 
  “is 
  where—
  whatever it was—happened to my brother.” 
   
   
  THE sun filled the sky with such 
  glare that lifting the eyes was like looking at 
  the stabbing blue flash of a welding torch, 
  while jungle green spread to the horizon, the 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  30 
  hue of boiled spinach, except for a muddy-
  looking worm that lay twisted and wrinkled 
  below, a worm of a river that gave the illusion 
  of fattening as the plane sank toward it. 
  “That the sand bar?” 
  “Yes.” 
  “The plane is still there,” Doc pointed 
  out, rather needlessly. 
  Tufted jungle arose above the wings, 
  then the floats hammered the waves, 
  knocking out spray, and rather slowly their 
  plane bogged down in the water as it lost 
  speed. Doc did not beach the craft on the 
  sand bar. Instead, he put out a small anchor 
  and paid line until they could jump from the 
  floats to the bar; then he snubbed the craft.  
  The girl craned her neck and stared 
  at the sand. Her face was strange when she 
  turned it to the bronze man. “You can see 
  yourself. There were no footprints except my 
  own.” 
  Doc said nothing, but climbed to the 
  sand bar and studied the thing thoughtfully, 
  noting the footprints which Sanda had made 
  several days before. 
  Jungle water birds had tracked the 
  bar somewhat; there were marks where 
  alligators had crawled. But there was no 
  trace of human feet except those left by the 
  girl on her previous visit. 
  Sanda shuddered. 
  “You can see how impossible it was!” 
  she gasped. “As weird as that black knife 
  killing Henry Lee, then vanishing.” 
  Doc said, “You sure there were no 
  alligator tracks close to the plane when you 
  were here?” 
  The girl glanced about. Something 
  occurred to her, some realization that caused 
  her mouth to open, but no sound to come, 
  and her right hand to lift to her throat, fingers 
  closing slowly in a clutching way. “Tracks!” 
  she said. “Tracks!” Her voice climbed. “But 
  that’s weird, too!” 
  “Weird?” 
  “There wasn’t a mark here the first 
  time. Not a track.” 
   
   
  DOC SAVAGE ran along the wing of 
  the overturned plane, leaped, and landed on 
  the pontoon of their own plane, which had 
  swung on the anchor tether until it was close 
  to the sand bar. 
  “We might as well leave,” he said. 
  Sanda stared at him. 
  “What about my brother?” 
  Doc Savage’s voice was confident. “I 
  wouldn’t worry particularly about him.” 
  She studied his face, trying to tell 
  whether there was any falseness, any acting, 
  behind the confidence with which he spoke. 
  “You are sure he is alive?” 
  “Not sure. You want the truth from 
  me—I think he is alive.” 
  “Can’t we find him now? Maybe he is 
  somewhere close.” 
  “He is probably a long way from here 
  now.” 
  She thought that over. She was 
  puzzled. “But he was here? He was in the 
  plane when it fell, wasn’t he?” 
  “Your brother was in the plane when 
  it struck this sand bar.” 
  The bronze man then grasped the 
  line and began pulling up the other line they 
  had dropped. He stowed it in the pontoon 
  where it belonged, then took the controls. 
  Sanda climbed in. She had many questions 
  but decided to hold them until they were in 
  the air. 
  The plane plowed forward, vaulted 
  up on step and raced thumping across the 
  river waves, slid up sluggishly into the hot air. 
  It flew for slightly more than fifteen 
  minutes, climbing most of the time, before 
  the wing came off. 
  There was no warning—the only 
  sound was a sharp twang of a noise—before 
  the wing was suddenly whirling around in the 
  air behind them like a big yellow feather. The 
  plane sank, wounded side down, began to 
  turn as it fell, around and around, slowly at 
  first, then faster until the spin became 
  dizzying, and the noise of its fall, a whistling 
  rush of air at the beginning, became a great 
  funereal moan as the craft hurtled at the 
  tufted green of the jungle. 
   
   
  Chapter X 
  THE QUEER NAVY 
   
  IT had fallen upon Ham to drug, 
  exercise and feed Lord Dusterman, the 
  munitions magnate. Lord Dusterman’s title 
  was quite real, incidentally, and his position 
  was at the top of the social vortex in 
  London’s Mayfair, the Riviera and Palm 
  Beach. Naturally, Monk had accused Ham of 
  giving Lord Dusterman special privileges as a 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  31 
  prisoner, and for the sake of the squabble 
  involved, Ham had not denied it. 
  Privately, 
  Ham 
  detested 
  Lord 
  Dusterman—his 
  opinion 
  of 
  all 
  seven 
  prisoners was not too high, if it came to that. 
  It would be next to an impossibility to lump off 
  seven richer men at one whack, but wealth 
  alone had long ago ceased to impress Ham. 
  He was no pauper himself. 
  Lord Dusterman awakened at the 
  end of a regular twenty-four-hour interval of 
  drug-induced sleep, and Ham waggled the 
  end of a blackjack under his nose and 
  advised, “You know by now that the thing to 
  do is keep quiet and follow orders. Take 
  some exercises. Then eat. After that, you get 
  another shot of bye-bye.” 
  “Thank you,” Lord Dusterman said, 
  not cheerfully. “Where are we? The boat 
  seems to have stopped.” 
  “Trinidad.” 
  “The island off the north coast of 
  South America—the one where they have 
  the asphalt lake?” 
  “Yes.” 
  “Just what in the devil,” asked Lord 
  Dusterman, “are you keeping us prisoner 
  for?” 
  He had asked that question before. 
  “We’re 
  protecting 
  you,” 
  Ham 
  explained. 
  “Oh—hell!” 
  “Well, you’ll notice that there have 
  not been any more attempts to kill you since 
  we took over. No more black daggers.” 
  “Humph!” Lord Dusterman suddenly 
  made a pass at Ham with his fist. The blow 
  missed. “This is costing me millions of 
  dollars!” the man screamed, hysterical with 
  rage. 
  Ham grinned. “Why do rich men 
  always think the world can’t get along without 
  them?” 
  Lord Dusterman, looking blankly 
  furious, subsided, and ate in silence. Without 
  Ham noticing, he managed to stow the 
  napkin inside his shirt. Finishing his meal, he 
  stood up, walked into the private bathroom 
  which was a part of the cabin. 
  As soon as he was out of sight of 
  Ham, he tied the napkin around his arm, 
  tourniquet fashion, just above the elbow. 
  Then he went stamping back into the cabin. 
  “Gimme the shot,” he snarled. 
  The drug was administered with a 
  hypodermic needle in the forearm. Ham 
  administered it—failing to discover the napkin 
  tied tightly around the man’s arm above the 
  elbow. 
  Lord Dusterman flung himself into 
  the bed and yanked the sheets over his 
  head. 
  Ham laughed, said, “Go ahead and 
  pout.” 
   
   
  LORD DUSTERMAN smiled fiercely 
  under the sheets, then deliberately sank his 
  teeth into his arm where the hypo needle had 
  planted its chemical. He began sucking the 
  wound. 
  He 
  was 
  giving 
  himself 
  the 
  conventional 
  treatment 
  for 
  snakebite, 
  shutting off circulation above the wound and 
  sucking out the poison, which in this case 
  was the chemical-inducing sleep. 
  He managed to stave off the effects 
  of the stuff; stretching out, he breathed 
  deeply as if asleep. 
  Ham was satisfied that the man was 
  again under the influence of the drug, which 
  meant that he would sleep blissfully for 
  another 
  twenty-four 
  hours. 
  “Come 
  on, 
  Chemistry,” Ham told his pet chimp. “Let’s go 
  quarrel with that funny-looking Monk.” 
  They left the stateroom. 
  Lord Dusterman rolled out of the 
  bunk, but folded down on the floor when he 
  tried to stand. The chemical had taken effect 
  to some extent, he realized. He crawled to 
  the bathroom, doused his face with cold 
  water, and after several attempts could walk 
  in a wobbling fashion as far as the cabin 
  door, where he began working upon the lock 
  with the tine of a fork, a fork that he had 
  stolen two days ago, for he’d had this plan in 
  mind for some time. 
  He had been a mechanic in arms 
  plants in his youth, and his fingers still 
  retained much of their skill; he prided himself 
  on that. He got the door open. The corridor 
  was empty. 
  He did not go to the captain of the 
  Rocket, because he was not sure that money 
  could buy the captain’s help against Doc 
  Savage. At best, such an arrangement would 
  take time to consummate. What he wanted 
  was men whom money could buy, body and 
  soul. He moved along the rail, saw the 
  workmen on the lighters. Five minutes later 
  he joined them, singled out one of the most 
  likely-looking for his purpose. 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  32 
  He used the opening that he knew 
  would be most effective. Doc had not taken 
  his money from him. He flashed a roll of 
  greenbacks. 
  “Can you get ten good men?” he 
  asked. 
  The stevedore eyed the money, 
  reached out and thumbed up the edges of 
  the bills to see the denominations. 
  “How good?” he asked, a little 
  hoarsely. 
  “I won’t fool you. Some of them may 
  get killed.” 
  “That’s bad.” 
  “The pay will be five hundred dollars 
  a day. Twice that to you!” 
  The stevedore licked his lips; his 
  hands opened and closed spasmodically. 
  “How soon?” 
  “Twenty minutes.” 
  Once more the man dampened his 
  lips. He looked out over the sweating 
  stevedores, selecting individuals with his 
  eyes. 
  “Can do,” he said abruptly. “If that’s 
  not stage money.” 
  “It’s not.” 
  “How do I know?” 
  Lord Dusterman handed him a 
  hundred-dollar bill, said, “Suppose you take it 
  up to the purser and see.” 
  The man went away, came back 
  satisfied, and grinned widely when Lord 
  Dusterman said, “Keep that”—The munitions 
  king leafed out four more bills of the same 
  denomination. “And these—for expenses.” 
  The two drew aside and spoke in low 
  voices for some time, Lord Dusterman 
  making all of the long speeches. 
   
   
  HAM BROOKS looked into Lord 
  Dusterman’s cabin about two o’clock, and 
  even went over and took Dusterman’s pulse, 
  finding it satisfactory. Astonishment was a 
  mild word to apply to his feelings when the 
  supposedly unconscious man suddenly got 
  him by the throat. 
  Two hard blows with his fists freed 
  Ham. He staggered backward—into the arms 
  of three men who had been standing 
  sweating in the heat of the little bath. The trio 
  must have had experience with their fists, 
  because they had Ham senseless a moment 
  later. 
  “Tie him,” Dusterman said. “Gag him 
  too.” 
  One 
  of 
  the 
  hired 
  stevedores 
  exhibited a knife, said: “We can put him in 
  the bathtub and use this on him and he won’t 
  be as likely to give us any trouble later.” 
  Lord Dusterman shook his head 
  quickly. “No. He’s very important alive.” 
  “Ransom?” 
  “No—well, not cash ransom anyway. 
  His safety should be a potent argument to 
  keep Doc Savage from molesting us further.” 
  The other frowned. “You said Doc 
  Savage?” 
  “Yes.” Lord Dusterman watched the 
  man closely, anxious to see what effect the 
  bronze man’s name would have. He had not 
  advised these men who they were going up 
  against when he hired them, for the good 
  reason that men who have already jumped in 
  the water are more likely to go swimming. 
  The spokesman of the hired rescuers 
  swore. 
  “All right—we know why you didn’t 
  tell us who it was,” he said. “But we’re in it 
  now. We’ll go ahead.” 
  Lord Dusterman put his chin up, 
  said: “You are working for a combination of 
  men more powerful than Doc Savage ever 
  was or ever will be.” 
  “I hope we don’t find out you’re 
  mistaken,” the stevedore said. 
  The door knob rattled—one of them 
  had locked it on the inside, fortunately—and 
  Dusterman made a quick gesture, sending 
  his men to either side of the door, after which 
  he unlatched the door. 
  Monk walked in and never saw what 
  hit him, although the weapon happened to be 
  a length of lead pipe wrapped in cloth. 
  Later, 
  much 
  later, 
  when 
  Monk 
  awakened, he had the idea that Ham had 
  conked him. 
  Ham was lying on the bunk, only his 
  eyes showing. 
  Ham then lifted his head, and Monk 
  perceived that he was also gagged. 
  “W-h-a-t 
  g-o-e-s 
  o-n?” 
  Monk 
  signaled. 
  “L-o-o-k 
  b-e-h-i-n-d 
  y-o-u,” 
  Ham 
  suggested with his fingers. 
  Monk turned over and discovered 
  that he had company. Renny and Long Tom 
  reposed on the floor. All were festooned with 
  ropes and thoroughly muffled, and not one 
  was in a pleasant humor. Furthermore, each 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  33 
  man was tethered to some object which 
  made it impossible to get together to 
  unfasten each other’s bonds; Monk found 
  that he was lashed to the footpost of the 
  bunk. 
   
  As Lord Dusterman looked on, the 
     three men ganged up on Ham! 
   
  Later, the rolling motion of the floor 
  convinced him that he was not dizzy, as he 
  had supposed, but that the steamer was 
  moving in a seaway. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  HISPANOLA was not a large nation, 
  and not a prosperous one, even by Central 
  and South American measurements. The 
  climate was tropical for the most part, and 
  the products were the typical ones: coffee, 
  chicle, rubber. The natives of the lowlands 
  were an indolent lot, as often as not scorning 
  other garb for xanaps, sandals made of tapir 
  hide held on with coarse henequin rope, and 
  long sleeveless jackets called huipils. On the 
  tierra fria, the higher plateau country inland, 
  the populace had a little more life and wore 
  conventional 
  shoes, 
  pants 
  and 
  shirts, 
  although the peasant women pounded their 
  meal in the stone metate and brazo. It was 
  naturally a lazy country, this Hispanola; the 
  streams swarmed with tuber, machaca and 
  other varieties of fish which could be caught 
  quite simply by gathering a berry called 
  pixbicabam, tossing it in the most convenient 
  river, whereupon the fish were stupefied and 
  rose to the surface. It was hardly to be 
  expected that the government of Hispanola 
  would be any shining example of efficiency; 
  the natives apparently had never expected it, 
  and they had never been disappointed. 
  Taxes were never absent, and nothing ever 
  showed for them, except a war now and 
  then, such as the current one with Cristobal. 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  34 
  The captain of the steamship Rocket 
  was astounded when a trim, yachty-looking 
  craft came charging over the horizon, swung 
  alongside and hailed him. 
  “You will heave to!” shouted an 
  authoritative voice from this vessel. “By order 
  of the Hispanola navy.” 
  The Rocket skipper hadn’t been 
  aware that Hispanola possessed a navy, but 
  here was a sample. A hundred-and-fifty-foot 
  sample, neat and shining, with a three-inch 
  gun on the forward deck, another aft, and a 
  torpedo 
  tube 
  forward. 
  The 
  colors 
  of 
  Hispanola danced on the flagstaff. 
  The 
  Rocket 
  skipper 
  had 
  a 
  vocabulary. 
  “What the blankety-blanked swizzle-
  tailed blue blank blazes blank-blank do you 
  think you are?” he inquired through a 
  megaphone. “The hell with you! I’m not 
  stopping!” 
  No words came from the yachty-
  looking Hispanola boat. Instead, both three-
  inch guns turned around on their carriages 
  and gaped at the vitals of the Rocket. 
  “Stop engines!” the captain of the 
  Rocket howled into the engine-room tubes. 
  Then, while his vessel was stopping, he 
  leaned over the bridge weather cloth and 
  recited all the profanity he knew. 
  A boarding party arrived in charge of 
  a spick-and-span officer who said, “Sorry. 
  We must search your vessel for spies.” 
  “Spies?” 
  “Exactly.” The neat officer gestured 
  at his men. “Proceed with the search.” 
  The captain of the Rocket was an old 
  hand at his business, and he’d had 
  experience running arms into Spain during 
  the revolution, so he concluded that silence 
  was the better course. Nothing concerned 
  him but his cargo, and that was bound for 
  Hispanola anyway. If there were any spies 
  aboard, they could look out for themselves. 
  The captain watched, swearing and 
  puzzled, as four figures wrapped in sheets 
  were carried into the small boat. 
  “Who are they?” he yelled. “If you’re 
  carrying off my passengers, I’ve got a right to 
  know which ones.” 
  The neat Hispanolan officer showed 
  him the end of a long-snouted automatic, 
  said, “We have the guns—so you have no 
  rights.” 
  Seven more men walked off the 
  Rocket. The captain stared at them, for he 
  hadn’t seen them before, and he should 
  have, because his passenger list was not 
  large. He had no means of knowing that the 
  seven were the wealthy men whom Doc 
  Savage had seized in New York. 
  The boarding party returned to the 
  yachty-looking vessel on which the three-inch 
  guns were mounted, and the propellers of the 
  craft kicked a boil of water out astern, and it 
  soon vanished over the horizon. 
  Stewards 
  reported 
  that 
  Doc 
  Savage’s four aides were missing. That 
  explained the identity of the four figures 
  swathed in sheets. 
  The Rocket skipper stamped into the 
  radio room and began raising international 
  hell. He sent radio messages to the premier 
  and the parliament of his country, to London, 
  to Washington, to the League of Nations, to 
  the president of Hispanola, and to everyone 
  else he knew who had any influence. 
  From the president of Hispanola 
  came a radio answer that gave him 
  something to wonder about: 
   
  Captain S.S. Rocket, 
  Enroute Hispanola. 
  No such vessel as you say stopped you 
  belongs to the Hispanola navy. Craft is 
  unknown to us. 
  The Hon. Miguel Lenares, 
  President, Republic of Hispanola. 
   
  The 
  captain 
  of 
  the 
  Rocket 
  deliberated over this for a while and 
  eventually voiced his conclusions aloud by 
  muttering, “Now that’s a hell of a funny thing 
  to happen!” 
   
   
  Chapter XI 
  A MAN ALONE 
   
  THE piam-piam is a tropical bird that 
  was probably named after its cry, a 
  monotonous piam-piam noise which the bird 
  emits as it flies from tree to tree, or conducts 
  its eternal squabbling. The birds travel in 
  flocks, are not particularly difficult to capture, 
  but make a very tough menu item, eating one 
  of them being rather like making a meal off 
  slightly boiled binder twine. 
  Sanda MacNamara said, “I hope 
  they’re nourishing.” 
   
  
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  35 
   
  The bronze man tested the strength of the stout  
  vine to see if it would hold Sanda and himself. 
   
  Doc Savage said nothing, having a 
  hunch that the young woman’s remark was a 
  reflection on his jungle cooking. The previous 
  evening they had dined on wacho parrot, 
  which was tender when young. 
  “Two days,” remarked Sanda, “have 
  passed since you so thoughtfully had 
  parachutes aboard when the wing came off 
  our plane. How much longer do you think it 
  will take us to get somewhere?” 
  “We should reach an oil-prospecting 
  camp on the river this afternoon.” Doc 
  extended a zapote nut about the size of a 
  baseball, brown, with a custard-flavored meat 
  that was cool and mealy. 
  Overhead there was superheated 
  tropical sunlight, but where they crouched it 
  was comparatively gloomy. The jungle was 
  thicker than Sanda had believed any natural 
  growth could be. The mat of bushes 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  36 
  interlaced inextricably with lianas was almost 
  impenetrable to anything larger than a small 
  monkey, averaged between twenty-five and 
  forty feet, and above it towered the upper 
  lanes of the jungle, great trees standing so 
  close 
  together 
  that 
  their 
  branches 
  interlocked, festooned with thick vines and 
  lianas. 
  “When,” asked Sanda grimly, “do you 
  think that acid was put on the wing fastenings 
  of the plane?” 
  “Probably 
  the 
  night 
  before 
  we 
  arrived,” Doc said. “The stuff would eat into 
  the metal slowly.” 
  “But that was before our steamship 
  reached Trinidad.” 
  “Yes.” 
  “But that—that’s supernatural! How 
  did they know we were on the ship and would 
  rent a plane? Or is it a they? Could this thing 
  we’re fighting be something supernatural 
  after all?” 
  Doc said: “The man I rented the 
  plane from advertised the fact, remember. 
  The news was possibly cabled by a news 
  agency. And Trinidad is on the main South 
  American line of Pan-American Airways, 
  remember. A reception party could have 
  gotten there ahead of us by plane.” 
  Sanda 
  MacNamara 
  cupped 
  her 
  undeniably 
  nice 
  chin 
  in 
  a 
  palm 
  and 
  contemplated the unpleasant wall of jungle. 
  “There haven’t been any black 
  daggers for some time,” she said. 
  Sanda added: “And I still don’t 
  believe that story about there being a black 
  stone with a curse.” 
  Doc got up and stretched, but did not 
  offer, any comment. 
  “There’s 
  something 
  mysterious 
  behind this,” Sanda continued, “and you 
  know what I think? I’ll bet you one Cristobal 
  peso, which is about thirty cents American, 
  that this black-dagger mystery and the war 
  between Cristobal and Hispanola are all tied 
  in together.” 
  Doc looked at her sharply. “What do 
  you base that idea on?” 
  “Because neither one makes sense,” 
  Sanda said. “There’s no apparent reason for 
  Hispanola declaring war on Cristobal either.” 
  “You seem to have some clairvoyant 
  powers,” the bronze man said. 
  Doc Savage did not explain his 
  remark about clairvoyance. They took to the 
  jungle instead. Sanda placed herself on the 
  bronze man’s back. She had not yet become 
  accustomed to that means of locomotion, so 
  she shut her eyes tightly. She had always 
  hoped she possessed more than an average 
  share of courage, but she had been doubting 
  it. Because this bronze man, when traveling 
  through 
  the 
  jungle, 
  was 
  something 
  unbelievable. 
  The bronze man climbed to the 
  upper jungle lanes, then proceeded to travel 
  in a fashion that Sanda had considered 
  possible only in comic strips and motion 
  pictures. Time after time, the bronze giant 
  ran along swaying boughs so high in the air 
  that Sanda felt faint when she looked down. 
  He covered, with easy leaps, dizzy spaces. 
  For almost two days now they had 
  traveled in his fantastic fashion, traversing, 
  as Sanda well knew, a distance that would 
  have taken weeks had they resorted to 
  hacking their way through the jungle mat with 
  machetes in the conventional fashion. 
  The 
  two 
  days 
  had 
  worked 
  a 
  noticeable effect upon Sanda. It was not the 
  fact that she had lost a great deal of her 
  terror while traversing the dizzy heights 
  clinging to the bronze man’s back—and yet 
  gripped the branches in tight desperation the 
  moment he left her and went scouting for 
  food. She could understand that. 
  The thing that concerned her was not 
  her admiration for the bronze man’s physical 
  strength, which had become tremendous. 
  She was beginning to realize how that had 
  been developed. 
  What she did not understand was 
  inside her, and it was new, and it bothered 
  her, and of late, just the last hour or so, it had 
  set her to remembering . . . remembering 
  that, really, she had never been in love 
  before— 
  They came abruptly to a growth of 
  uamil, low bush a dozen feet or more high 
  which had grown up where the good timber 
  of the jungle had been cut off. Beyond this 
  was the river, and following that, they came 
  shortly to the oil-prospecting camp. 
  “How did you know just where to find 
  these oil prospectors?” Sanda asked. 
  “Johnny happened to be talking 
  about it,” Doc explained. “Johnny is a 
  geologist, and he keeps track of all oil and 
  mineral prospecting expeditions.” 
  Because there were Indians in this 
  jungle who used poisoned blowpipe arrows 
  on any strangers they could reach, the oil 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  37 
  surveyors were camped on rafts and boats 
  which were anchored in midstream, out of 
  arrow range of the shore. The bunk “tents” 
  were made of galvanized iron, which would 
  deflect a spent arrow. They were erected on 
  rafts, and there were speedboats for use up 
  and down the rivers. 
  Doc borrowed an all-steel launch 
  powered with a converted sixteen-cylinder 
  automobile motor, and driven by a young oil 
  man who seemed to consider any speed less 
  than forty miles an hour a reflection on 
  himself. 
  They reached the base camp of the 
  oil-exploration mission, which was equipped 
  with a radio. Doc Savage got on the radio, 
  and in the name of the oil prospectors, 
  ordered down a fast combination land-and-
  sea plane. Playing safe, he did not mention 
  his own name at all. 
  While waiting for the plane to arrive, 
  the bronze man sent a radio message to 
  Renny—and got an answer back which 
  disclosed 
  what 
  had 
  happened 
  to 
  the 
  steamship Rocket. 
  During the next several hours, Doc 
  Savage sent and received more than two 
  dozen radio messages. By that time, the 
  facts were unpleasantly clear. 
  The steamship Rocket had been 
  stopped by a mysterious yachty-looking 
  vessel, which had removed Doc Savage’s 
  four aides and the seven extremely wealthy 
  men whom Doc’s assistants had been 
  “protecting.” The yacht-like vessel then had 
  disappeared, and no trace of it had been 
  found, and no one had been located who 
  knew anything about it. 
   
   
  THEY flew toward the coast of 
  Hispanola. The plane was a high-wing job, 
  not as streamlined as it might have been, but 
  making up in engine horsepower for other 
  shortcomings. However, it did use gasoline, 
  Sanda declared, as fast as a circus elephant 
  could drink water. The engine made a great 
  deal of noise; flying at five thousand feet, 
  they could use binoculars and see gaudy 
  splashes of color that were jungle birds 
  frightened by the plane bawling. 
  They came to the seacoast some 
  fifty miles south of the Hispanola border. Doc 
  began following the coastline. 
  “If we’re forced down, they’ll either 
  shoot me or lock me up for so long it won’t be 
  funny,” Sanda pointed out. “I forgot to tell 
  you—down here, we have a custom that is 
  either very convenient, or just too bad, 
  depending on the outlook. As soon as we 
  declare a war, we issue a proclamation that 
  all the leaders on the other side are 
  criminals. In this case, that would include me. 
  And I’ll bet they would make it include you.” 
  Doc Savage offered no comment, 
  but flew steadily 
  along the Hispanola 
  coastline, 
  using 
  the 
  binoculars 
  almost 
  continuously. 
  The 
  Hispanola 
  coastline 
  was 
  swampy, with small mangrove-matted islands 
  offshore, and deep tidal creeks, usually full of 
  rushing current, threading for miles inland. 
  Some of the creeks had navigable channels, 
  and the bronze man gave attention to these 
  in particular. 
  The steamship must have been 
  driven inshore by some hurricane in the past, 
  or possibly it had been nosing along the tidal 
  river when a viento, one of those sudden, 
  terrific storms of the locality, had grounded it 
  so hopelessly that no attempt had been 
  made to salvage anything that was not 
  immediately portable. It lay there, half-buried 
  in the festering jungle, turning to rust. 
  They flew on, passed over two small 
  cities, one the principal seaport, crowded 
  with munitions shipping. Doc Savage had 
  visited the place on previous occasions, in 
  the course of travel, and the difference was 
  striking. Whereas one steamer was a normal 
  quota for the harbor, there were now at least 
  fifty vessels unloading. 
  Then a pair of military planes 
  climbed up after them. Very modern craft, 
  Doc saw without pleasure. Fortunately, there 
  were clouds to the northward, and after a 
  race and some dodging, he lost the 
  inquisitive pursuers. 
  Having covered the remainder of the 
  Hispanola coastline, the bronze man turned 
  back and seemed to be cruising up and down 
  aimlessly, far out to sea. 
  “What’s the sense of this?” Sanda 
  asked. “You’re not doing anything, that I can 
  see.” 
  “Waiting for the afternoon rain.” 
  At this season of the year, a short 
  rainstorm arrived dependably each day at 
  about four o’clock, a brief affair with black 
  clouds, snorting gusts of wind and rain that 
  came down as if washtubs were being 
  emptied. 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  38 
  In the middle of this gully-washer, 
  Doc Savage landed on a tidal creek not far 
  from the rusting hulk of the wrecked 
  steamship. They could not see a hundred 
  yards. Cascading thunder was so loud and 
  continuous that at times they hardly heard 
  the motor of their own plane. 
  The wind caught their plane, swept it 
  against 
  the 
  mangroves. 
  Doc 
  worked 
  furiously, kept it from being damaged, and 
  finally the wind subsided and the rain came 
  down, in such profusion that it seemed at 
  times that they had sunk. 
  “Where are we?” Sanda asked. 
  Doc told her. 
  “That’s a great place to be!” the girl 
  said, rather disgustedly. 
   
   
  SANDA MACNAMARA had worked 
  up a quantity of confidence in Doc Savage 
  during the past week that surprised herself. 
  In the last two days particularly, she had 
  started wondering at the magnitude of her 
  own trust. She was not, she hoped, normally 
  a suspicious soul, but neither was she 
  inclined to believe implicitly in others; there 
  was a certain element of frailty in every 
  human, she had learned. 
  As they worked through the dripping 
  jungle, 
  Sanda 
  mentally 
  warned 
  herself 
  against this. She was clinging to the bronze 
  giant’s back, and she could feel the ripple 
  and snap of his unbelievable muscles as he 
  traveled 
  simian 
  fashion 
  through 
  the 
  interlacing treetops. 
  They dropped down from the upper 
  jungle lanes into thick shrubbery. The bronze 
  man admonished silence, and they crept 
  forward. There was no more rain, the sun 
  had come out brilliantly. 
  “See!” Doc Savage pointed. 
  They could look across the tidal 
  creek into the stern of the rusting wreck of 
  the steamship. 
  The stern had been cut away, and 
  bulkheads and interior decks of the huge 
  craft removed, leaving a vast hangar-like 
  interior which had been converted into a 
  boathouse. 
  A gleaming yacht of a craft, more 
  than a hundred feet long, narrow of beam 
  and speedy, lay inside. They could see that a 
  three-inch gun was mounted on her stern. A 
  number of folding chairs were scattered on 
  her afterdeck, occupied by men, some of 
  whom wore neat naval-looking uniforms. 
  Sanda looked at Doc strangely. 
  “Are you a magician?” she asked.  
  “What’s magic about this?” 
  “That boat is the one which took your 
  friends and the seven wealthy men off the 
  steamship Rocket.” 
  “Yes. That’s what I expected.” 
  “And that’s what gets me—how did 
  you expect it? What kind of crystal gazing did 
  you do to learn they were here?” 
  The bronze man’s answer was slow; 
  it was always a little embarrassing to him to 
  explain motives and processes. He said 
  finally, “The yachty-looking vessel had to 
  disappear somewhere, since it had not been 
  sighted. And the Hispanola coast seemed the 
  most likely spot, due to the number of inlets, 
  many of which lead into uninhabited jungle, 
  such as this. So it was a logical idea to go 
  along the coast looking for hideouts.” 
  “How came this old wreck to strike 
  you as a possible one?” 
  “Some years ago, a steamship was 
  wrecked on the reefs off the Florida Keys,” 
  Doc said, “and the interior of the craft was 
  ripped out and serves as a shelter for fishing 
  boats during minor storms. It lies there today, 
  and any tourist driving over the Key West 
  highway can observe it by looking out to 
  sea.” 
  Sanda looked at the bronze man 
  strangely. 
  “Say,” she said, “you’ve figured out a 
  lot more about this mystery than you’re 
  telling, haven’t you?” 
  Doc Savage seemed not to hear her. 
  He crawled through the jungle, heading 
  inland parallel to the banks of the wide and 
  deep tidal creek. Sanda stared after him, 
  wondering why he hadn’t heard her; she 
  knew his hearing was as extraordinary as the 
  rest of him, because yesterday, while 
  traversing the jungle, he had heard a party of 
  Indians and told her exactly how many of 
  them there were—a fact she had later 
  verified by counting from a distance—and 
  she had been able to detect no sound 
  whatever. He hadn’t wanted to hear her, she 
  concluded. 
  Three-quarters of a mile upstream, 
  after the tidal creek turned, Doc Savage 
  entered the water and swam across, trailed 
  by Sanda, who swam excellently. They took 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  39 
  to 
  the 
  jungle 
  again, 
  and 
  went 
  back 
  downstream toward the wreck. 
  Eventually, Doc halted. 
  “You wait here,” he said. 
  “You’re going to have a look alone?” 
  “Yes.” 
  “If you don’t come back?” 
  “Then,” Doc said, “you had better 
  return to our plane and see if you can make 
  your home, Cristobal, in one hop.” 
   
   
  Chapter XII 
  JUNGLE DERELICT 
   
  THE bow of the wrecked ship had 
  been driven up on shore in the same way 
  that a beached rowboat is drawn up on the 
  bank, and the hulk obviously had been there 
  for years because the tropical jungle had 
  matted up around it and long vines had 
  crawled up the scaling sides and across the 
  decrepit decks, so that the whole aspect of 
  the thing was unpleasantly depressive. A 
  small doorway had been opened with a 
  cutting torch in the bow plates close to the 
  ground, but Doc Savage avoided the 
  aperture, surmising a guard would be 
  present. 
  Instead, the bronze man found a 
  long-jointed piece of bamboo, worked on it 
  with a knife until he had a tube through which 
  he could breathe, after which he submerged 
  himself in the water and worked along the 
  bottom until he found the hull of the wrecked 
  steamer, and without coming above the 
  surface, located the stern hole and entered. 
  Finally, when he had found the yacht hull, he 
  lifted to the surface. He was close to the 
  yacht rudder post; overhang of the stern hid 
  him. 
  The craft was a yacht, converted to 
  this strange use. The bronze man was 
  already sure of that. 
  The close confines of the hull of the 
  wrecked ship made the casual conversation 
  of the men loafing on deck audible to Doc, 
  where he lay under the stern with his head 
  barely out of water. 
  “My guess,” said one of the men on 
  deck, “is that we’ll have a nice long loafing 
  spell.” 
  “Nice? What’s nice about it? This is a 
  hell of a place to loaf!” 
  Another voice, one that spoke with a 
  Hispanolan accent, said, “There are worse 
  spots. The trenches, for instance.” 
  “There hasn’t been much trench 
  fighting, so far,” someone reminded him. 
  The Hispanolan sighed. “I hope there 
  will not be. I have a brother with a machine-
  gun company.” 
  “Well, he’ll be safe enough. This war 
  is going to be over soon.” 
  The other snorted. “If so, why is this 
  yacht being kept in readiness?” 
  “Yes,” another man put in. “I would 
  like to know why too. You know and I know 
  what this boat is. We all know. It was given to 
  old Miguel Lenares, president of Hispanola, 
  to use if things went wrong and he had to 
  escape. If they are so sure Hispanola will 
  conquer Cristobal immediately, why do they 
  keep this yacht at hand?” 
  “Maybe because old Miguel Lenares 
  is a cautious one.” 
  A man laughed. “Cautious, yes. Not 
  a bad liar, either. Did you hear about the 
  radio messages he sent when they asked 
  him if we belonged to the Hispanola navy? 
  He said he had never heard of us.” 
  There was a little general mirth at 
  that. 
  “There’s one thing I feel like singing 
  and dancing about,” a man remarked. “We’re 
  not running a prison.” 
  “You mean you’re glad those five 
  Doc Savage associates are not here?” 
  “Yes. I didn’t like that.” 
  “I didn’t like it either. But what are 
  you going to do in a case like that?” 
  “Forget it, I guess. They’re gone 
  now. Everybody is gone.” 
  “Except the blasted mosquitoes,” a 
  man said, and swore and slapped himself. 
   
   
  DOC SAVAGE eased farther back 
  into the dark interior of the strangely 
  improvised boathouse, found a dangling line, 
  grasped it and went up the side, being 
  careful to hang for some time with his feet 
  touching the surface to permit water to drain 
  off his body. 
  He began searching the yacht. 
  There seemed to be only a skeleton 
  crew aboard; all of these were gathered on 
  the aft deck, where it was cool. 
  The bronze man was interested 
  particularly in the registry papers of the boat, 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  40 
  the documents which would show who 
  owned the craft. These should be in the 
  bridge cabin; that was where he found them. 
  The yacht belonged, according to the 
  documents, to Doc Savage, which was 
  somewhat of a surprise, the bronze man 
  never having seen the craft before. 
  There was no trace of any of the 
  seven wealthy men aboard. 
  After he had used caution for some 
  time, Doc rejoined Sanda MacNamara, who 
  was rapidly being consumed by mosquitoes 
  and impatience. 
  She asked, “What did you find?” 
  “My own boat.” 
  “Your—” 
  “According to the registry documents 
  on board.” 
  “You mean that they registered the 
  boat in your name to embarrass you in case 
  of trouble?” Sanda said after thinking it over. 
  “How could they manage that?” 
  “By 
  merely 
  swearing 
  to 
  false 
  affidavits.” 
  “What else did you learn?” 
  “That my friends, and the seven 
  wealthy men, are no longer here. They were 
  taken away—by land.”  
  “By land?” Her tone was questioning. 
  “Show you,” Doc said, and led her 
  through the jungle until they came to a trail 
  cut with machetes a long time ago, and lately 
  trimmed to make it passable again. Where 
  the ground was soft, there were footprints, 
  but they were so trampled as not to be very 
  recognizable. 
  “I don’t see how you know,” Sanda 
  said. 
  “Did you happen to notice Monk’s 
  shoes?” 
  Sanda pondered. “Didn’t he wear 
  sport shoes with crepe rubber soles? I don’t 
  see what that has to do with it.” 
  “The soles weren’t crepe rubber. 
  They were a chemical composition which 
  slowly wears away, and in doing so, leaves a 
  footprint which can be made visible by 
  chemical treatment. Monk perfected those 
  shoe soles himself, uses them all the time, is 
  very proud of them, and wears out a pair of 
  them every two weeks on the average.” 
  Doc Savage had long since shed his 
  coat, and had torn off his trousers at the 
  knees, but he still wore a rather clever vest, 
  fashioned of chain mail of an alloy metal 
  which was strong enough to stop ordinary 
  bullets, and also aërated so that it was not 
  excessively hot. This vest contained a 
  number of exterior pockets which held metal 
  capsules of varying size that contained a 
  quantity of his more essential gadgets. 
  From the vest he removed a metal 
  tube; this had a button on the top and a tiny 
  aperture, and when he pressed upon the 
  button, there was a hissing sound and vapor 
  flew out of the aperture. 
  “Have to use this sparingly,” he 
  explained, and went over the trail with the 
  stuff, moving the vaporizer back and forth as 
  though applying paint with an air gun. 
  One set of the footprints on the trail 
  took on a faintly yellowish hue. “Monk’s 
  chemical shoe soles,” Doc said. 
  After that, they followed the trail 
  rapidly. When it branched and both branches 
  seemed equally used, Doc used the chemical 
  test 
  again, 
  finding 
  that 
  the 
  yellowish 
  footprints took the right-hand branch. 
  They followed that trail rapidly until 
  there was a loud crashing noise behind them, 
  a sound that brought them whirling about in 
  alarm, to discover that what had seemed an 
  innocent section of matted vines had fallen 
  like a gate across the trail. 
  From some spot nearby, a voice said 
  dryly. “This happens to be the end of the 
  trail!” 
   
   
  SANDA, having given a wild start of 
  flight, started to plunge into the undergrowth 
  beside the trail, but Doc flung out a quick arm 
  and stopped her. He held her while his flake-
  gold eyes probed intently. The surrounding 
  wall of jungle was too suspiciously solid. And 
  his eyes began picking out the thorns, the 
  ends of which were black-tipped. 
  The voice said: “You might get 
  through the thorns, you know. I think we 
  managed to poison the tips of all of them, but 
  of course there is a chance we missed some, 
  in which case you might get through. 
  Granting that we failed to shoot you in the 
  meantime.” 
  Sanda said grimly, “We walked right 
  into it!” 
  The voice laughed. 
  “Yes,” it added. “But the error was 
  natural. You had no way of knowing we had 
  discovered the clever composition of those 
  shoe soles which the one called Monk wore. 
  Neither could you surmise that we would set 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  41 
  this trap just on the long chance that you 
  would find this spot and follow that trail.” 
  Doc said, “You weren’t overlooking 
  chances, were you?” 
  “Not many. To tell the truth, we 
  thought it was silly excess precaution when 
  we were ordered to rig this reception.” 
  Doc said nothing more. He was not, 
  at the moment, enthusiastic about his own 
  intelligence. He had walked headlong into 
  this 
  mess; 
  he 
  had 
  hardly 
  given 
  the 
  surrounding jungle a glance while following 
  the trail, which made it difficult to blame 
  anyone but himself. Ordinarily, he managed 
  to avoid such predicaments as this through 
  the exercise of alertness. He had not been 
  alert. 
  He glanced at Sanda MacNamara, 
  then looked away and made a mental 
  resolution. He would have to stop letting his 
  mind wander to the item of femininity, even to 
  as exquisitely put-together a sample as this 
  one. In his profession, he had long ago 
  concluded that women were synonymous 
  with trouble, and here was an example to 
  illustrate how right he had been. He had 
  been thinking girl, and he would have to stop 
  that, even if it might be a hell of a job. 
  The man who had spoken, said, “If 
  you have guns and  
  ideas 
  of 
  using 
  them—don’t,” and came into view, walking 
  out on a limb some twenty feet overhead. 
  “Drop any weapons you may have,” he 
  ordered. 
  Doc Savage removed a pocketknife 
  and let it fall; Sanda discarded her small 
  automatic. 
  The man spoke in a dialect used by 
  Indian natives of Hispanola, and more men, 
  almost black ones, appeared in the trees. 
  They had ropes, the ends of which they 
  fastened to branches, afterward sliding down 
  carefully to avoid the thorns. 
  More white men had appeared in the 
  trees. They wore gas masks, and held fully-
  automatic rifles of the new military type. 
  Sanda looked at Doc, asked, “Shall 
  we try to do something?” 
  “If you can think of anything.” 
  “She’d better not!” one of the men 
  said. 
   
   
  AFTER the thorny trap gate—the 
  thorns were poisoned, they were informed—
  had been lifted, they were carried bodily back 
  along the trail, ankles and wrists bound, 
  elbows lashed to their sides, and knees 
  roped together, with a dark-skinned aborigine 
  trailing behind them holding a knife made 
  from the poisonous barb of a sting ray and 
  looking as if he wanted to use it. 
  They had hardly started when the 
  black dagger appeared in the sky. 
  Doc Savage might not have noticed 
  the thing had one of the natives not stared 
  upward and suddenly cried out, and the 
  bronze 
  man 
  followed 
  the 
  fellow’s 
  superstitiously horrified stare and saw the 
  dagger. 
  The dark knife was about the size of 
  the others he had seen, approximately two 
  hundred feet overall in length—it was hard to 
  be sure, because he could see the thing only 
  partially through the roofing of the jungle 
  leafage—and the hilt span somewhere near 
  fifty feet. The entire party stopped at once, 
  giving Doc a chance to examine the sepia 
  thing more closely. It was quite high in the 
  sky, between five hundred and a thousand 
  feet, as nearly as he could estimate, and the 
  blade pointed, whether by coincidence or not, 
  in the direction of the rusting wreck of the 
  ship. 
  Perhaps a minute, the black dagger 
  stood in the sky, then it disappeared, its 
  departure an uncannily abrupt fading, so that 
  it seemed magically to vanish. 
  No one said anything for a moment, 
  and then Sanda MacNamara screamed. 
  There was ripping hysteria in her shriek. She 
  cried out shrilly for her brother, Juan Don, 
  and after that the noises she made were 
  incoherent. 
  A man muttered, “She’s got the 
  screaming-meemies.” 
  “And 
  who 
  wouldn’t?” 
  another 
  growled. 
  They glanced upward at the spot 
  where the black dagger had appeared. 
  Sanda continued to shriek as they 
  carried her on through the jungle, then later 
  her sounds became more a series of pitiful 
  whimperings, with now and then a burst of 
  hair-raising laughter. 
  Doc said: “You had better let me help 
  her. I’m a physician.” 
  “You’re more than a physician—
  you’re more hell than a cyclone when you’re 
  loose,” a man advised him. “You stay tied 
  up.” 
  “But she’s snapped under the strain.” 
  
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  42 
  “If you got away, we’d do some 
  snapping ourselves.” 
  They reached the rusting derelict 
  steamship inside which the yacht lay, and 
  there was a warm exchange of profanity and 
  denials, the crew of the yacht insisting Doc 
  Savage had not been in that vicinity, and the 
  bronze man, in order to warm the argument, 
  repeating bits of their conversation which he 
  had overheard in order to convince them that 
  he had been there. 
  Doc, who had expected to be taken 
  aboard the concealed yacht, got a surprise. 
  He and Sanda were loaded into a launch, 
  which began following a tortuous course 
  through the mangrove creeks, then put out to 
  sea and raced along the coast. The craft, for 
  a small one, was remarkably seaworthy. 
  Later, they put in at the same Hispanolan 
  seaport city from which the military planes 
  had climbed into the sky that afternoon to 
  chase Doc Savage’s ship. 
  A squad of soldiers met them on the 
  dock. 
  “You are under military arrest,” an 
  officer advised grimly. “The charge is 
  treason.” 
   
   
  Chapter XIII 
  PAN AND FIRE 
   
  MANY men had taken chisels and 
  sledges and other stone-working tools, and 
  had fashioned hewn rock into geometrical 
  blocks approximately four feet square; then 
  they had piled these stones together, sealing 
  the joints with a mortar that had become as 
  obdurate as the stone itself, and had 
  fashioned stone cells roughly four feet by 
  eight. Doors had been constructed which 
  were barely wide enough to admit a man, the 
  portals being iron bars scarcely less thick 
  than a man’s leg. All of this construction work 
  had been done about four hundred years 
  ago, and seemed to have suffered very little 
  from age. 
  “I never saw a more solid place,” 
  remarked Sanda, after trying ineffectually to 
  rattle the bars of her prison cell. 
  “Better be careful,” Doc warned. “A 
  guard might overhear us, and learn that your 
  mind hasn’t snapped.” 
  “Wasn’t my acting good?” 
  “Very good. But you weren’t the type 
  to snap in that fashion.” 
  “I thought,” Sanda said, explaining 
  the reason for her hysterics in the jungle, 
  “that they might turn you loose to take care of 
  me, and you would get a chance to make a 
  break.” 
  “It was a nice attempt.” 
  Sanda pondered for a moment. 
  “What did you make of that black dagger? 
  Any more than before? Is it still such a 
  mystery?” 
  “It’s unusual.” 
  Sanda made a sound that was more 
  angry than hopeless. “If I just had some idea 
  of what became of my brother! I’ll never 
  forget the incredible way he vanished. And 
  that . . . that . . . black thing in the sky!” 
  Doc said, “This will turn out all right,” 
  putting pleasant conviction into his voice. 
  “You’re an actor,” the girl said. “You 
  don’t feel hopeful at all. You’re just sounding 
  that way for my benefit. I wish you wouldn’t 
  do that.” 
  Doc was devising an argument that 
  would lift her spirits, when military boots 
  stamped down the corridor, rifle bolts rattled, 
  then keys ground in the rusty locks and the 
  doors were hauled open, screaming a rusty 
  protest. 
  “It doesn’t look as if they’re going to 
  wait until dawn to shoot us,” Sanda said 
  dryly. 
  “Come out!” a voice ordered. 
  Since nothing seemed to be gained 
  by objecting, they stepped out into a ring of 
  bayoneted, cocked rifles, and were escorted 
  along an unappealing grayish stone passage, 
  up stairs that seemed to rise interminably, 
  and into a room. 
  The room was furnished with a long 
  table, chairs, and more than a dozen much-
  uniformed officers, one of whom stood up 
  and began speaking. 
  “You are before a board of the 
  military duly and legally assembled for 
  conducting trial by court-martial,” the man 
  stated. “Hispanola being in a state of war, 
  military courts have superseded civilian 
  judiciary. You will receive a fair and legal 
  trial, and all evidence will be weighed 
  carefully.” 
   
   
  
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  43 
  THE officer spoke an excellent brand 
  of 
  English, 
  except 
  that 
  it 
  was 
  as 
  expressionless as a 1907 phonograph.  
  Doc interrupted, “What about my four 
  friends?” 
  “Friends?” 
  “Monk Mayfair, Renny Renwick, Ham 
  Brooks, and Long Tom Roberts.” 
  The officer wore such a blank 
  expression that Doc Savage was suddenly 
  convinced that the man had no idea of the 
  whereabouts of Monk and the others. 
  Doc said, “Where are Peter van Jelk, 
  Ahmet Ben Khali, Lord Dusterman, B. A. 
  Arthur, Mark Costervelt, Josh Sneed and 
  Jacques Coquine?” naming off the seven 
  wealthy men who had explained that they 
  were in danger because they had bought a 
  black stone. 
  Reaction of the officer to that was 
  different. He got up, came around the table, 
  struck Doc Savage in the mouth. 
  “You will not mention those men 
  again!” 
  he 
  said. 
  He 
  scowled, 
  added, 
  “Incidentally, we do not know them.” 
  The officer then began picking up 
  papers, reading charges from them. 
  Doc Savage listened with growing 
  wonder. Less than eight hours had elapsed 
  since he had been captured, so someone 
  must have worked at top speed to assemble 
  so many charges. 
  Sanda and Doc, it developed, were 
  jointly accused of being foreign espionage 
  agents 
  in 
  Hispanola 
  territory 
  when 
  apprehended, a crime punishable with the 
  death penalty. 
  Doc was accused of piracy in 
  commanding a yacht registered in his own 
  name which had stopped a neutral ship on 
  the high seas and removed therefrom various 
  passengers, the crime of piracy under 
  international law and the Hispanolan statutes 
  being punishable by hanging from the neck 
  until life was extinct. 
  There was an assortment of other 
  offenses 
  ranging 
  down 
  to 
  entry 
  into 
  Hispanola without passing through the proper 
  immigration channels. 
  Sanda was identified as daughter of 
  the president of Cristobal, therefore a 
  criminal under the military regulations of 
  Hispanola and subject to a mandatory death 
  penalty. 
  Finally the officer put down all the 
  papers, faced them, and began reciting an 
  impressive 
  charge 
  which 
  he 
  obviously 
  manufactured as he went along. 
  “Furthermore,” he announced, “you 
  are charged with the unlawful acquisition of a 
  sacred black stone, traditional property of the 
  descendants of ancient Incan tribes living 
  within Hispanolan borders, and this crime, 
  according to the law of the land, is 
  punishable with a mandatory death penalty.” 
  Doc said: “There is no such law on 
  Hispanola statute books. You made that one 
  up, 
  just 
  as 
  those 
  charges 
  were 
  manufactured.” 
  Sanda 
  nodded, 
  snapped, 
  “This 
  whole thing is a farce!” 
  “You may present your defense,” the 
  officer said peremptorily. 
  Sanda said coldly, “I think we’ll save 
  our breath.” 
   
   
  THE thick-walled cells looked more 
  forbidding than before when they were 
  returned to them. There was a layer of gritty 
  dust over the floor; the air had a stagnant 
  quality that made it almost unbreathable. 
  Sanda occupied the cell adjacent to the one 
  wherein the bronze man was incarcerated, 
  and they could converse without seeing each 
  other. 
  “Did you expect anything else?” 
  Sanda asked. 
  “You mean—shooting us at dawn?”  
  “Yes.” 
  “Under the circumstances, they’re 
  behaving logically.” 
  “They might at least have been 
  original.” 
  It was very dark. Somewhere near, 
  drops of water were falling with monotonous 
  sounds that were made almost metallic by 
  the acoustics of the underground labyrinth of 
  dungeons. Once, far away in the darkness, a 
  sentry must have spoken, and his voice 
  reached them as a distorted conglomeration 
  of grumbling, as though several idiots had 
  tried to say something simultaneously. 
  Sanda called, “You there?” 
  “Yes.” 
  “What gets me,” the young woman 
  remarked, “is the death sentence they 
  passed on you. Suppose they do shoot 
  you—won’t 
  that 
  poke 
  the 
  international 
  hornet’s nest? You’re a famous man. 
  Shooting 
  you 
  may 
  become 
  a 
  little 
  complicated.” 
  
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  44 
  “Not,” Doc said, “if it doesn’t become 
  known for several months—perhaps not at 
  all.” 
  “Yes, but why? I mean—why should 
  they shoot you? Me, I can understand me. 
  I’m from Cristobal, and my father happens to 
  be president, and there’s a war. But I don’t 
  understand their including you. They know 
  who you are. They know that shooting you 
  will set off the international firecrackers, if 
  anything will. But they went ahead and 
  railroaded you.” 
  Doc reminded, “We started out in 
  New York to investigate a mystery.” 
  “Yes—the mystery of a black stone, 
  black daggers, and just what kind of funny 
  business is connected with them.” 
  Doc nodded. 
  “That 
  mystery,” 
  he 
  said, 
  “is 
  connected directly with the so-called republic 
  of Hispanola.” 
  “It is?” 
  “And with the war between Hispanola 
  and Cristobal,” Doc added. 
  The significance of that statement 
  gripped 
  Sanda’s 
  mind 
  and 
  held 
  her 
  speechless for a while. She said finally: “The 
  black stone, black dagger, this war—all tied 
  in together?” 
  Doc breathed, “Sh-h-h! Someone is 
  coming.” 
  Sanda listened intently, breathed at 
  length, “I don’t hear anyone.” 
  That was because their visitor came 
  stealthily, and was pressed against the bars 
  of Doc Savage’s cell before he spoke in a 
  low and strained whisper. 
  “This is Peter van Jelk,” he said. 
  “Don’t make any noise.” 
   
   
  VAN JELK had spoken so low that 
  Sanda, in the next cell, had not heard. She 
  asked, “Say, is there somebody, or isn’t 
  there?” and Van Jelk responded with a quick, 
  imperative, “Sh-h-h!” 
  Doc said, “It’s Van Jelk.” 
  “Who? I don’t believe it!” 
  Van Jelk made small panting noises 
  of excitement. “Be still! Please, please, be 
  still! This is very serious for me. They were 
  going to shoot me. They have already 
  condemned me to death.” 
  “Condemned you—what for?” 
  “Having a part in the acquisition of a 
  sacred black stone which belonged to the 
  descendants of the Incans residing within 
  Hispanola, I think they said. That is as near 
  as I can remember the charge. They didn’t 
  give me a chance. They never even listened 
  to my denials. They . . . they—” he groped for 
  a word— “gave me the works.” 
  Doc said, “We have lots of questions 
  to ask you. But first, how did you get free?” 
  “I was locked in a cell,” Van Jelk 
  explained. “They thought they took all my 
  money, but they didn’t. I had a hundred-dollar 
  bill that I folded flat and put under the plate of 
  my false teeth. I bribed the guard with that, 
  and he gave me the key to my cell.” 
  “Then you can get us out of here?” 
  “I can try.” 
  The key made gritting and scraping 
  noises against the rusty iron bars; finally the 
  lock opened. 
  “I’ll unlock the girl’s cell now,” Van 
  Jelk breathed. 
  Doc warned: “Careful! These hinges 
  howl like a wolf when you open the door.” 
  Having exercised three or four 
  minutes of infinite care, they stood in the 
  India-ink blackness of the passage. There 
  had been almost no sound except the 
  grinding of the sandy dust under their feet 
  when they moved, and because of this, Doc 
  said, “We better take off our shoes.” 
  While they were doing this, the 
  bronze man whispered, 
  “How did they get you here, Van 
  Jelk?” 
  “A yacht took us off the steamship at 
  sea,” Van Jelk explained. “Your four friends 
  were taken off as well. We were all prisoners. 
  The yacht had two guns mounted on it, and 
  claimed to be a ship of the Hispanola navy. 
  This was a lie, it developed.” 
  “And then?” 
  “We were blindfolded. For some 
  reason or other, I was singled out and 
  separated from the others and turned over to 
  Hispanola soldiers. I was brought here, given 
  that farce of a court-martial, and condemned 
  to death.” 
  Sanda asked: “Have you any idea 
  why you got all that special attention?” 
  “Not the least,” Van Jelk said. 
  Doc put a question. “What became of 
  my men?” 
  “Monk and the others, you mean?” 
  “Yes.” 
  “I haven’t a wisp of an idea.” 
  
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  45 
  “What about the other wealthy men 
  who were . . . ah . . . associated with you in 
  the purchase of the black stone?” 
  “I do not know where they were 
  taken either.” 
  “All he seems to know,” said Sanda 
  rather disgustedly, “is that he is in jail and 
  wants out.” 
  Van Jelk turned rather peevish, said: 
  “I’ve told you more than you’ve told me! 
  Suppose you do as much for me as I’ve done 
  for you—tell me what you’ve found out. What 
  is behind this fantastic mystery anyway? Why 
  should 
  the 
  government 
  of 
  Hispanola 
  condemn me to death? I was never 
  anywhere near Hispanola before.” 
  Doc asked, “The whole thing has you 
  puzzled?” 
  “Yes. It’s incredible. A group of my 
  friends and I buy a black mystic stone as a 
  normal purchase in the course of our 
  collecting Incan relics, and all sorts of 
  impossible things begin happening. Our 
  friend, Sid Morrison, the man who directly 
  purchased the stone, is murdered by a black 
  dagger that vanishes. All of our lives are 
  threatened. You appear and . . . ah . . . 
  protect us, in a somewhat bizarre fashion, by 
  putting us aboard a boat bound for South 
  America, against our will. Incidentally, I fail to 
  understand why you did that. Then the 
  steamer is stopped by a mysterious yacht, 
  and we are taken off, and I am turned over to 
  the Hispanola military, who condemn me to a 
  firing squad. I wish you would make some 
  sense of that. What are the reasons for it?” 
  “You 
  want 
  the 
  whole 
  thing 
  explained?” Doc asked. 
  “Yes. But can you do it?” 
  Doc Savage had been carefully 
  locating Van Jelk’s voice in the darkness, 
  and he had decided about where the man’s 
  jaw was situated; he sent out a fist so that 
  the knuckles came against Van Jelk’s chin 
  with enough force to jar consciousness out of 
  the man’s brain. 
   
   
  Chapter XIV 
  RECEPTION IN CRISTOBAL 
   
  VAN JELK collapsed against Sanda, 
  who did not realize what had happened, and 
  gasped, “What is wrong?” 
  “Maybe he fainted,” Doc said. 
  “But—but he sounded perfectly—
  well, healthy.”  
  Doc Savage avoided discussion on 
  the point by gathering up Van Jelk and 
  moving down the passage, feeling his way 
  with one hand. Sanda fastened to his shirt 
  sleeve and followed. 
  Doc whispered, “Be careful about 
  noise.” 
  “You think I want to stand in front of 
  that firing squad?” 
  They came quite suddenly upon a 
  guard who was standing in a niche in the 
  stone corridor, and who said grimly in 
  atrocious English: “Who ees eet? Spik quick, 
  or these machine gun go zip-zip!” 
  Intensive practice in voice imitation—
  it was a facility of no small value, he had long 
  ago discovered—had given the bronze man 
  more than average skill at mimicry. He used 
  Van Jelk’s voice, as nearly as he could 
  manage it. 
  “Be quiet, you fool,” he said. “This is 
  Van Jelk.” 
  “Lo siento!” the man grunted the 
  local equivalent of begging your pardon. 
  Doc 
  then 
  reached 
  out 
  in 
  the 
  darkness, got the man’s neck, throttled off an 
  attempted squeal for help, and worked on the 
  nerve centers at the back of the sentry’s neck 
  until he had the fellow unconscious. They 
  had made a little noise, but there seemed to 
  be no one else close enough to have heard. 
  At least, there was no uproar. 
  “He must have been the sentry Van 
  Jelk bribed,” Sanda whispered. “He knew 
  Van Jelk. Lucky break for us.” 
  There was a tobacco odor about the 
  guard, an indication he would have matches, 
  so Doc searched. The matches were the 
  atrocious little “fosforos” with sticks of 
  paraffin-saturated paper; one of them fizzed, 
  gave off a sulphur smell and enough light to 
  show the locked steel panel of a door. Keys 
  had rattled on the sentry’s belt when Doc 
  searched him. One of them tripped the lock. 
  Outside, there were low clouds, 
  barely enough reflection from street lights to 
  show a barracks courtyard. 
  Doc shouldered Van Jelk, and they 
  walked rapidly. They got out of the barracks 
  yard, went down a narrow street, at the end 
  of which a sentry hailed them with a sharp, 
  “Quien es?” 
  “Where does the colonel want this 
  body put?” Doc asked in the same tongue. 
  
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  46 
  “Body?” The sentry was puzzled. 
  The man took a step forward, and 
  Doc reached him with a fist. 
  Sanda said, “I’m going to take his 
  rifle.” 
  “We had better take his uniform 
  instead,” Doc advised. “You go down the 
  street and wait.” 
  Darkness absorbed the girl, and the 
  bronze man hurriedly stripped the senseless 
  sentry of shoes, trousers, coat and cap, 
  carried the garments to the girl. She moved 
  away and came back soon wearing the 
  clothing. 
  She 
  was 
  slender 
  enough, 
  Doc 
  noticed as they passed near the next street 
  light, to wear trousers well. 
   
   
  THE airport was probably the best 
  one in Hispanola, because it had been built 
  by an American aviation company, and the 
  local government had confiscated it “for the 
  duration of hostilities.” The field had been 
  given a spraying with chemicals to kill off the 
  eager growth of tropical weeds and shrubs, 
  so that the tarmac was fairly smooth. There 
  were two old hangars, and four extremely 
  new ones, and a line of very modern pursuit 
  and bombing planes had been wheeled out 
  for an early dawn patrol; the motors of these 
  turned over slowly, warming up. 
  Sanda whispered: “You must have 
  lived in this town. You seemed to find every 
  back alley on your way here.” 
  Doc did not explain that he had, 
  before leaving New York, taken the trouble of 
  familiarizing himself with detailed maps of the 
  principal towns in both Hispanola and 
  Cristobal. 
  “This is the most risky part,” he 
  warned. 
  They walked boldly toward the line of 
  planes which stood ready, motors grumbling 
  and coughing, exhaust stacks drooling blue 
  flames. Doc carried Van Jelk with an arm 
  around the man’s chest, so that it was not too 
  noticeable that the fellow was unconscious. 
  Fortunately, the field floodlights had 
  not been switched on; the murk concealed 
  them until they reached one of the planes. To 
  avoid suspicion further, Doc chose one with 
  an armorer astraddle the cowling, tinkering 
  with one of the prop-synchronized machine 
  guns. 
  “Que dice, caballero?” the man said 
  idly, and Doc Savage got him by the leg, 
  jerked the astounded fellow to the ground 
  and used his fist. 
  “Into the plane!” Doc rapped. 
  It was a two-place job, cockpits for 
  pilot and gunner-bomber. Sanda landed in 
  the bucket seat and Doc literally piled Van 
  Jelk atop her, said, “Hang onto him!” swung 
  behind the controls, and gave the throttle a 
  bat with his palm. 
  The 
  engine 
  stacks 
  poured 
  out 
  cascading thunder; the plane crawled up on 
  the wheel chocks, jumped them, seemed to 
  spring into the air from a standstill. 
  Men poured out of hangars and 
  barracks. Great searchlights stabbed out 
  white rods. Several innocent-looking shacks 
  around the field collapsed and disclosed 
  highly modern rapid-firing anti-aircraft guns 
  which began sticking out angry red-flame 
  tongues. The archie shells ripened with woof 
  noises around the plane. Doc dived, barely 
  scraped housetops, changed course, went 
  arching up into the night sky, continuously 
  swinging right and left, climbing and diving to 
  avoid the rigid white fingers of light that were 
  feeling for them. 
  They fled toward Cristobal. 
  “This 
  is 
  an 
  extremely 
  modern 
  warplane,” Sanda said. 
  She had to scream. She had come 
  forward from the gunner’s cockpit, grimacing 
  a little because of the deafening noise of the 
  motor. 
  “Very modern,” Doc agreed. 
  “In Cristobal we haven’t any planes 
  like these,” Sanda added. 
  Doc looked at her, said nothing. She 
  had something on her mind. 
  “Hispanola didn’t have them either, a 
  year 
  ago,” 
  the 
  girl 
  continued. 
  “Also, 
  Hispanola 
  was 
  broke. 
  They 
  had 
  no 
  international 
  credit. 
  The 
  Hispanola 
  government couldn’t sell its own bonds. Did 
  you see those anti-aircraft guns?” 
  “The archies,” Doc admitted, “were 
  latest type.” 
  “How did Hispanola buy such planes 
  and guns? Where did they get the money? 
  Answer me that.” 
  “Doesn’t your Cristobal government 
  have an espionage service?” 
  “Spies—yes, we have some. They 
  have learned that enormous stores of the 
  best 
  war 
  materials 
  are 
  pouring 
  into 
  
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  47 
  Hispanola. That’s all. How they’re paid for, 
  we can’t find out.” 
  “The spies haven’t learned much 
  about the black rock either, I believe you 
  said.” 
  “Oh—you mean what I told you in 
  New York?” 
  “Yes. The fact that the Indians of 
  Incan ancestry in Cristobal have been led to 
  believe that your brother acquired the sacred 
  black stone, and therefore a curse has fallen 
  upon the government.” 
  Sanda made an angry face. “I don’t 
  believe there is any curse!” 
  “You’re hard to convince.” 
  “Oh, I’ve seen the black daggers all 
  right. But there is a sensible explanation 
  somewhere.” 
  “What makes you think so?” 
  “Because there is supposed to be an 
  explanation for everything, isn’t there?” 
  The bronze man turned his attention 
  back to his flying. 
  “That theory,” he said dryly, “is one 
  I’ve always had faith in.” 
  Van Jelk stirred, opened his mouth—
  he probably groaned, but the noise of the 
  plane engine made the sound inaudible—and 
  finally got his wits together enough to yell, 
  “What happened?” 
  “A man crept up on you and hit you 
  in the darkness,” Doc shouted back. “We 
  managed to get out without raising an alarm, 
  and stole a plane from the military airport.” 
  “Where are we going now?” 
  “Taking 
  Miss 
  MacNamara 
  to 
  Cristobal, where she’ll be safe,” Doc said. 
  Sanda said grimly, “I would much 
  rather know my brother was safe.” 
   
   
  CRISTOBAL was composed about 
  half of tierra fria—higher country than 
  Hispanola. This portion bordering Hispanola, 
  this extensive plateau, lay like a table in front 
  of great mountains and fertile valleys, a 
  section in which high altitude and kindness of 
  nature created an almost perfect climate. Not 
  widely known, hardly accessible enough to 
  become 
  popular 
  with 
  tourists, 
  this 
  mountainous portion of Cristobal was one of 
  the spots on earth that came closest to being 
  paradise, probably excelling in loveliness the 
  famed vale of Kashmir. 
  Efficient Americans invariably swore 
  at the stupidity of the natives in not 
  developing the land. It seemed silly that the 
  natives should exist in huts, raising only a 
  milpa, or small patch of corn cleared in the 
  native jungle, and giving that no more 
  cultivation than it required, and rarely doing 
  anything else in the line of work except 
  gather a few thick maguey leaves to repair a 
  hut after wind blew the thatching away. 
  The 
  Indians, 
  however, 
  had 
  a 
  standard word for American efficiency. It was 
  “tectatan.” It meant, “I don’t understand.” 
  In justice, it should be added that 
  after Americans had been there a while, they 
  did not understand either. There was no 
  necessity for working, since nature provided 
  sufficiently. So why work? There were 
  Yankees in Cristobal who had managed to 
  become even lazier than any of the natives. 
  However, between this mountainous 
  Eden and the Hispanolan border—or what 
  had been the Hispanolan border, for that had 
  changed a lot in a few days—lay the plateau 
  land, the tierra fria. 
  On this plateau, the war was being 
  waged. 
  Sanda had found binoculars; she 
  kept them pointed over the side of the plane. 
  The sun had, risen, throwing white glare 
  through rapidly thinning cumulus clouds. 
  Sanda said something explosive, 
  frightened. 
  “The fighting!” she gasped. “They are 
  beating us terribly!” 
  Doc Savage had been studying the 
  terrain. He had noted numerous caterpillar-
  type motor lorries moving up to the front, 
  doubtless 
  loaded 
  with 
  supplies 
  and 
  munitions. There had been tanks, not 
  traveling in groups so that a number of them 
  might be bombed at once, but rolling along a 
  single tank at a time. Motorized artillery 
  moved in the same fashion. Whosoever was 
  conducting this side of the war knew how it 
  should be done. 
  The war lines, it suddenly developed, 
  were back almost against the mountains. 
  “Are the mountains fortified?” Doc 
  asked. 
  “No.” Sanda shook her head. “We 
  never dreamed that Hispanola would attack 
  us. There was no reason for this war, I tell 
  you!” 
  “It looks bad.” 
  Sanda nodded. “There is no use 
  being patriotic. We have lost. We’ve lost the 
  war, unless a miracle happens along.” 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  48 
  “Lines of communication with the sea 
  are cut, aren’t they?” 
  “Yes. In the other direction, beyond 
  the mountains, there are no roads at all. The 
  country is impassable, at least as far as 
  bringing in supplies. We’ll run out of 
  ammunition within a week. Even if we didn’t, 
  we would soon starve out.” 
  A white mushroom appeared over to 
  the left and the plane jumped slightly. Doc 
  stood the plane on its nose to keep from 
  being boxed by the anti-aircraft guns. 
  “The fools!” Sanda said grimly. 
  “Those are our own guns!” 
  “This is a Hispanolan plane,” Doc 
  reminded her. 
   
   
  THEY 
  bounced 
  around 
  on 
  air 
  currents inside one of the mountain passes. 
  The 
  big 
  engine 
  settled 
  down 
  to 
  a 
  monotonous moan of labor as it climbed. 
  Below was a railroad, construction of which 
  had been an engineering feat years ago. 
  They passed bridge after bridge that had 
  been bombed out. At one point, a fantastic 
  bomb-loosened landslide had dammed the 
  canyon, making a large lake. 
  “Look.” Sanda pointed. 
  A group of men were retreating 
  slowly up a mountain slope, crawling from 
  boulder to boulder, skulking among trees, 
  firing at other men who were pursuing them. 
  Doc said: “This is far inside the front 
  line. We’ll drop down and see what kind of a 
  skirmish it is.” 
  “The 
  men 
  higher 
  up 
  the 
  mountainside are my people, Cristobal 
  soldiers,” Sanda said. “I can tell from their 
  uniforms.” 
  The plane leaned in toward the 
  mountainside, went moaning downward, 
  changing course rapidly when the Cristobal 
  soldiers began pointing rifles at it. 
  The 
  guerilla 
  force 
  fighting 
  the 
  Cristobal military waved their arms and their 
  weapons, snatched off enormous palm-straw 
  hats and flourished them. They were a 
  miscellaneous-looking 
  rabble, 
  very 
  dark 
  faces being about the only thing they had in 
  common. 
  “Indians,” 
  Sanda 
  said 
  suddenly. 
  “They belong to a tribe that descended from 
  the Incans.” 
  Doc asked: “You think this means 
  the trouble over the black stone has flared 
  into open rebellion?” 
  “It can’t mean anything else.” 
  Doc lifted the plane higher, flew on. 
  Cristobal City came into view, a thing of 
  picture beauty with its multi-colored rooftops, 
  and every house with neat white walls. Lanes 
  of palm trees lined the streets, curtsying in 
  the breeze, a startling contrast against the 
  not very distant background of perpetually 
  snow-crowned mountains. 
  “It’s a little like Switzerland, isn’t it?” 
  Sanda said. There were tears in her eyes. 
  Doc nodded, located the airport at 
  the edge of the city, beyond the small hilltop 
  which was crested with the magnificent white 
  presidential palace. 
  Van Jelk, who had said nothing and 
  done nothing up to this point, suddenly came 
  to life, shouting: “Are you crazy? You can’t 
  land here! This is an enemy plane we’re 
  flying! They’ll riddle us!” 
  An anti-aircraft gun or two woofed at 
  them. Doc put the plane nose down, dived 
  until he was close to housetops, went 
  thundering over narrow streets so low that 
  the ship could not be ranged effectively. He 
  managed to reach the airport. Sanda stood 
  up, waved as they flew close to the hangars, 
  and made herself recognized. 
  It was that simple. 
  Doc arched around, set the wing 
  flaps to lower the otherwise dangerous 
  landing speed of the plane, and settled on 
  the tarmac. 
  Cristobal soldiers ran toward them, 
  rifles ready. Around the field, a score of 
  machine guns were trained on them. 
  Sanda got out. 
  An officer advanced and saluted 
  Sanda, said, “Seize these men,” and pointed 
  at Doc Savage and Van Jelk. 
  “Wait a minute—they’re my friends!” 
  Sanda snapped. 
  The officer smiled, explained: “My 
  orders were to hold them.” 
  “I’ll see about this!” Sanda said. “I’ll 
  telephone my father.” She stamped away 
  angrily. 
  Doc Savage and Van Jelk waited, 
  the bronze man studying the airport, noting 
  that the equipment was scarce and of a not 
  too efficient vintage, although apparently well 
  maintained. A breeze came down from the 
  mountains, pleasantly cool; brilliantly-hued 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  49 
  tropical birds fluttered among the palms and 
  flowering bushes that bordered the field. It 
  was a picture spot—no place for the ugly 
  hate of a war. 
  The officer had followed Sanda. Now 
  he came back, clicked his heels, saluted. 
  “So sorry, Señor Savage,” he said. 
  “My orders are to put you under military 
  arrest.” 
  Van Jelk glared at Doc. “See what 
  you got us into!” he yelled. 
   
   
  Chapter XV 
  PRESSURE 
   
  GATUN MACNAMARA, president of 
  Cristobal by right of having conducted one of 
  the most thorough revolutions in years, 
  should have been of Irish descent, a 
  generation or two removed. He was more the 
  conventional 
  picture 
  of 
  the 
  two-fisted 
  Irishman who roared his own arguments, and 
  refused to listen to the other fellow’s. He had 
  little Scotch canniness. When he wanted 
  something, he said so, preferably beating a 
  table at the same time. 
  He had been over six feet tall before 
  the years bent him. His hair had been a black 
  thatch that stood up; now it was a snow-white 
  thatch that stood up. His eyebrows were a 
  pair of black gophers that traveled around on 
  his forehead, according to the mood he was 
  in. 
  Just now, the presidential eyebrows 
  were up near his hairline, indicating profound 
  surprise that anybody could be such a dope. 
  “Have I been misinformed?” he 
  asked, speaking better English than most 
  Yanks. “Is what I have read, what I have 
  heard, a lot of—what you call him—bologna? 
  Or maybe you are just—what they say—
  kidding me.” 
  “I’m not kidding you,” Doc said. “The 
  answer is no.” 
  “Pah!” Gatun MacNamara could say 
  “Pah!” and make everyone within earshot 
  jump. 
  They were in the reception room of 
  the presidential mansion which, being the 
  most impressive room in the place, was 
  impressive indeed. It had most of the 
  pretentiousness of the Hall of Mirrors of 
  Versailles Palace, except that some of these 
  mirrors had genuine gold-plated frames 
  instead of gilt. The Gatun MacNamara desk, 
  hewn in one piece from a marvelous 
  Cristobal mahogany log, occupied the far end 
  of the room, farthest from the door through 
  which visitors came. Like Mussolini, old 
  Gatun knew the value of letting a business 
  caller have a long walk before reaching his 
  desk. 
  “Pah!” 
  said 
  Gatun 
  MacNamara 
  again. “I understood that you were a man 
  who helped the oppressed and punished 
  wrongdoers, traveling wherever it might be 
  necessary to do so.” 
  Doc said, “Something like that.” 
  “Well—” 
  “But we don’t hire out to fight wars,” 
  Doc 
  interrupted, 
  “which 
  is 
  what 
  your 
  proposition amounts to. You want to hire 
  whatever scientific knowledge I may have for 
  use against your enemy, Hispanola.” 
  Gatun 
  MacNamara 
  nodded 
  cheerfully over his own idea. “I thought,” he 
  explained, “that you might have a germ or 
  something on tap. If we could start a nice rip-
  tearing epidemic of something among those 
  damn-blasted Hispanolans, we might slow 
  them up. We could cure them after they 
  surrendered to us, of course.” 
  “No.” 
  “It 
  against 
  your 
  principles, 
  or 
  something?” 
  “Exactly.” 
  Gatun 
  MacNamara pounded his 
  desk and looked threatening, roared, “We 
  may find methods of making you comply with 
  our wishes.” 
  “If this is why you had me arrested,” 
  Doc said, “you’re wasting time for both of us.” 
  Old 
  Gatun 
  MacNamara 
  turned 
  around and roared at a lackey: “This bronze 
  fellow has five assistants, hasn’t he? Send to 
  New York and have them kidnapped! Use 
  them as hostages to make him listen to 
  reason!” 
  Doc said dryly: “Someone thought of 
  that before you did.” 
  “Eh?” 
  “Four of my assistants,” Doc said, 
  “are prisoners somewhere.” 
  “Where?” 
  “That’s the question.” 
  Gatun MacNamara lost his temper 
  and roared: “Lock this man up again and let 
  him think it over!” 
   
   
  
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  50 
  VAN JELK had shared the audience 
  with Cristobal’s stormy petrel, and after he 
  had tried to speak on three different 
  occasions and been shouted down, he had 
  maintained a dignified silence. Dignity was 
  Van Jelk’s strongest point, and he had gotten 
  back a great deal of it. 
  The cell to which they were taken 
  was modern, made of concrete, electrically 
  lighted, and equipped with a steel door which 
  had a lock completely sheathed in steel and 
  controlled from some distant point. After the 
  door was slammed behind them, the lock 
  buzzed, then clicked in place. There was 
  finality in the sound. 
  “You’re an idealistic fool!” Van Jelk 
  said. “We’ll stay here until we rot.” 
  Doc looked about, ventured: “It’s a 
  more comfortable cell than our last one.” 
  “You could have promised to help 
  them—then escaped at the first opportunity.” 
  “A man’s promise,” Doc said dryly, “is 
  something like a dog. If a dog bites you once, 
  it gets a permanent reputation as a biting 
  dog.” 
  “Oh—hell! Don’t be childish!” 
  Van Jelk walked over and slammed 
  down on his bunk and lay there for a while. 
  He groaned: “I wish we had never called on 
  you for help! A fine lot of help you’ve been!” 
  He turned his face to the wall. 
  Doc 
  Savage, 
  not 
  seeming 
  particularly disturbed by the disapproval of 
  his cellmate, examined the door and the 
  remainder of the cell, finding it solid. Even 
  files would have done no good against the 
  type of steel of which the cell bars were 
  composed, and it was doubtful if a cutting 
  torch would have been very effective. 
  Ten minutes later, the cell-door lock 
  buzzed, the door swung open, and Sanda 
  MacNamara 
  stepped 
  into 
  view 
  and 
  beckoned. 
  “I didn’t see any sense in waiting,” 
  she said. “We better move fast, though.” 
  Van Jelk had scrambled out of his 
  bunk with great haste. He jumped through 
  the cell door, barked: “Which way? How do 
  we get out of here?” 
  “Take it easy, millionaire,” Sanda 
  advised. “The coast is clear. I sent the guard 
  away . . . ah . . . with enough money to pay 
  him for his trouble.” 
  She led them along a passage, 
  through 
  rooms, 
  then 
  toward 
  afternoon 
  sunlight, the girl walking rapidly and both 
  men trailing her closely. But when they had 
  almost reached the sunlight, old Gatun 
  MacNamara stepped out before them—the 
  automatic he held was big and black, his fist 
  was white and steady—and he spoke in an 
  unexcited voice, saying, “I should have 
  something to say about this, don’t you think?” 
   
   
  MACNAMARA stood scowling at 
  them, upper lip lifted enough to show teeth, 
  the black gopher eyebrows crouched close 
  together above the bridge of his nose, the 
  gun absolutely still in his hand. 
  Then he put the gun away. 
  “Sorry about flashing the gun on 
  you,” he said. “I was afraid you would jump 
  me and maybe do something drastic before I 
  had time to explain.” 
  “Explain what?” Doc studied him. 
  “There is a microphone in your cell,” 
  old Gatun MacNamara said, “and I overheard 
  what you said to this fellow,”—he looked at 
  Van Jelk, and his eyebrows gave an 
  uncomplimentary jump—”about a man and 
  his promises. I liked that.” 
  Sanda began smiling. She said: 
  “Dad, no wonder most of your political 
  enemies eventually go to insane asylums. 
  Nobody can predict what you’ll do.” 
  “Hell, 
  I’m 
  perfectly 
  transparent,” 
  Gatun said, and grinned. 
  Doc asked: “What about us? Do we 
  get locked up again?” 
  Gatun MacNamara shook his head. 
  “You’re as free as a bird, although I never 
  could see anything free about a bird, the way 
  he has to scratch for a living—which is 
  beside the point. The point is—you can go.” 
  He produced a pen and paper, 
  turned and plastered the paper against the 
  wall and wrote rapidly for a few minutes, 
  ending by signing his name with a flourish. 
  “Here,”—he extended the paper—”is 
  a pass that will get you the plane in which 
  you came, fully refueled. And this pass, as 
  long as it is in your possession, will keep any 
  Cristobal soldier from bothering you. And it’ll 
  probably cause any Hispanolan soldier to 
  shoot you, if he gets a look at it.” 
  Doc took the pass, thanked him 
  quietly. 
  Old Gatun MacNamara suddenly 
  extended his hand. “I want to apologize,” he 
  said gruffly, “for insulting you with threats. I 
  had heard of you, hoped what I had heard 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  51 
  was true—and I wanted you on our side in 
  this war. The situation is getting pretty 
  desperate.” 
  “How long can Cristobal hold out 
  against Hispanola?” Doc asked. 
  “Not very damned long.” Gatun 
  MacNamara pounded his fists together and 
  swore. “And that’s a crying shame. A year 
  ago, I wouldn’t have believed it. A year ago, 
  ten Hispanolas couldn’t have licked Cristobal. 
  But now they’ve got the most modern war 
  materials. Planes, guns, tanks, gas—they’ve 
  even got imported soldiers, men who are the 
  best military scientists in the world, unless I 
  miss my guess, directing their operations. 
  They’ve whipped us to a standstill.” 
  “Help from outside?” 
  “Of course. Scads of it.” 
  “Why?” 
  “I 
  don’t 
  know,” 
  old 
  Gatun 
  MacNamara said. “It doesn’t make sense. 
  Cristobal hasn’t any mineral resources to 
  speak of, at least no more than some of our 
  neighbors.” 
  “You have a climate,” Doc said. 
  “Eh? What the hell would a climate 
  have to do with it? You don’t fight a war to 
  conquer a climate.” 
  “There is probably not a more 
  pleasant place in the world to live.” 
  “Well, we’re going to lose it, barring a 
  miracle. But that’s our hard luck.” The old 
  president of Cristobal extended his hand 
  again. “Good-by. Good luck. If you change 
  your mind, let me know.” 
  “About helping you, you mean?” 
  “Yes.” 
  Doc said, “As a matter of fact, I 
  wouldn’t be surprised if we are both fighting 
  the same enemy.” 
   
   
  FIVE 
  minutes 
  later, 
  when 
  Doc 
  Savage had not clarified his statement about 
  a common foe, old Gatun MacNamara had 
  reached a condition best described as 
  peeved, and stood with fists jammed on his 
  hips and watched them walk away, rumbling: 
  “That’s a fine hell of a note! You make a 
  remark like that, and you don’t explain it. By 
  dirt, I ought to lock you up again!” 
  Sanda said: “You should hear him 
  swear when he’s really in the notion. I’ll never 
  forget the time a bull chased him out of the 
  presidential box during a bullfight. He swears 
  in American. He says it is the best swearing 
  language there is. I’ll go with you to the 
  airport.” 
  They 
  walked 
  through 
  streets, 
  occasionally showing their pass to sentries, 
  until they were some distance away from the 
  presidential mansion, after which there were 
  no more sentries. 
  Sanda touched Doc’s arm. 
  “Yes?” He looked at her. 
  “You noticed that he didn’t mention 
  my brother, Juan Don? He didn’t even ask 
  about him. You know why?” 
  “Why?” 
  “He was afraid he would break 
  down,” Sanda said quietly. “He told me so. 
  He is very proud of being a rip-roaring old 
  hardshell. He was afraid to talk about Don. I . 
  . . I told him what we knew.” 
  They approached the airport, and 
  once again had to use the pass. It was 
  effective. 
  The plane which they had seized in 
  Hispanola was wheeled out, and the snout of 
  a gasoline hose put into the filler vent. 
  “Where are you going?” Sanda 
  asked. 
  “To look for your brother, my four 
  friends, and the others,” Doc told her. 
  She nodded gratefully. “That was 
  what I hoped.” 
  “Won’t we need weapons?” Van Jelk 
  asked. 
  Doc said, “I’ll promote some,” and 
  went away. He came back carrying two 
  automatics hanging to belts that were brassy 
  with cartridges. “These should help,” he said, 
  and gave one of the weapons to Van Jelk. 
  The refueling crew finished work, the 
  long hose was coiled back in its pit, then men 
  laid hold of the plane and wheeled it out to 
  the line, after which a mechanic got into the 
  cockpit and started the motor. The field 
  attendants then saluted and withdrew. 
  Sanda, standing close to the plane, 
  extended her hand. “I hope you have luck, 
  but I don’t see how you can. You haven’t a 
  clue.” 
  Van Jelk had belted on one of the 
  automatic pistols; now he drew the pistol, 
  and holding it close to his body so that the 
  weapon was out of sight of the flying-field 
  officers, pointed the dark snout at Doc and 
  Sanda. 
  “Get in the plane,” he said, “if you 
  know what’s good for you. Both of you!” 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  52 
  His voice had turned completely 
  ugly. 
   
   
  Chapter XVI 
  HACIENDA 
   
  THEY flew for three hours. 
  Doc handled the controls, Sanda 
  occupied the co-pilot’s seat beside him, and 
  Van Jelk kept his gun pointed at them and 
  gave directions. 
  Once, Doc Savage leaned over and 
  said, so that only Sanda could hear. “You 
  want to go through with this?” 
  “What else can I do?” 
  “His gun is loaded with duds,” Doc 
  explained. “I took the powder out of the 
  cartridges in his gun before giving it to him. 
  He hasn’t discovered the fact.” 
  Sanda sat very still, staring at the 
  mountains, the jungle that furred the valleys 
  far below. She did not move, except for the 
  involuntary bobbing of her head as the fast-
  moving plane hit air bumps. 
  “You already suspected Van Jelk?” 
  she asked. 
  “Yes. As far back as New York.” 
  “What gave him away?” 
  “Several things. A man tried to kill us 
  with a bomb in a New York hotel, you recall, 
  and we trailed him to Van Jelk’s home. That 
  was suspicious. Van Jelk’s home, except for 
  the ground floor, was empty, indicating he 
  was getting ready to leave the country. And I 
  found Van Jelk’s fingerprints in your brother’s 
  plane—he was with your brother when he 
  disappeared.” 
  “What?” 
  “Van Jelk,” Doc repeated, “was in 
  your brother’s plane when he vanished—his 
  fingerprints were there.” 
  “I . . . why—” 
  “Suspecting 
  him,” 
  Doc 
  said, 
  “I 
  slugged him back there in that Hispanolan 
  jail. He was lying—he hadn’t been a prisoner 
  and escaped. He had come to pretend and to 
  pump us to find out how much we had 
  learned. 
  If 
  he 
  hadn’t 
  been 
  knocked 
  senseless, he would have prevented our 
  escaping.” 
  There was a loud rapping from the 
  back; Van Jelk was pounding angrily on a 
  fuselage strut. 
  “Stop that talking!” he yelled. 
  Doc settled back at the controls as if 
  intimidated, but from the corner of his eye 
  watched the girl’s lips. She guessed he was 
  a lip reader. 
  She asked, “There a chance of 
  finding my brother alive?” 
  Doc nodded. 
  “Then I want to go through with this,” 
  Sanda said. “Where is he taking us?” 
  “Their headquarters, probably.” 
  Sanda settled back. Her face was 
  composed and not particularly devoid of 
  color, the only signs of unusual emotion 
  being a compressed expression at the 
  corners of her eyes and the ends of her 
  mouth. One of her hands was gripped tightly 
  upon the arm-rest of the seat, but the other 
  hand was loose-fingered and relaxed. 
  She has courage and balance, Doc 
  thought. There is a lot of her Scotch ancestry 
  in her. Better think of such things rather than 
  of how attractive she is, how nice she would 
  be inside a man’s arms, what her lips would 
  be like. 
   
   
  THE hacienda might have been a 
  medieval castle but for one or two things—
  the hill on which it stood would have had to 
  be a little higher, and the white walls 
  equipped with turrets and surrounded by 
  moats spanned by drawbridges. The plane 
  came closer and the castle aspect was a little 
  less pronounced. 
  The hill crest was as flat and green 
  as the top of a billiard table, edged around 
  with a white fence behind which machine 
  guns were mounted, and sentries paced. At 
  the foot of the hill was a river; it snaked away 
  toward the swampy coastline, and Doc had 
  memorized the Hispanolan map sufficiently 
  to conclude that the stream must be the 
  same one on the banks of which lay the 
  wrecked steamship that had been converted 
  into a boathouse for the yacht. 
  “Land on the lawn!” Van Jelk called 
  harshly. 
  Doc looked at Sanda, asked, “What 
  is this place?” 
  “It’s the summer mansion of the 
  president of Hispanola,” she explained. 
  It was a smooth lawn, kept close-
  mowed; only when the plane was very low 
  could Doc distinguish wheel marks where 
  other planes had landed and taken off 
  frequently. 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  53 
  After the bronze man had his ship 
  down, he let it roll until it was close to the 
  white walls of the hacienda. An order came 
  from Van Jelk. “Cut the motor,” he said. 
  “Then climb out, one at a time.” 
  The men who surrounded them were 
  Hispanolan 
  officers—not 
  soldiers, 
  but 
  officers, high-ranking ones, Doc noted from 
  their uniform insignia. Not without manners, 
  either. Sanda got many a snappy salute and 
  low bow. 
  Van Jelk grinned at them, asked: 
  “You have a couple of extra guest rooms 
  here, haven’t you?” 
  The rooms were not adjoining. They 
  were comfortable guest chambers—until the 
  furniture was packed out, when they became 
  rather formidable. The windows were wide 
  and offered a pleasant view, but they were 
  equipped with shutters which were as 
  effective as jail bars. 
  Doc walked around the place, kicked 
  the shutters, threw his weight against the 
  door. 
  Outside, Van Jelk said, “To tell the 
  truth, we have been more fortunate than I 
  expected. I didn’t think we would get you all 
  rounded up.” 
  Doc said nothing, and after a while 
  Van Jelk went away. 
  “Monk!” Doc called, making his voice 
  very loud. “Renny! Long Tom! Any of you 
  here?” 
  Monk’s 
  rather 
  childlike 
  voice 
  answered from somewhere, “We’re all here.” 
   
   
  THEN the bronze man lapsed into 
  Nahuatl, the basic tongue of the ancient 
  Mayan language, which was spoken fluently 
  by himself and his men, understood by few 
  others. They used it for conversation they 
  wanted kept private. 
  “Did you manage to bring any 
  equipment with you?” Doc asked. 
  “Not a bit,” Monk answered. “They 
  searched us on that yacht. They even gave 
  us baths and pared our fingernails and 
  toenails.” 
  Renny said: “They tore the crowns 
  off two of my teeth, looking for chemicals.” 
  Doc called, “Miss MacNamara!” 
  “Yes,” the girl answered. 
  Down the hallway somewhere, there 
  was an excited cry. A boyish voice, shouting 
  wildly with mixed joy and worry. 
  “Sanda!” the voice cried. “Sanda! 
  How did they get you?” 
  It was her brother, Juan Don, and 
  they shouted somewhat incoherently at each 
  other, the girl saying, “Don! Don! Don!” over 
  and over. 
  When she had straightened out her 
  emotions, Sanda asked: “Don, how did they 
  get you?” 
  “One of them—the man named Van 
  Jelk, who is the executive of the gang—hid 
  himself in my plane,” her brother said. “Over 
  the jungle, he simply crept out of the 
  baggage compartment, struck me over the 
  head, then landed my plane on the river. He 
  struck a sand bar, and turned over. You saw 
  that, didn’t you?” 
  “But how did he get you out of the 
  plane? There were no tracks on the sand 
  bar.” 
  “I don’t know. I was unconscious. I 
  never knew there was anything mysterious 
  about that.” 
  Doc Savage put in: “You remember 
  when we visited that sand bar, Miss 
  MacNamara?” 
  “Yes.” 
  “I jumped from the wing of your 
  brother’s plane to the pontoon of our own 
  ship, which was floating on the river, you will 
  recall,” Doc pointed out. “It would have been 
  simple for Van Jelk to throw your brother into 
  the river, jump in after him, and swim to the 
  shore. It was not far.” 
  “But there were no animal or bird 
  footprints on the bar.” 
  “The river must have been up, and 
  gone down just that morning. There were 
  only a few tracks when we were there, 
  several days later.” 
  Sanda said, with evident satisfaction: 
  “I knew the whole thing wasn’t as incredible 
  as it seemed. I’ve said so all along, haven’t I? 
  Now—what about the black dagger? What 
  was that?” 
  There was the clatter of dress 
  swords in the hall, tramping of feet, and 
  eventually a key in the lock of Doc Savage’s 
  door. Van Jelk looked in. He was scowling. 
  “This isn’t my idea,” he said coldly. 
  “But the others are in favor of it. So I guess it 
  won’t hurt to talk to you.” 
   
   
  THE table was of mahogany, very 
  long. B. A. Arthur sat at the head of it, 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  54 
  presiding 
  over 
  the 
  meeting 
  with 
  the 
  businesslike 
  aplomb 
  that 
  he 
  probably 
  exercised over his board meetings in New 
  York, 
  Philadelphia 
  and 
  Chicago. 
  Lord 
  Dusterman, the munitions magnate, was on 
  his right, Ahmet Ben Khali, oil tycoon of the 
  Orient, to the left. The other members of the 
  coterie of seven of the world’s wealthiest 
  men—Mark Costervelt, Josh Sneed and 
  Jacques Coquine—occupied chairs. Van Jelk 
  took a seat at the other end of the table. 
  “B. A. will talk,” he said, indicating B. 
  A. Arthur. “He’s chairman. I’m in charge of 
  actual operations.” 
  There was a short silence. Doc 
  watched them. He had marveled before at 
  their self-possession, and he did so again. 
  They were a cold, efficient organization. As a 
  combine, they could go after and wreck 
  almost anything in the civilized world, 
  including nations. The bronze man had no 
  delusions; he knew the power of money in 
  such quantities. 
  B. A. Arthur stood up. 
  “I wonder,” he asked, “how much we 
  will have to tell you to make you understand 
  what this is all about?” 
  Doc said at once, “You might listen 
  to my guesses. That would tell you.” 
  B. A. Arthur glanced at the others. 
  They nodded. “Go ahead and guess,” Arthur 
  said. 
  “You have formed a syndicate—
  seven of you who are very wealthy—for the 
  purpose of seizing Cristobal,” Doc Savage 
  said quietly. “You have financed this war. 
  You probably began the plan more than a 
  year ago, by approaching the president of 
  Hispanola. You persuaded or bought him, 
  and part of the agreement was that you were 
  to put a yacht at his disposal in a secret 
  hiding place, for a getaway should things go 
  wrong.” 
  They 
  said 
  nothing. 
  They 
  were 
  watching him. 
  “Then you began shipping munitions 
  into Hispanola, along with hired military 
  experts. When war was declared, Cristobal 
  didn’t have a chance.” 
  Van Jelk was smiling thinly, but not 
  pleasantly. 
  “Your plan was complete, and it 
  included internal strife in Cristobal, also. You 
  managed that by working on the superstitions 
  of the natives—you resurrected that ancient 
  legend of a black stone that carried a curse. 
  Your agents spread a story that Juan Don 
  MacNamara, 
  son 
  of 
  the 
  president 
  of 
  Cristobal, had the stone. Your agents 
  probably committed a series of murders as 
  well, using a black dagger each time, or 
  seeing that a mysterious black dagger 
  appeared in the sky.” 
  B. A. Arthur’s mouth was open. He 
  said: “I’ll be damned! You knew all that!” 
  “The black daggers which appear in 
  the sky,” Doc Savage continued, “are simply 
  specially constructed Very pistol, or signal 
  pistol, cartridges. Such shells are usually 
  made to explode in balls of smoke, or 
  different colored lights. You use a shell which 
  explodes in four different directions, in the 
  shape of a cross with one arm much longer, 
  which forms the recognizable likeness of a 
  dagger.” 
   
   
  B. A. ARTHUR shut his mouth, 
  opened it, asked: “You saw through the 
  daggers, too?” 
  Doc Savage named a chemical. 
   
  (Author’s 
  note—The 
  names 
  of 
  chemicals and chemical concoctions which 
  might be converted to criminal use are 
  purposefully omitted from this book.) 
   
  “That substance,” he said, “when 
  kept sealed from the air, is almost as solid as 
  metal. However, after it is exposed to the air 
  for a period of time, it evaporates—just as, 
  for instance, does the material called ‘dry 
  ice.’ The daggers were made of that 
  chemical, kept sealed until used, and shortly 
  evaporated, 
  thus 
  disappearing 
  very 
  mysteriously.” 
  “How did you find that out?” 
  “The appearance of the daggers 
  themselves. Anyway, it was the only possible 
  explanation.” 
  “Then we didn’t have you deceived 
  at all?” B. A. Arthur growled. 
  “Oh, yes. Completely, at times. 
  However, there were many incidents easily 
  explained. The first attack on me, for 
  instance, when a flame enveloped the inside 
  of my plane near Baltimore. The flame was 
  simply a magnesium bomb which Sid 
  Morrison 
  placed 
  inside 
  my 
  plane 
  in 
  Baltimore—a time bomb.” 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  55 
  The bronze man looked around at 
  them; on his face was an expression that 
  was not pleasant. 
  “You killed Sid Morrison because we 
  were on his trail,” Doc said. “Van Jelk did not 
  do it. He was down here at the time. So it 
  must have been one of the others.” 
  B. A. Arthur said quite calmly: “It was 
  Henry Lee. Unfortunately, the murder he had 
  committed got on Henry’s nerves until he 
  wasn’t accountable for himself.” 
  “So you killed Henry Lee,” Doc said. 
  “One of you stabbed him in that New York 
  penthouse while we were in the hall talking. 
  You used one of the black daggers. Probably 
  you threw the container which had held the 
  dagger out of one of the windows, and it was 
  lost in the snow.” 
  The bronze man drew a deep breath. 
  “To sum up,” he finished, “there 
  probably is no black stone, and never was. 
  That was just a story to confuse us.” 
  Van Jelk suddenly began swearing. 
  He swore profanely and at some length. 
  “What we should do with this fellow,” he 
  yelled, “is shoot him immediately!” He 
  whipped an automatic pistol out of his belt. 
  “Hold it!” B. A. Arthur snapped. “We 
  called this man in to make a proposition, and 
  we might as well make it.” 
  Doc said: “Oh, yes—something else. 
  How I happened to get involved in this in the 
  first place. You knew that Juan Don 
  MacNamara suspected what was really 
  behind the war, and that he was coming to 
  me for help for his country. You didn’t want 
  that. Sid Morrison was watching my office. 
  When I flew south to start a vacation, he 
  thought I was headed for Cristobal, hence 
  the attempt to kill me.” 
   
   
  B. A. ARTHUR stood up—possibly 
  from habit acquired in addressing corporation 
  meetings—to do his speaking. 
  “Possibly,” he said thoughtfully, “we 
  should have gone to you in the first place. 
  Our motives in doing this, you may or may 
  not know, are—well, they are idealistic.” 
  “Idealistic?” 
  B. A. Arthur cleared his throat. “The 
  world today is a turbulent, unpredictable, 
  war-ridden place. In no country, no nation on 
  the face of the earth, are property rights 
  unhampered by taxation. I am an American 
  citizen, for instance, and when I die, the 
  United States government plans to take over 
  half my fortune in inheritance taxes—which 
  means they will take some seven hundred 
  million dollars, in spite of all my lawyers can 
  do to the contrary. Granting, of course, that 
  taxation had not made me a pauper before 
  then.” 
  B. A. Arthur scowled before he 
  continued. 
  “Government meddling—you find it 
  everywhere. Take the New York Stock 
  Exchange, for example—what do you find? 
  Government regulation everywhere you turn. 
  The banks? Deposit insurance—eating up 
  the 
  banker’s 
  legitimate 
  profit. 
  Utilities? 
  Government competition forcing rates down 
  until return on capital is cut to a measly 
  seven or eight per cent.” 
  Doc Savage looked around the table 
  and said: “The point is that you fellows—you 
  very wealthy men—don’t like the way the 
  world is today. That it?” 
  “Exactly.” 
  “And you propose?” 
  “To take over the mountainous 
  portion of Cristobal—a perfect place to live, if 
  there is one on the face of this earth. We 
  tried, two years ago, to buy old Gatun 
  MacNamara, but he wouldn’t listen. But now 
  Hispanola is going to win this war, turn the 
  part of Cristobal which we want over to us.” 
  “And then?” 
  “We will create a sanctuary for 
  wealth,” B. A. Arthur said grimly. “There will 
  be no income tax, no inheritance tax, no tax 
  on any business enterprise of any size. 
  There will be no regulations. Operating from 
  such a country, we will soon make it the 
  financial center of the world.” 
  “What 
  about 
  the 
  natives 
  of 
  Cristobal?” 
  “Oh, them? They will be shown their 
  place.” B. A. Arthur suddenly pounded the 
  table. “There will be none of this damned 
  rights-of-labor stuff! No unions. The first time 
  the fools go on strike, we’ll have them shot 
  down. That’ll teach them!” 
  Doc Savage remained emotionless, 
  asked, “And where do I come in?” 
  “We need brains. We might hire 
  yours.” 
  “What makes you think I would work 
  for you?” 
  “You’re one of those idiots who 
  spends his time trying to make a better world, 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  56 
  aren’t you? Well, we’re offering you the 
  chance of your lifetime.” 
  Doc shook his head. 
  “You won’t do it?” B. A. Arthur 
  exploded. “But we’ve kept your friends alive 
  solely in hopes of getting your good will in the 
  end.” 
  “No.” 
  “And why not, you idiot?” 
  Doc said, no noticeable excitement 
  in his voice: “This whole setup is rather 
  hideous. It’s selfish and ugly. It is simply a 
  case of rich men—men more wealthy than 
  anyone has a right to be—trying to keep their 
  money and get more.” 
  Van Jelk suddenly swore. “I told you 
  the thing to do was shoot him. Now I’m going 
  to do it!” 
  He pointed the automatic at Doc 
  Savage and pulled the trigger at about the 
  same moment that the bronze man, lunging 
  suddenly, got both hands on the weapon. 
  The 
  gun made 
  a 
  harmless 
  cap-pistol 
  sound—only the fulminate percussion cap 
  exploding, since there was no powder in the 
  gun—as they struggled for the weapon, and 
  after a moment Doc backed away with the 
  automatic in his hand. 
  Only one man at the table had 
  moved. 
  Ahmet Ben Khali sprang to his feet. 
  There was alarm in all his very, very long 
  brown figure. 
  “I’ll be superamalgamated, Doc!” he 
  exploded. “I thought he would shoot you!” 
  “It’s all right, Johnny,” Doc told the 
  long brown man. “Just search them for guns.” 
   
   
  Chapter XVII 
  GOLD POOL 
   
  THE 
  wealthy 
  men 
  stared 
  in 
  dumbstricken stupefaction. Van Jelk was 
  probably the most affected; he put a hand to 
  his chest, made croaking sounds and 
  subsided into a chair, not unconscious, but 
  paralyzed with astonishment. 
  B. A. Arthur pointed a tremulous 
  hand at Ahmet Ben Khali. 
  “This man—is Johnny Littlejohn—
  your associate!” Arthur croaked. 
  Doc Savage nodded. 
  “But . . . but—” Arthur failed to make 
  words. 
  “We didn’t seize you back in New 
  York to protect you,” Doc explained dryly. 
  “The seizure was to give us a chance to 
  substitute one of our men for one of your 
  group—well disguised. Johnny was the only 
  man who closely resembled any of your 
  outfit. He happened to be as tall as Ahmet 
  Ben Khali, and he also knew Khali’s native 
  language.” 
  Johnny was walking behind the men, 
  searching them. He found two automatics, a 
  revolver, a tear-gas pistol made to imitate a 
  pencil. 
  “Did you have any trouble getting by, 
  Johnny?” Doc asked. 
  “Not much,” Johnny said. “I just kept 
  my mouth shut and agreed with the others.”  
  They were alone in the room; the 
  doors 
  were 
  closed. 
  Probably 
  sentries 
  outside, but the doors were heavy and 
  soundproof. 
  Johnny explained, “I couldn’t get 
  word to you, Doc. Everything seemed to go 
  wrong. I did find out they had you in a 
  Hispanolan prison for a while, but before I 
  could get there without arousing suspicion, 
  you had escaped.” 
  Van Jelk suddenly buried his face in 
  his hands. He began swearing in a low 
  monotonous voice that was almost tearful. 
  “He’s bad.” Johnny indicated Van 
  Jelk. “You want to watch him. He did all their 
  killing. He’s their brains, really.” 
  Doc said: “Can you get Monk and 
  Ham and the others in here?” 
  Johnny said grimly, “I hope so.” 
  He went to the door, opened it, 
  called sharply to a guard in the Hispanolan 
  language. Johnny’s work with archaeology 
  had given him a familiarity with a number of 
  languages. 
  “Bring the prisoners here—all of 
  them,” Johnny ordered the sentry. “The 
  MacNamara girl, her brother—everyone.” 
  After that, there was a wait of 
  perhaps five minutes. 
  Long Tom entered first. The others 
  trailed him, Sanda and Don MacNamara 
  entering last. 
  “Line up along the wall with your 
  hands in the air!” Johnny rapped. To the 
  guards, he said, “All right. Leave the room. 
  We can handle this alone.” 
  The armed escort left. 
  Monk and the others immediately 
  dropped their arms and greeted Doc Savage 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  57 
  in low voices. Sanda and her brother stared, 
  flabbergasted. 
  “What is this?” Sanda gasped. 
  “Ahmet Ben Khali,” Doc explained, 
  “is really Johnny Littlejohn, my associate.” 
  “For the love of little fishes!” Sanda 
  said. “Where is the real Khali?” 
  “Held by friends of ours in New 
  York.” 
  Doc glanced at Johnny. “The whole 
  war campaign is directed from here, isn’t it?” 
  Johnny nodded. “By radio.” 
  “Where are the radio rooms?” 
  “In this wing of the house. We can 
  get to them all right.” Johnny grinned. “By the 
  way, their staff officers are holding a meeting, 
  which means most of them will be in one 
  room. If we work it right, and get them, we 
  can wipe out the brains of this war with one 
  lick.” 
  “If Hispanola loses all its hired 
  military skill, can Cristobal lick them?” 
  “Maybe.” 
  “If we use the radio,” Doc said, “and 
  mess up the campaign with conflicting 
  orders, would that help?” 
  “It sure would.” 
  “Before we start,” Monk said, “I got a 
  little speech.” He stood in front of the wealthy 
  men and looked ugly. When Monk wanted to 
  look ugly, he could manage a rather 
  horrendous effect. “You six guys have got 
  just one chance of going on living, and that’s 
  by seeing that we get out of this mess.” 
  They left the conference room by a 
  door on the far side. In the corridor, they 
  found a guard armed with a submachine gun. 
  Johnny rapped the fellow’s jaw, got the gun 
  as the man dropped. They continued on to a 
  door. 
  “Staff 
  headquarters,” 
  Johnny 
  whispered. 
  He went in, pointed the submachine 
  gun at the eight or ten men in the room, said: 
  “All of you—you’re under arrest!” 
  These were professional fighting 
  men—eight or ten of them in the room—so it 
  was a little too much to expect the blanket 
  command to be effective. One of the experts 
  whipped out an automatic, leveled it and 
  pulled the trigger. 
   
   
  ROARING lead from Johnny’s gun 
  cut the man’s arm between wrist and elbow 
  at about the same instant that he shot, so 
  that it looked as if the pistol recoil might have 
  broken his arm. The wounded man—his 
  bullet had missed—did not scream, did not 
  make a sound, but dived at one of his 
  companions and with his unhurt hand began 
  trying to get that man’s gun. 
  Van Jelk suddenly slugged Monk. He 
  put everything he had into the roundhouse 
  uppercut. Monk managed to get his jaw out 
  of the way; the blow took him on the cheek 
  and sent him skip-dancing crazily backward. 
  Ham 
  said, 
  “Why, 
  you—” 
  and 
  knocked Van Jelk down. 
  And 
  suddenly 
  fighting 
  spread 
  throughout the vast room. There were yells, a 
  few shots. The table upset. Chairs climbed 
  into the air, glanced off walls and ceiling. 
  Doc spoke in the Mayan tongue, 
  saying: “Johnny, have you got anaesthetic 
  bombs?” 
  “Plenty of them,” rapped the gaunt 
  archaeologist and geologist. 
  Still using Mayan, Doc called: “Hold 
  your breath! Johnny is going to use 
  anaesthetic grenades!” 
  His 
  five 
  men 
  understood, 
  and 
  immediately got their lungs as full of air as 
  possible and held it there. Johnny produced 
  the grenades—they were thin-walled glass 
  balls, filled with liquid—and hurled them at 
  the floor, at men, at anything which would 
  break them. The things burst, made splashes 
  of wetness which evaporated instantly, 
  turning into a vapor that produced an abrupt 
  unconsciousness when breathed—but which 
  had the unusual property of becoming 
  impotent after being mixed with the air for 
  approximately a minute. 
  Men began folding down—which 
  meant the fight in that room was over. 
  Doc ran to a door, flung it open. He 
  was searching for the radio rooms. The 
  others—Monk, Ham, Renny, Johnny, Long 
  Tom—followed him. Monk scooped up 
  Sanda, and Renny got her brother, Juan 
  Don. Neither MacNamara had known about 
  the anaesthetic gas and holding breath, so 
  they had fallen victim to the stuff. 
  “Where are the radio rooms?” Doc 
  asked. 
  “In there.” Johnny pointed. 
  In other parts of the great house, 
  there were sounds of growing excitement. 
  “Any boats on that river?” Doc asked. 
  “Yes. One. Very fast, too.” 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DOC SAVAGE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  58 
  “Get all seven of those wealthy men 
  to the boat. Wait there.” 
  “What about the military experts?” 
  “Let them go. If we get their source 
  of pay stopped, that part will take care of 
  itself.” 
  They 
  separated, 
  Doc 
  Savage 
  heading for the radio rooms. He found two 
  operators on duty, both bumped over their 
  keys, wearing headsets and grimacing as 
  they strained to read messages through the 
  tropical static. Doc got one with his fists. He 
  had to use a chair on the other, and because 
  he did not want to kill the man, did not strike 
  hard enough, so that the fellow could crawl 
  rapidly after he fell, until he reached a gallon-
  sized bottle labeled Sulphuric Acid—acid 
  evidently used in storage batteries that were 
  kept for emergency operations. The man 
  hurled the bottle at Doc, who ducked. The 
  bottle smashed on the instrument board. The 
  acid, which could blind and burn horribly, 
  sprayed over the power panels. 
  Doc caught the man, used his fist on 
  the fellow. 
  Then the bronze man bent over the 
  transmitter table, studying the dispatch 
  sheets, transmitted messages and other 
  data. After a while, he began sending 
  messages—the same message in every 
  case: 
   
  Government of Hispanola has failed. 
  All army units retreat from Cristobal at once. 
   
  He signed the name of the officer 
  who had signed the other army orders in the 
  file. 
  He kept sending until the sulphuric 
  acid ate through the insulation and shorted 
  out wires, putting the apparatus out of 
  commission, after which he left the radio 
  room and ran, doubling low and zigzagging, 
  down a sloping lawn, close-cropped so that it 
  was as green and soft as a carpet, to a neat 
  steel dock to which the speedboat was 
  moored. He was shot at only once, although 
  after he got on the boat, a machine gun 
  gobbled from the vast hacienda. But that was 
  not important, the speedboat was armor-
  plated. 
  They went down the river, the 
  speedboat motors sounding like several 
  unmuffled airplanes. 
   
   
  THE Hispanolan coastline was out of 
  sight astern—they had passed the length of 
  the river without being molested—when Long 
  Tom Roberts, the electrical expert, came up 
  from belowdecks. The speedboat was of the 
  large express-cruiser type, which meant that 
  it had enclosed cabins; small cabins, it was 
  true, because of the space given over to 
  engines and gasoline storage. 
  “That’s a good short-wave radio,” 
  Long Tom said. “I got hold of Tropical Radio 
  in New Orleans, and they relayed a message 
  to Pat in New York.” 
  “Will she get one of our big planes 
  and fly down and pick us up?” Doc asked. 
  “Pat said she would.” 
  Sanda 
  MacNamara 
  had 
  been 
  listening. She frowned. “Is this Pat a girl?” 
  “She’s Patricia Savage, who is Doc’s 
  cousin,” Long Tom explained. “She helps us 
  out from time to time. Dickens of a nuisance, 
  Pat is at times. Always wanting to get mixed 
  up in excitement.” 
  “Pretty?” Sanda asked. 
  “A honey! And I don’t mean maybe.” 
  Sanda 
  looked rather 
  unpleasant 
  about it. 
  Doc Savage went into the aft cabin 
  and resumed what was proving to be a 
  useless argument with the seven rich men. 
  “You have a distorted idea if you 
  think we are going to let you go unpunished,” 
  the bronze man told them. “You are guilty of 
  plain and fancy murder, to say nothing of 
  fomenting a war.” 
  “You try doing anything to us,” B. A. 
  Arthur threatened, “and you will find yourself 
  in plenty of trouble. You can’t touch us!” 
  Monk heard that, and he grinned 
  thinly. Later, the homely chemist followed 
  Doc Savage out on deck. 
  “We can’t do anything to ‘em, eh?” 
  Monk said. 
  Doc Savage said, “They need a little 
  changing.”  
  Monk grinned. “College?” 
  “Yes. The college.” 
  Sanda, who was standing nearby 
  with her brother, looked puzzled. The cryptic 
  talk about a college had her puzzled. Monk, 
  noting her expression, sauntered off to warn 
  the others not to mention the “college” again. 
  The 
  “college” 
  was 
  a 
  unique 
  institution, existence of which was a secret to 
  the general public. The institution was 
  situated in a remote section of upstate New 
  
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE DAGGER IN THE SKY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
   
  59 
  York, a mountainous area seldom visited by 
  outsiders. To this spot Doc Savage sent such 
  criminals 
  as 
  he 
  captured, 
  to 
  become 
  “students” in the strange place. 
  Patients 
  in 
  the 
  institution 
  first 
  underwent delicate brain operations at the 
  hands of specialists trained by Doc Savage, 
  operations which wiped out all memory of the 
  past. The “students” were then given an 
  intensive course of training, the principal 
  feature of which was the ingraining of a hate 
  for crime. They were also taught a trade. No 
  graduate of the place had ever turned back 
  to crime for a livelihood. 
  Monk 
  got 
  Doc 
  Savage 
  aside. 
  Something 
  was 
  bothering 
  the 
  homely 
  chemist. 
  “Look, Doc,” he said. “All that dough 
  them guys have got—it’s a shame to let them 
  shekels go to relatives and lawyers. That 
  money could do a lot of good, or at least 
  undo some of the harm it’s done.” 
  Doc explained: “We might train them 
  to be philanthropists.” 
  “Eh?” 
  “Our men at the college have had 
  plenty of experience training men to hate 
  crime,” Doc pointed out. “It should be no 
  more difficult to train men to want to do good 
  with money.” 
   
   
  THE lapse of a few weeks proved 
  Monk’s conjecture substantially correct. The 
  seven wealthy men—they had secured 
  Ahmet Ben Khali and added him to the 
  “student” roll—were far enough along in the 
  upstate institution to prove Doc’s theory 
  correct. 
  Another pleasant thing was the visit 
  Sanda MacNamara and her brother paid 
  them. The war between Hispanola and 
  Cristobal had collapsed satisfactorily. There 
  had even been a revolution in Hispanola, 
  Sanda advised, and the president was now 
  occupying a jail cell. 
  Just why Sanda had to come all the 
  way to New York to tell them that was a little 
  puzzling. 
  The truth finally dawned on Monk. 
  The next morning, Monk appeared wearing—
  for the first time in anybody’s memory—a 
  new suit that was halfway respectable. He 
  was generally spruced up. 
  “What 
  ails 
  you?” 
  Ham 
  asked 
  wonderingly.  
  “I’m a rescue party.” 
  “A what?” 
  “Haven’t you noticed the way this 
  Sanda girl looks at Doc? A girl as pretty as 
  she is—he’s liable to fall. Somebody has got 
  to save him.” 
  “I think that saving is my job,” Ham 
  said with dignity. 
  Monk grumbled disgustedly, “I was 
  afraid we would have trouble over that.” 
   
   
  THE END 
   
   
   
  Strange—Weird—Amazing— 
   
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SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Vault2.0.-.Fiction-and-audiobooks/Books/R/Robeson, Kenneth/082 The Dagger in the Sky.pdf