TEXT:  OST
  A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
  
  Table of Contents
  OST.......................................................................................................................................................................1
  A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson.....................................................................................1
  Chapter I. THE CITY THAT WAS NOT  THERE.................................................................................1
  Chapter II. THE LADY DIRIGIBLE BUYER........................................................................................8
  Chapter III. THE SAILOR WHO COULD  NOT SWIM.....................................................................15
  Chapter IV. THE HIDING PLACE.......................................................................................................19
  Chapter V. THE PHANTOM CELESTIAL..........................................................................................21
  Chapter VI. THE NEW BEN BRASKEN.............................................................................................26
  Chapter VII. THE BRONZE MAN.......................................................................................................28
  Chapter VIII. MURDER VICTIM.........................................................................................................33
  Chapter IX. THE STOLEN AIRSHIP...................................................................................................36
  Chapter X. SEA TRAIL.........................................................................................................................40
  Chapter XI. THE WATCHFUL WAIT.................................................................................................44
  Chapter XII. ADRIFT............................................................................................................................47
  Chapter XIII. THE SUMMONING VISION.........................................................................................56
  Chapter XIV. THE STINGING BREATH............................................................................................62
  Chapter XV. THE OTHER WHITE MAN............................................................................................65
  Chapter XVI. THE THIRD VICTIM.....................................................................................................71
  Chapter XVII. GOA...............................................................................................................................77
  Chapter XVIII. SIEGE...........................................................................................................................82
  Chapter XIX. THE REST OF THE VICTIMS......................................................................................88
  Chapter XX. PAYMENT IN DEATH...................................................................................................92
  Chapter XXI. THE TRAP......................................................................................................................98
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  OST
  A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  http://www.blackmask.com
  Chapter I. THE CITY THAT WAS NOT THERE
  • 
  Chapter II. THE LADY DIRIGIBLE BUYER
  • 
  Chapter III. THE SAILOR WHO COULD NOT SWIM
  • 
  Chapter IV. THE HIDING PLACE
  • 
  Chapter V. THE PHANTOM CELESTIAL
  • 
  Chapter VI. THE NEW BEN BRASKEN
  • 
  Chapter VII. THE BRONZE MAN
  • 
  Chapter VIII. MURDER VICTIM
  • 
  Chapter IX. THE STOLEN AIRSHIP
  • 
  Chapter X. SEA TRAIL
  • 
  Chapter XI. THE WATCHFUL WAIT
  • 
  Chapter XII. ADRIFT
  • 
  Chapter XIII. THE SUMMONING VISION
  • 
  Chapter XIV. THE STINGING BREATH
  • 
  Chapter XV. THE OTHER WHITE MAN
  • 
  Chapter XVI. THE THIRD VICTIM
  • 
  Chapter XVII. GOA
  • 
  Chapter XVIII. SIEGE
  • 
  Chapter XIX. THE REST OF THE VICTIMS
  • 
  Chapter XX. PAYMENT IN DEATH
  • 
  Chapter XXI. THE TRAP
  • 
  Scanned and Proofed by Tom Stephens
  Chapter I. THE CITY THAT WAS NOT  THERE
  IT was remarkable that anything Ben Brasken did  should astound the world.
  Ben Brasken was what is sometimes called "a poor  fish." This had no connection with his being a sailor. He
  was meek,  abused, and did not have many manly qualities of the hairy−chested  kind. He was short. He was
  thin. He had never won a fight, although he  had had several. He was as poor as a church mouse, and
  somewhat  resembled one. Not that he went to church. They did not have a church  on the Benny Boston. All
  they had was grease, heat, smell, hard  work and a hard skipper and a first mate with bucko leanings.
  Ben Brasken had one quality. It was this one thing  that got him into all his trouble. And got some other
  people into  theirs. Which also caused some heads to turn gray, and a few people to  die.
  To say nothing of the incredible chain of things it  started happening.
  A dreamer, this Ben Brasken. Not a student. Not a  wise man. He read a lot, though. Most of his reading was
  simple stuff  about heroes who were everything Ben Brasken was not. None of it was  deep. What he read went
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  in one eye and out the other. At any rate, he  was kind of a dumb cluck.
  Most of the time, he dreamed. He would stop and lean  on his shovel and go off in reveries until somebody
  threw a chunk of  coal at him. Ben Brasken was a fireman on the Benny Boston. The  Benny Boston was a
  small tramp freighter, nearly as old as Ben  Brasken, who was not a young man any more. It was a wonder the
  Benny  Boston got by the inspectors.
  Ben Brasken’s dreams worried nobody but his  employers, and didn’t worry them much, because Ben Brasken
  wasn’t worth  worrying about. He was paid his not−very−good keep�a hammock in the  creaking fo’c’s’le,
  and a few of Uncle Sam’s dollars each month, a very  few.
  Not that Ben Brasken was what is variously called a  goop, a nut, bats in his belfry, or strange. Not a bit of it.
  Ben  Brasken was just a poor failure of a sailor man who got his joy out of  life by standing around, or going
  off in some corner where he was  alone, and dreaming. They were light, harmless little dreams about  Rolls
  Royces, penthouses, mints of money, and pretty girls. Just things  he had seen in the movies.
  An understanding of Ben Brasken, the kind of sailor  man he was, is necessary to understand the fantastic
  things he started  happening.
  SOON after Ben Brasken shipped for his first voyage  on the sea−going coffin, Benny Boston, he knew
  something  was wrong.
  The other sailors. They stood around in knots. When  Ben Brasken, who was a sociable mouse in a quiet way,
  came up to them,  they would stop talking and split up. They had a secret among them, and  didn’t want to
  share it.
  Rough seas, a stinking tub of a ship, and hard work  are wonderful ice−breakers where conversation is
  concerned, though. On  the eleventh day out of San Francisco, destination New Guinea and other  South Seas
  islands, a sailor told Ben Brasken what was what. The sailor  had just polished off a pint he had smuggled
  aboard in San Francisco,  but that was of no importance.
  In truth, Ben Brasken did not give the story the  credence he should have. He thought it was a little goofy.
  "Say, what’s the big secret around here?" Ben  Brasken asked.
  You see, his conversation was perfectly rational.
  "Ah, it’s somethin’ most of us figure we saw on the  last voyage," explained the sailor. "The skipper got mad
  and said he’d  beach any sailor he caught talkin’ about it. The skipper thinks he’s  got dignity. He don’t want
  to get to be known as one of these captains  who sight sea monsters.
  "Everybody knows there ain’t no sea monsters.  Anybody who says he seen one is either a liar or tryin’ to get
  his name  in the papers, the skipper claims. See how it is? The old man don’t  want people to start laughin’ at
  his boat."
  Ben Brasken was naturally interested. "What did you  see?"
  The sailor squinted one eye and sucked his upper  teeth. "I ain’t sayin’ we saw anythin’. It’s what we thought
  we saw. It  was a city."
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  "A city?"
  "Yeah. It was at sea, at night. It was as dark as  hell, and everybody knows you can’t see anythin’ when it is
  dark. But  these buildin’s in this city was there plain as could be. They showed  up kinda like the stuff on the
  kind of watches you can tell time by in  the dark."
  "A mirage," said Ben Brasken.
  "Huh?"
  "A mirage. You see ‘em in the deserts, and sometimes  at sea."
  "It was dark."
  "Oh! Then it must have been phosphorescence in the  water. You see a lot of that in the South Seas."
  "This city was kinda up in the sky."
  Ben Brasken scratched his head. He was baffled.  "Where was this?"
  "Two hundred miles off the New Guinea coast."
  "That was kinda queer, wasn’t it?" Ben Brasken said,  after a minute. "How do you explain it?"
  "Well, the skipper said it must be somebody on  another boat throwin’ a magic−lantern picture on a cloud. He
  said they  use powerful magic lanterns and throw advertising pictures and stuff on  clouds in New York and
  places like that."
  "Of course!" exclaimed Ben Brasken. "That explains  it."
  The other snorted. "It don’t explain how we all knew  the name of the city was Ost."
  "You what?"
  "Everybody who saw the city knew it was called Ost.  Don’t ask me how. We can’t figure it out. Yet
  somehow, every man knew  it was Ost."
  "That’s funny."
  "It get still funnier when you know there ain’t no  city named Ost."
  "There ain’t?"
  "No, there ain’t. We looked on all the charts."
  Ben Brasken was not without a sense of humor. He did  not believe in such spooky tales. He was sure fortune
  tellers were  fakes, mediums were hoodoos, and anybody who believed in spiritualism  was only kidding
  himself. So Ben Brasken burst out laughing.
  "How’d you like a bust in the snoot?" growled the  other, offended.
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  That put an end to it.
  Until, of course, Ben Brasken disappeared at sea.
  WHEN Ben Brasken was missed, and the cry, "Man  overboard!" rang through the ancient Benny Boston, it
  was too  late for there to be any hope.
  Anyway, every one aboard was in something of a  dither, because the glowing city in the sky had been seen
  again. The  watch below, loitering on the murky foredeck, discovered it first.
  A sailor ran to get the skipper, whose name was  Captain Smooth, a name, incidentally, which did not fit him.
  The sailor met Ben Brasken in a companionway, and  shouted, "We’re seein’ that thing again!"
  "I know it," Ben Brasken replied. "I am on my way  there now."
  That was the last they saw of Ben Brasken on that  voyage. A rain squall hit the old steamer a few minutes
  later, and  while a rain squall is nothing to a good ocean freighter, when one blew  down on the Benny Boston,
  things had to be watched. All hands  were busy for a while, and they stopped seeing the city.
  They missed Ben Brasken. They searched the  fo’c’s’le, the other places where he might logically be, and
  didn’t  find him.
  The sailor who had met Ben Brasken on the companion  got to thinking.
  "He said he was on his way there," the seaman  muttered. "Holy ladders! I wonder if he meant he was on his
  way to that  city? I thought he meant he was headed for the deck to have a look."
  Captain Smooth ordered the Benny Boston hove  to. They laid there the rest of the night, the vessel rolling,
  and some  of the men became seasick. Yes, sailors get seasick.
  The day dawned bright and clear. There was no city  in sight. There was just a lot of ocean.
  They did not find poor Ben Brasken.
  They sailed on to Melbourne, Australia, which was as  far as they went. In Melbourne, the story got out, and
  the newspapers  ate it up. Captain Smooth got a cable from his owners telling him to  cut out such idiocy.
  When they returned to San Francisco, some  enterprising reporters got the first mate tight, and the front pages
  carried his remarks.
  Captain Smooth was carpeted, the Benny Boston  got a new first mate, and became an old−fashioned hell−ship
  on the leg  back to Melbourne. It helped a little when they didn’t see the strange  city.
  But they saw the city when three hundred miles off  the New Guinea coast, enroute back to San Francisco.
  And they found Ben Brasken climbing aboard the  Benny Boston in the open sea, carrying an iron block.
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  BEN BRASKEN hauled himself over the rail, and stood,  clothes leaking water, holding his piece of iron. The
  rope up which he  had climbed was a line which trailed overside and down into the water.
  The first two sailors to see Ben Brasken lit out  running, reached the fo’c’s’le, and didn’t say a word. They
  thought they had seen a ghost.
  And why not? Ben Brasken had vanished quite some  time ago in the open sea, and here he was climbing
  aboard again! On the  face of the thing, it was absolutely impossible.
  Captain Smooth, when Ben Brasken was brought before  him, took three fingers of rum in a water glass,
  although he was not a  drinking man. Before he said a word, Captain Smooth looked for a long  time at the
  sailor who had done the impossible.
  A different Ben Brasken stood before him, yet it was  the same man, or a shadow of the same man.
  Ben Brasken was emaciated, so thin that the shape of  his teeth actually showed under his cheeks and lips
  when his mouth was  closed. His eyes were burning coals.
  Water ran off him and made a pool on the old rug in  the captain’s cabin.
  Captain Smooth looked at Ben Brasken’s piece of iron.
  The piece of iron was less than a foot long, less  than half that wide, a little less thick than it was wide, and
  had a  kind of handle fastened to one flat side. The other flat side was  smooth.
  In general, it was rather like an oversize flatiron  of the old−fashioned kind that had to be heated on the
  cookstove.  Except that it had squarish ends.
  When Captain Smooth got a voice, he pointed at the  iron and asked, "What’s that?"
  "An ordinary piece of iron," Ben Brasken replied  hollowly. "But it was touched with the magic of the mighty
  Goa, and so  with this key I was able to walk through the mouth of the cave into  Ost."
  Captain Smooth swallowed two or three times and  squinted at Ben Brasken.
  "Where have you been?" he asked.
  "Ost," Ben Brasken said. "I just told you."
  "How did you get there?"
  "I swam."
  "How did you get back?"
  "I swam."
  "What did you find there, Ben Brasken?"
  Ben Brasken shut his eyes and seemed to be thinking.
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  "I believe," he said grimly, "the main thing I found  was the awful terror."
  CAPTAIN SMOOTH sat back, relaxed, and tried to look  as gentle as he could. He was suddenly convinced
  that he was dealing  with a demented man.
  "What is Ost?" Captain Smooth asked quietly. "We’d  like to know all about your experiences, Ben. Is Ost a
  town on one of  the Japanese islands?"
  "No," Ben Brasken replied quickly, "Ost is the city  of the Ostians. The Japs probably never heard of it. You
  never heard of  it either, did you?"
  "I�I think I saw it in the sky," Captain Smooth  said. "It was kind of a glowing color."
  "The buildings were shaped like pyramids?" Ben  Brasken asked. "And one of them, the temple of Goa the
  mighty, was  upside down?"
  Captain Smooth gulped. As a matter of fact, one of  the queer aspects of the city in the sky had been the
  apparent  upside−down position of one huge building.
  The city, as he and the crew had observed it, had  been somewhat vague as to outline, and the exact details of
  the  structures did not stand out any too clearly.
  "What was this horror you mentioned?" Captain Smooth  asked.
  Ben Brasken seemed to think again.
  "It was so terrible," he said at last, "that you had  better give me time to think of a way to describe it so you
  will  understand,"
  "That’s all right, Ben," Captain Smooth said  quickly. "Take your time. What else did you see?"
  "I saw Martin Space."
  "Oh, then the people in Ost are white people, eh?"
  "No. Martin Space is a white man. And there was a  woman, who was also white. The rest were Ostians."
  "What do the Ostians look like?"
  Ben Brasken had to think over that, too. "I guess,  when I first saw them, I thought of them as the
  spider−armed men."
  "Eh?"
  "The spider−armed men. They have blue bodies, too."
  The skipper suddenly decided he had enough of this.  Ben Brasken looked so inhuman that talking to him was
  not a pleasure.
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  "Well, well, Ben, this is all very interesting, and  I know I want to hear more about it," he said. "But you must
  be tired,  and now I want you to have a good long rest. You can have a cabin all  to yourself, and we will just
  lock the door so no one will be bothering  you."
  Ben Brasken became animated.
  "No, no!" he cried out vehemently. "You must turn  and go to Ost at once! That is why I am here. I came to
  get you to save  Ost from the horror!"
  "You know that way to Ost?" Captain Smooth asked,  interested in spite of his common sense.
  "Oh, yes. Come here and I’ll show you."
  BEN BRAXTEN went to a porthole and pointed through  it.
  "There," he said. "You can see Ost as plain as can  be."
  There was nothing when Captain Smooth looked.
  "Sure, sure," Captain Smooth said gently. "You just  go to sleep and have a rest, and we’ll wake you when we
  anchor at Ost."
  He took Ben Brasken’s elbow.
  Ben Brasken looked at him. He jerked his elbow away.
  "Don’t act that way!" he shrieked. "You think I’m  crazy! You don’t believe me! I tell you, I’m as sane as any
  man on this  ship! You’ve got to go to Ost. They sent me for you. They need help.  They’ve got to have it!"
  "Of course, of course," murmured Captain Smooth.  "Don’t get me wrong, Ben. We’ll sail for Ost."
  Ben Brasken was not fooled. He became a raving  fiend, and tried to get at the gun Captain Smooth kept in his
  desk.
  It took five stout sailors to lash poor Ben Brasken  to a stout, padded plank in a spare cabin. Ben Brasken then
  fainted. He  was very weak, and apparently had been without food for days. They  noted that his hands were
  skinned, and thick callouses were on the  palms. The palms were also cut and bruised.
  Ben Brasken would eat when he regained  consciousness. But when they asked him questions, he only glared
  at  them, after saying that what was the use, since they thought him crazy.
  When the ship reached San Francisco, they  transferred Ben Brasken to the mental ward of a hospital for
  observation.
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  Chapter II. THE LADY DIRIGIBLE BUYER
  THE strange case of Ben Brasken came to the  attention of Doc Savage in the shape of a typewritten report,
  the first  sheet of which was headed:
  INCIDENTS POSSIBLY WORTH ATTENTION,
  No. 9163. BRASKEN, BEN,
  (Sailor who saw phantom city.)
  There were a lot of other reports with this one.  They covered incidents pretty much all over the world. Some
  of the  reports apparently had no meaning. The premier of an obscure European  country had deposited a
  hundred thousand dollars in his bank account. A  famous racketeer had been released from the penitentiary. A
  scientist  had developed an electrical treatment for curing color blindness in the  human eye, it was believed.
  These reports were made up for Doc Savage by his  five aids.
  Doc Savage’s headquarters occupied the top floor of  New York’s tallest building. He remained there most of
  the time, and  did not venture out in public, for he had a genuine dislike for being  noticed.
  It was impossible for him to go about without being  noticed. He was a bronze giant who made almost every
  other man seem  small in comparison, although his muscular development was so  symmetrical that he did not
  seem such a giant when standing off by  himself. He had straight bronze hair, a little darker than his skin.  But
  his eyes probably made him more striking than any other feature.
  They were like pools of flake gold stirred steadily  by tiny winds, and they possessed a penetrating, almost
  hypnotic  quality which was quite disturbing, especially to somebody with a  guilty conscience.
  Doc had been trained from childhood by scientists.  He was a scientific product. He had never had a normal
  youth. The  result was that he was an amazing personage. The newspapers called him  a mental wizard and a
  muscular marvel.
  Doc Savage read the report about Ben Brasken without  showing any emotion.
  With Doc in the library of the skyscraper  headquarters were two of his aids.
  William Harper Littlejohn, more often called  "Johnny," had often been described as being two men high and
  half a man  thick. He wore a monocle attached to his lapel. It was really a  magnifying glass. Johnny was an
  eminent archaeologist and geologist. He  had one habit which might some day get him slaughtered: He never
  used a  small word when he could think of a big one.
  Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks was the  best−dressed man in America, most persons admitted.
  He was also a noted  lawyer, and carried a harmless−looking black cane that was really a  sword cane. Those
  who knew him very well, or could outrun him, called  him "Ham." He did not like the nickname.
  Ham had one bad habit: It was Chemistry, his pet.  Chemistry was either an ape, chimpanzee, gorilla or
  baboon, or a  mixture. Scientists who tried to figure out just what Chemistry was  frequently gave it up and
  called him the what−is−it.
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  Doc had just put the Ben Brasken report down and was  looking at it when "Monk" came in, looking very
  excited.
  MONK was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair,  chemical wizard, owner of a pet pig called
  Habeas Corpus. Monk looked  almost exactly like Ham’s what−is−it, Chemistry, would look like if he
  weighted two hundred and fifty or so pounds.
  Monk was indeed excited. He shifted from one stubby,  bowed leg to another.
  Ham looked at Monk.
  "It must be a woman," Ham said sourly. "Something in  skirts is sure to get that freak of nature all worked up.
  Just anything  in skirts will do the trick."
  Monk looked at Ham. He looked at Ham as if the  latter were a fly some one had missed with the swatter.
  "You shyster!" Monk squeaked, in a small child’s  voice. "Some day I’m gonna cram you all into one shoe!"
  Doc asked quietly, "What is it, Monk?"
  "A lady to see you," Monk said. He gazed at the  ceiling ecstatically. "And brothers, is she class!"
  "I told you so," Ham jeered.
  "Show her in," Doc requested.
  When the young woman came in, they all got to their  feet courteously. But Ham sprang forward and, with
  great politeness,  escorted the young woman to Doc and arranged a chair for her, elbowing  aside Monk, who
  glared indignantly.
  No one could recall Monk and Ham ever having treated  each other with any civility.
  She was sort of a pocket−edition girl. Not that  there wasn’t enough to her to make a vision who would have
  disturbed  any man’s dignity. There definitely was.
  Her mink coat was cost and class, and her stockings  were so sheer that a second glance was necessary to be
  sure she wore  any. She had large brown eyes, and her hair was about the color of a  pecan shell.
  She carried her chin in the air, and began to act  like a young woman who was accustomed to having men let
  her have her  own way.
  "I am Kittrella Merrimore," she said.
  Monk and Ham exchanged the kind of glances they  might have swapped if they had discovered a
  harmless−looking butterfly  they had been handling was a deadly, venomous moth. They had heard of  "Kit"
  Merrimore. Indeed, she had more money than any young woman should  have.
  Two jackleg foreign noblemen had sued her in the  courts, claiming she had promised to marry them. She had
  started a  transatlantic flight. Her pilot had tried to drown them both by diving  into the sea when she refused to
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  wed him at the end of the flight. She  was what is known as dynamite.
  "You have a small dirigible, I believe," Kit  Merrimore told Doc Savage.
  The bronze man admitted he did have. If Kit  Merrimore was having any effect on him, it failed to show.
  "I came to buy your airship," Kit Merrimore stated  flatly.
  "For what purpose?" Doc Savage inquired.
  "You’ll pardon me," the lady hell−raiser retorted,  "but that happens to be my business."
  DOC SAVAGE’S three aids waited with great interest  for whatever might come.
  Doc Savage said nothing after the pretty visitor  advised him to keep his nose out of her affairs, which was
  what it  amounted to.
  The silence appeared to irk Kit Merrimore. She  started tapping the floor angrily with an expensively
  custom−shod toe.
  "Well," she snapped, "how much do you think your  airship is worth?"
  "It is not for sale," Doc replied quietly.
  "Nonsense! Of course it is! How much?"
  Doc Savage rested his metallic hands on the desk.  The bronze skin on the hands were smooth and
  fine−grained, and the  tendons, when movement caused them to spring out, were hard cables  nearly as large as
  an ordinary man’s fingers.
  "It seems you do not understand," he said, in a  deep, well−controlled voice. "The dirigible is a private craft
  which we  had constructed especially for our own needs. And we would certainly  not allow any one to use it
  without knowing for exactly what purpose it  was intended."
  Kit Merrimore’s toe tapped the floor viciously.
  "You talk as if you thought I was going to use it to  drop bombs on women and children."
  Doc used good judgement. He did not answer this  invitation for a quarrel.
  The young woman suddenly used a different tack. She  had been studying the big bronze man, who was
  himself far above the  average in male pulchritude. Perhaps this had something to do with it.  Kit Merrimore
  smiled sweetly.
  "Please," she said, "I really do want the airship  badly."
  "For what purpose?" Doc asked bluntly.
  "I’m truly sorry, but I cannot tell you that," the  young lady replied.
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  "I am equally sorry," Doc said. "You cannot have the  airship."
  Kit Merrimore’s smile would have stopped a war.
  "Please," she pleaded.
  "You haven’t a chance of vamping me into it," Doc  said.
  Kit Merrimore stamped both feet, and her eyes  launched sparks.
  "I demand that you sell it to me!" she hissed.
  Doc shrugged wearily.
  "I’ll make you wish you had!" the young woman  snapped. "Perhaps you don’t know just who I am?"
  "You are a young woman who was not spanked often  enough when she was little," Doc Savage replied
  earnestly. "And you  have too much money."
  Monk and the others held their breath, mortally  certain Doc was going to get hit with the first thing the young
  lady  could get her pretty hands on.
  Kit Merrimore did grab for a paper weight. Then  something happened. She stiffened. She seemed to forget all
  about Doc  and her rage.
  Her eyes were fixed on the report about Ben Brasken.  She could see Ben Brasken’s name. She could also see
  the notation:  "Incidents possibly worth attention," preceding the name.
  She moved her brown eyes to Doc Savage. The eyes  were wide, amazed, shocked.
  "Oh!" she said. "Oh!"
  Doc showed no emotion. He hardly ever showed any,  for that matter. But his three aids were almost as
  astonished as the  young woman.
  Kit Merrimore looked up from the paper.
  "So that’s it!" she said.
  Without another word, she spun and walked out to the  place. She seemed in a hurry.
  "Monk, Ham," Doc Savage said quietly, "it might be a  good idea if you checked up on what she does. Trail
  her."
  Monk and Ham went out.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" said tall, thin Johnny.  "An anagrammatical eventuation."
  These words were a sample of why a dictionary was  necessary to understand Johnny’s normal speech. Not
  for the world would  he have stated simply that he was surprised at the puzzling turn events  had taken.
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  KIT MERRIMORE took an express elevator to the  street. The express elevators in the building were by no
  means slow  conveyances. Yet Monk and Ham beat her to the street.
  They did this by taking Doc’s private speed  elevator, a lift used only by the bronze man and his aids, and one
  which would not have been passed by the inspectors for public use  simply because it operated at such a
  speed, that it would have been  considered dangerous to individuals with weak physiques.
  Monk and Ham hurried out and got in the first taxi  they saw. There was a string of cabs at the curb waiting
  for fares.
  There was also an enormous gray town car at the  curb. Pedestrians turned around and stared at this car,
  sometimes  running into each other in their absorption. It was a very striking  car, streamlined to the last
  degree.
  A round butterball of a Chinaman was behind the  wheel, and a lean, dark, very muscular−looking man was in
  the rear.
  Monk and Ham waited.
  "There she is," Monk said. "Even if she does expect  to be followed, she will never suspect we arrived out in
  the street  before her."
  Kit Merrimore got into the aristocratic town car.  She was biting her shapely lips in rage.
  "Drive up to the park, Two−bit," she told the  Celestial. "I want to think."
  Then she turned and looked at the dark athlete  beside her.
  "Lupp, everything went wrong," she said.
  "Yes," said the dark "Lupp." "What? Wouldn’t he sell  us the airship?"
  "Worse. He has been investigating that sailor, Ben  Brasken. I saw some kind of a report on his desk."
  Lupp sat up straight at that. Muscles around his  mouth bunched.
  "This is a tough break!" he said grimly. "I wonder  if he knows the truth?"
  "I don’t know what he knows. I wasn’t fool enough to  ask him. What are we going to do?"
  "Don’t worry, I’ll do plenty!" Lupp snapped. 
  "You had better think twice," the young woman  offered. "Doc Savage is not to be taken too lightly. I was
  very much  impressed by him."
  "Savage is quite a handsome chap," Lupp said, with a  trace of acid.
  "Handsome men are a dime a dozen!" retorted Kit  Merrimore, who should know. "And furthermore, his looks
  have nothing to  do with it."
   OST
  Chapter II. THE LADY DIRIGIBLE BUYER
  12
  
  "Of course," Lupp agreed dryly.
  "Furthermore," snapped Kit Merrimore, "if I should  fall in love with Doc Savage or anybody else, it is no
  concern of  yours!"
  "Two−bit," the Oriental, said, without turning his  head, "It has been said that the mightiest tigers are those
  whom the  jackals follow most."
  "What do you mean, you fat heathen?" Kit Merrimore  asked.
  "Two men," replied Two−bit, "are following us. I  have seen them in my rear−view mirror."
  Lupp growled, "I’ll take care of them mighty quick!"
  MONK and Ham sat back in their cab, blissfully  unaware that they had been discovered by the sharp−eyed
  Oriental driver  of the town car.
  "Lawyers should all be shot," Monk stated firmly.  "They’re what’s wrong with this country."
  Ham unsheathed his sword cane and examined a sticky  substance on the tip.
  "I wonder if this stuff has lost its strength?" he  pondered aloud, and looked at Monk speculatively.
  The sticky stuff was a drug which produced  unconsciousness when the sword cane pricked a victim.
  "You stick with that," Monk promised, "and I’ll take  you by the neck and wind you up like a clock."
  They continued the quarrel while their quarry led  them into Central Park via the Sixth Avenue entrance. The
  machine  carrying Monk and Ham got up to fifty miles an hour.
  Then, for no reason immediately apparent, it rocked  wildly, jumped the curb, turned sidewise, went
  completely over, and lit  in about four feet of water which was in a lagoon beside the road. It  was very
  fortunate that the cab had an all−steel body and a good one.
  Monk yelled. He always yelled when he got excited.  His ordinary voice was that of a child, but his yells were
  the bellows  of a bull.
  He kicked about, fought the door. The door was  jammed. He batted the glass with a palm. It caved. Monk
  broke the rest  out, and clambered out. He reached back and got Ham by the hair.
  "Let’s go!" Ham snarled. "I’m not dead yet!"
  Monk reached for the driver. At that point, Monk was  suddenly conscious of an awful stinging in his eye.
  They began to  water. His nose hurt.
  He took a gasping breath, and his lungs and throat  began to sting. He bent over in an uncontrollable paroxysm
  of coughing.
  "I’m dyin’!" he croaked.
   OST
  Chapter II. THE LADY DIRIGIBLE BUYER
  13
  
  IT was a rather sheepish−looking Monk and Ham who  presented themselves at Doc Savage’s headquarters.
  Ham was also mad.  His natty morning suit�for which he had just paid the city’s most  exclusive tailor almost
  four hundred dollars�had been ruined.
  The other two of Doc Savage’s little group of five  aids were in the skyscraper aërie. They were "Long Tom"
  and "Renny."
  Long Tom was an undersized, pale specimen, such a  sickly appearing character indeed that undertakers could
  not help  feeling a wave of prosperity coming when they saw him. He was actually  a man who had never been
  ill. He was an electrical genius. His full  name was Major Thomas J. Roberts.
  Renny was a big, sour−faced man who led the world in  two things: He was probably the greatest living
  engineer. And he had  bigger fists than any other man. He used them for an aggravating pet  diversion of
  knocking wooden panels out of doors at the most unexpected  moments.
  "Holy cow!" Renny rumbled, using a voice that was  like a lion in a deep cave. "What happened?"
  Monk’s groan could not have been louder if he had  lost an arm.
  "Tear gas," he said. "It must have been the kind you  squirt out of them little guns that work like fire
  extinguishers, only  you don’t pump ‘em. Anyway, this dame had her car drive fast, and  either she or
  somebody with her pumped the gas out, and our driver got  it and ran off the road into a puddle and turned
  over."
  "And ruined my clothing!" Ham snapped.
  "What about the girl?" Doc asked.
  "Oh, her?" Monk shrugged. "Search me. They got away."
  "They?"
  "A Chinaman driving her car. He came the nearest to  being a full moon as anybody I ever saw. And there was
  some kind of a  swarthy, athletic−lookin’ guy in the car with her. I never saw either  him or the Chinaman
  before."
  Doc Savage said nothing more. But he picked up the  report on Ben Brasken, tapped it with a metallic
  forefinger, and  glanced at gaunt Johnny.
  "A plenary chronographical recapitulation," Johnny  said.
  "Eh?" Monk said.
  "He said that report on Ben Brasken was complete,  stupid!" Ham told Monk.
  "I wish he’d learn English," Monk growled. "And who  are you calling stupid, you mud dauber?"
   OST
  Chapter II. THE LADY DIRIGIBLE BUYER
  14
  
  DOC SAVAGE began to speak without emotion.
  "It looks as if this Ben Brasken matter was  something that could stand a little of our particular type of
  attention," he stated. "What do you gentlemen think?"
  The expectant grins gave him his answer.
  Doc Savage continued. "Your first move might be to  get a line on Kit Merrimore and her two associates, the
  Chinaman and  the dark man. Find out whatever you can. You know the best methods to  use. One of you had
  better remain here to take the reports and assemble  them, so that they will be available when I call in."
  Monk demanded, "What are you going to do?"
  Doc did not seem to hear the question.
  The bronze man had an aggravating habit of not  seeming to hear queries which, for one reason or another, he
  did not  desire to answer. This had a connection with his custom of not letting  his aids know what he was
  doing, frequently, when he worked alone.
  The idea was that if one of them should be seized,  and perhaps tortured into talking, there would be no
  information  available which would imperil the bronze man or the others.
  Renny walked over, calmly drew back, and practically  demolished the wooden panel of the library door with
  one of his huge  fists.
  "Holy cow!" he said. "This affair kind of interests  me already."
  He looked very gloomy. It was peculiar with him that  he looked the saddest when he was the happiest.
  Chapter III. THE SAILOR WHO COULD  NOT SWIM
  POOR Ben Brasken was still in the wing for mental  cases in the San Francisco hospital, and there did not
  seem to be much  chance of his getting out soon.
  A number of more or less eminent psychologists,  psychopaths, psychophysicists, and a plain M. D. or two
  had examined  Ben Brasken. As was to be expected, they came up with different ideas.
  Being puzzled, they expressed themselves with  five−dollar words which were not only unintelligible to an
  average man,  but more or less confusing to each other. The truth was that they  hadn’t been able to quite
  figure out Ben Brasken.
  The hospital was modern, the food good, the nurses  easy on the eyes, and the patients had the use of a croquet
  court,  swimming pool, short golf course�all surrounded by a high man−tight,  woven−wire fence�so there
  was no reason why a poor sailor man with  nowhere else to go should want to leave.
  Ben Brasken seemed to have resigned himself. He sat  in his chair on the lawn beside the swimming pool, his
  favorite spot,  most of the time. It was as if, being a seafaring man, he liked to be  near a bit of water.
   OST
  Chapter III. THE SAILOR WHO COULD  NOT SWIM
  15
  
  It was there that Ben Brasken received the large,  swarthy sailor who came to visit him. At least, the big
  visitor had a  little white sailor hat perched on the back of his thatch of dark,  curly hair.
  There was one striking thing in particular about the  visitor: He had one bad eye. It looked exactly like a large
  pigeon egg,  pink and quite awful. The other eye was protected by a pair of colored  spectacles which were
  minus the lens over the bad eye.
  "Hello, Ben, you old swab," said the visitor, when  the nurse brought him up.
  The nurse, convinced he knew Ben Brasken, departed.
  Ben Brasken then muttered, "Look here, I don’t know  you!"
  "Sure you don’t," said the other, and took a seat  cross−legged on the edge of the swimming pool beside
  which Ben  Brasken’s chair was situated. "I wanted to talk to you."
  "Whatcha want?"
  "Look here," grunted the other. "Suppose I knew a  sailor, and he was on a boat makin’ the run from Frisco to
  Melbourne,  and he reached Frisco one time and talked some when he was drunk about  seein’ a town of some
  kind in the ocean. Mind you, the town wasn’t  there. Then, on the next voyage, supposin’ he disappeared off
  the ship."
  "Why are you interested?"
  "Supposin’ this other sailor was my brother."
  "I ain’t your brother! I ain’t got a brother."
  "Nobody said you were or had."
  "Oh!" Ben Brasken thought that over. "You mean that  you had a brother and that’s what happened to ‘im?"
  "Maybe."
  "You got a heck of a hindforemost way of sayin’ so." 
  The other shrugged. "Did you see any sign of my  brother?"
  Ben Brasken leaned forward eagerly. "Say, do you  really believe I’m not crazy?"
  "Maybe my brother wasn’t crazy," the other said.
  "What was his name?"
  "Gulliver Smith."
  "I didn’t see him," sighed Ben Brasken. "The only  white people I saw were the man named Martin Space and
  the woman."
   OST
  Chapter III. THE SAILOR WHO COULD  NOT SWIM
  16
  
  BEN BRASKEN had been under an intense strain for  days. He had known he was considered insane, and that
  was enough to  worry any man. Now that he had a chance to talk, he literally  overflowed conversation. In
  spite of the latter’s undeniably hideous  appearance. Indeed, the guests’ very ugliness was something that
  inspired pity, and therefore a certain amount of kindness.
  The story Ben Brasken told was almost word for word  the same one he had told Captain Smooth, the
  hard−boiled master of the  ancient hooker Benny Boston. When he came to the mention of the  "great horror"
  he had seen, he did not go deeper into details than that.
  "Hold on!" interjected the visitor. "What was this  horror?"
  Ben Brasken leaned back and closed his eyes. He  seemed to be thinking. He shuddered.
  "To tell the truth, that is what is worrying me," he  said. "The strain of that long swim back from Ost carrying
  the two iron  keys must have been too much for me. The doctors here said I was nearly  dead from exhaustion
  and lack of food.
  "I swam for many, many hours. It must have dulled my  mind, or something. A lot of details are faint. I can’t
  tell exactly  what the horror was."
  "Think hard."
  "I have. For days. But if anything, it all seems to  grow more vague, like a bad dream. I told that to those
  psychowhatchacall’ems who examined me. They didn’t seem to know what to  think."
  "That’s too bad," muttered the visitor.
  "It was something terrible, this horror," Ben  Brasken said. "But I can’t remember. I guess I am going bats
  maybe."
  "Don’t let ‘em kid you!" snorted the other. "Listen,  my boat sank one time and I was out in an open dory for
  three weeks  without food and with only a little water, and I’m tellin’ you for a  long time I couldn’t remember
  a thing that happened to me."
  Ben Brasken grinned. "I’m sure glad to hear you say  that. Everybody thinks I’m nuts."
  "Forget it!" chuckled the one−eyed guest. "Look,  what about that iron key you mentioned?"
  "I used them to get in and out of Ost." Ben Brasken  pinched his eyes shut and puckered his brows in deep
  thought. "Oh, damn  the luck! I can’t remember. It’s all so hazy. Like if I was drunk the  whole time. Only I
  wasn’t. I never drink."
  "You had two of them?"
  "Oh, yes. One for each hand."
  "But when you reached the ship, you only had one."
  "Darn, that’s right." Ben Brasken shut his eyes  again. "Well, I must have lost the other one while I was
  swimming. It  was pretty heavy."
   OST
  Chapter III. THE SAILOR WHO COULD  NOT SWIM
  17
  
  "You swam and carried these two pieces of iron?"
  "Oh, yes."
  The visitor now arose, as if to depart. But the big,  one−eyed fellow seemed to have become stiff while seated
  cross−legged  on the edge of the pool. He staggered wildly, his legs not tracking. To  keep from falling, he
  grabbed Ben Brasken’s chair.
  Ben Brasken, chair and all, toppled into the  swimming pool.
  BEN BRASKEN landed in the water with a splash. The  pool was deep at this point, almost ten feet. The chair
  was of metal  and sank. Ben Brasken also went down, but came to the top, splashing  and gagging.
  "Help!" he croaked.
  Then he sank again.
  The pool was very clear. Every move poor Ben Brasken  made in his wild struggles could be seen plainly. He
  had both his eyes  and mouth wide open, and big bubbles kept coming out of his mouth and  nose.
  He grabbed frantically, again and again, for the  surface. He did manage to reach the top, but went down
  again. When he  was momentarily on the surface, he emitted a piteous shriek.
  Hospital attendants had by now reached the pool. Two  of them sprang in. Ben Brasken grabbed them as a
  drowning man will, and  there was quite a turmoil until every one was hauled out of the pool.
  The big, dark, one−eyed sailor started walking away.  "Hey, you!" an attendant said sharply. "I’m not sure,
  but it looked as  if you pushed Brasken into the pool."
  The one−eyed man said nothing, but walked faster.
  The hospital attendants were accustomed to handling  persons who did the unexpected. They pursued the big,
  dark visitor. A  whistle blew. More attendants appeared. Burly fellows, strong men who  knew how to control
  maniacs with the greatest of facility.
  They closed in on the big, dark one. Two attendants  reached for his arms. They reached confidently, for the
  big Cyclops was  merely walking along. But they got a shock. Their hands got only empty  air.
  The one−dyed man had not dodged, apparently. They  grabbed for him again. Once more, the incredible
  happened. The truth  dawned on them. Their quarry was as fast as the proverbial greased  lightning.
  A wild mêlée followed. Men rushed the dark visitor  from all directions. He whipped about in a fashion that
  was  astonishing. Reaching a door, he dodged through. A nurse cried out his  location. When the attendants
  reached there, the fellow was gone. They  looked about wildly for him.
  A few moments later the dark, one−eyed mariner  dropped from a window of the hospital and sauntered away,
  unobserved.
   OST
  Chapter III. THE SAILOR WHO COULD  NOT SWIM
  18
  
  Back in the hospital grounds, attendants stood  around Ben Brasken, who was little the worse for his
  immersion.
  Ben Brasken’s ducking had proved one thing: He could  not swim a stroke.
  Chapter IV. THE HIDING PLACE
  THE big, dark sailor with the pigeon−egg eye next  turned up in the vicinity of the steamship pier to which the
  ancient  hooker Benny Boston was tied.
  It was dusk when he arrived. There was only one  gangplank down, and a sailor loafed at this to keep just
  anybody from  wandering aboard, a precaution against sneak thieves.
  The sailor applied a match to a cigarette, and it  was dark enough for the match flame to blind him slightly.
  When he had  accustomed his eyes by blinking, he discovered the Cyclops sailor in  front of him.
  "Hy’ah, captain," said the latter.
  Around the water, every one calls every one else a  captain, whether the title is warranted or not. Just as all
  elderly  gentlemen are called colonel in Kentucky.
  "Greetings," said the sailor.
  "When you sailin’?" asked pigeon−egg−eyed man.
  "Couple of days."
  "Got a full crew?"
  "Dunno. You better see the Old Man. Cap’n Smooth.  He’s not aboard to−night."
  "Thanks, captain," said the one−eyed sailor. He  walked away, and was swallowed in the darkness. He had
  gone in the  direction of town.
  His course did not take him toward town for any  considerable distance, however. He doubled back and went
  directly to  one of the big hawsers by which the Benny Boston was tied to the  pier. He seemed to be the
  brother of a cat in his ability to get about  in the dark.
  Without seeming to exert his muscles in the least,  he swung along the hawser. He passed the big conical tin
  rat guard  through which the hawser ran, and went on.
  The rat guard was turned so as to keep the rats on  shore, but it would have been more appropriate the other
  way, rats  being much more plentiful on the old steamer than on shore.
  Once on deck, the prowler entered the holds. He  showed an extraordinary familiarity with the interior of
  freight  steamers of ancient vintage. He lighted his way with a flashlight,  which emitted only a small streak of
  light.
   OST
  Chapter IV. THE HIDING PLACE
  19
  
  He began searching the ship. A thorough job, he did;  but he seemed little interested in the holds, passages and
  cabins which  were used most frequently.
  Nothing did he miss, which was unusual, because  there were numerous crannies of the most remote kind. The
  prowler even  raised a trapdoor and wormed down into the bilge, wading around in  water which was
  incredibly smelly and coated with almost a quarter of  an inch of grease and scum.
  He was very secretive. Since it was early in the  night, sailors were still moving about, those who had not gone
  ashore.  The searcher dodged these expertly. Altogether, he was quiet enough to  have done a first−class spook
  job in haunting a house.
  In a little−used compartment back of the anchor  chain locker near the bow of the boat, he came across
  something that  seemed to interest him. The niche was a gloomy one, closed by a hatch,  and apparently not
  used at all.
  The place was littered with empty cans. The searcher  examined the cans closely. Tomatoes, corn, beans,
  mostly. Most of them  bore grimy finger prints.
  Some of the cans had been opened only a few days  ago. Others had been emptied less recently. This
  difference, while it  was not quite as plain as print, could be discerned by close inspection.
  It was evident that some one had lived in the  cubicle, eating out of the cans for an interval that might have
  been  three weeks.
  There were certain other signs to indicate whoever  this was had been completely a hermit, had not left the
  place at all.
  Judging from the signs, the hermit had entered the  place about a month previously and had remained there
  until about a  week ago.
  This was the period during which Ben Brasken had  been missing.
  THE dark, one−eyed giant now produced two articles  from his pockets. One item was a pocket finger−print
  set, such as  police detectives sometimes carry. The other object was a copy, or  rather the page itself, from the
  hospital records made out when Ben  Brasken was committed. It bore Ben Brasken’s finger prints.
  A few seconds, and the mysterious sailor was  comparing the finger prints on the emptied food cans with
  those of Ben  Brasken.
  They were the same. Ben Brasken, then, had been the  hermit.
  The food cans were not the only interesting objects.  In moving them aside�there was rather a litter of
  them�the hunter found  four steel hacksaw blades, two files, a brace containing a metal−boring  bit, and two or
  three bolts. There was also a slab of rusty iron, three  inches or so thick, more than a foot wide, and a little
  longer than  wide.
  The hacksaw blade teeth were almost worn away, the  two files had seen much service, and the bit’s cutting
  edges were  chipped and rounded. Rectangular pieces had been sawed out of the iron.  Two of them.
   OST
  Chapter IV. THE HIDING PLACE
  20
  
  Under a pile of tin cans was an oblong iron block  equipped with a handle, an exact duplicate of the block Ben
  Brasken had  been carrying when they found him apparently climbing aboard the  Benny Boston. The key, he
  had called it.
  It would seem that the blocks had been made here.  And Ben Brasken had spent the time on the job which he
  claimed he had  expended in visiting Ost.
  The big, one−eyed prowler seemed satisfied with what  had been found, but was thorough enough to go over
  the rest of the old  steamer. He did not devote much time to anything else that he found.
  He carried the flatiron−shaped block equipped with a  handle when he went on deck.
  IT was fabulously dark outside, almost as black as  it had been in the smelly innards of the ship. The big
  hunter moved  with feline quiet toward the hawser by which he had come aboard.
  Out on the bay, a pair of tugs began blasting their  whistles at each other. The echoes bounced back from
  warehouses and  buildings until there was a gobbling uproar.
  This accounted for the pigeon−egg eyed sailor  bumping into another prowler on deck before he discovered
  his presence.
  There was no preliminary word exchanged. The other  marauder hit the big sailor with a fist. The fist hit the
  large one’s  chest with a sound as if a big jungle drum had been thumped.
  The two sprang upon each other. Both seemed fully  confident of an immediate victory. They strained,
  grunted, and clothing  tore. They tripped, went to the deck.
  Their fighting styles were vastly different. The  big, dark fellow used fist science. The other felt about with
  snaky  fingers, twisting a joint here, punching a nerve center there. Jujutsu.  Skilled, too.
  Suddenly, the giant with the pigeon−egg eye  commenced to demonstrate that he also knew jujutsu. He was,
  indeed, the  other’s master at the tricky joint−cracking, nerve−punishing science.  His foe emitted a sudden
  squall of pain, after which he could barely  move.
  The beam of the big sailor’s flashlight licked over  the gasping assailant.
  The fellow was a rather large and almost round  Chinaman who was about the color of homemade butter.
  Had Doc Savage’s two aids been present, they would  have recognized him as the same Celestial who had
  driven pretty Kit  Merrimore’s town car in New York City.
  A sharp shout came from amidships. Running feet  pounded. The fight had drawn attention.
  Chapter V. THE PHANTOM CELESTIAL
  THE globular Oriental had the cunning of his race.  He lay quiet until he had enough strength to emit a yell
   OST
  Chapter V. THE PHANTOM CELESTIAL
  21
  
  that would  have raised the dead.
  "He tly kill me!" he squawled. "Help poor Chinaman!"
  The footsteps approached with the rattle of a  hailstorm coming across a tin roof. The crew of the Benny
  Boston.  Some of them had hurricane lanterns.
  They did the natural thing. They decided to grab  both strangers and ask questions afterward. The Chinaman
  was a  stranger, certain enough.
  "Who’s the laundryman?" a sailor barked, and that  proved that.
  The dark giant with the strange eye tried to pick  the Oriental up and get over the side with him, but the
  Celestial  kicked and used his hands. He was really a master of his jujutsu. He  managed to delay the business
  of carrying him away.
  Two sailors leaped upon the dark marauder. They were  promptly flung backward.
  The Oriental sank to the deck and moaned, "He fella  bleak mine leg!"
  It was clever strategy. The sailors gave him no  attention, but flocked upon the big, dark fellow. As soon as no
  one was  looking at him, the Celestial bobbed up and disappeared down the hawser  to the gloomy shore.
  The Benny Boston sailors were tough lads who  knew all about fighting, or thought they did. After they had
  been  mixing with the big, dark fellow for a few seconds, they began to  conclude there were things they didn’t
  know.
  Men suddenly found themselves on deck, paralyzed,  and not knowing in the least just what had happened to
  them. Those who  got hold of the foe frequently thought some one had introduced iron  bars the size of arms
  and legs in the fight.
  The hurricane lanterns became smashed, one by one,  and the mêlée went on in the darkness. Captain Smooth
  came running from  his cabin, carrying a long, heavy boat hook. With this shillalah, he  poked and whacked,
  until someone kicked most of the skin off his right  shin.
  The fight became less violent. One man scrambled  clear, struck several matches and managed to relight what
  was left of  one of the hurricane lanterns.
  They saw then why the fight was less violent. They  were only scrapping each other. Their foe, the big tartar
  with the  queer eye, had faded away, probably overboard.
  Captain Smooth hopped around on one foot, nursing  his peeled shin, and began to say things which,
  remarkably it seemed,  did not melt the surrounding ironwork.
  One sailor backed hastily to the rear of the group  and examined the toe of his shoe. He hurriedly brushed off
  some bunches  of the skipper’s hide which were sticking to the toe. The hide somewhat  resembled the kind of
  ostrich leather they make purses out of.
   OST
  Chapter V. THE PHANTOM CELESTIAL
  22
  
  THE big, dark, strange−eyed sailor was not only  ashore; he had reached the street which ran beyond the
  piers. A small  coupé was a hundred yards away, and still gathering speed.
  It is, of course, impossible for a man to outrun any  respectable kind of an automobile in a test of speed, but
  the big  sailor very nearly succeeded.
  The Celestial in the car saw him barely in time,  stepped on the gas, and got away. The car motor had a carbon
  knock, but  that didn’t hurt.
  The big, dark sailor stopped. He had just covered  two hundred yards at a clip that would have taken the
  breath of a  professional sprint timer. Yet his breath was not coming with undue  speed.
  He went back to the pier, listened, learned the  sailors off the Benny Boston were ashore searching. He paid no
  attention, but entered the pier shed silently. Once, he could have  reached out and taken the cigarette off the
  lips of a searching  Benny Boston deckhand.
  The dark sailor got the flatiron−shaped piece of  steel with the attached handle which he had found in the
  cubicle aboard  the ship. Because of its weight, he had left this behind while pursuing  the rotund Oriental.
  The big, dark, strange−eyed sailor left the vicinity  with ghostly stealth.
  One of the city’s more obscure hotels saw him next.  He seemed to have a room there. He entered it, closed
  the door, pulled  the shade, listened for a while to make sure no one was listening, then  went to the bureau
  mirror.
  With a tiny suction cup gripping device that  somewhat resembled the rubber part of an eye dropper, the sailor
  proceeded to remove colored glass caps which fitted over his eyeballs,  under the lids. These were transparent
  enough to permit vision through  them. One had given him the pigeon−eye.
  A pastelike chemical and an application of friction  and soapsuds took the curl out of his hair. The hair
  became gray,  almost white when the chemical treatment was done.
  A small trunk yielded a dignified and very  conservative business suit, also an excellently made mustache and
  Vandyke beard, spectacles with a black ribbon, and a case of  instruments such as surgeons carry. There was
  also a case of business  cards.
  Another pair of the glass eyeballs caps disguised  his eyes, and a few drops of a chemical made them watery
  and  old−looking.
  The surprising individual walked out of the hotel as  an elderly, dignified gentleman. The iron block was in
  his surgical bag.
  He turned up at the hospital where Ben Brasken was  confined and presented one of his cards in the office.
  The card said:
  Kurt Von Vallenstadt
  Psychiatrist  Vienna, Berlin
  "Ja," 
   OST
  Chapter V. THE PHANTOM CELESTIAL
  23
  
  said the old gentleman, using a grand manner. "Vass it possible for  me to examine dot sailor Ben Brasken?" 
  "It is rather late, doctor," he was told.
  "Ja. 
  I know dot. But mine plane leave for New York very early in  morning. Dot Ben Brasken case interest me
  very mooch." 
  After some hesitation, he was told he might see Ben  Brasken.
  Ben Brasken occupied a ward in which there were  three other beds, but the other three were empty. Ben
  Brasken was  reading a detective magazine. He lowered the magazine.
  Ben Brasken’s forehead was covered almost to the  eyes by a damp towel, and the sheet was pulled up over
  his chin.
  The nurse departed.
  "What do you want?" Ben Brasken asked hoarsely.
  THE old gentleman put the bag on the table. "I have  something to show you."
  He took out the flatiron object.
  "Huh?" said Ben Brasken.
  "This is a duplicate of the key you had when they  found you climbing aboard the Benny Boston, apparently,"
  stated  the visitor.
  "Oh." Ben Brasken blinked dark eyes.
  "I found it in a small, unused cubbyhole near the  bow of the Benny Boston. It had been made in that cubby.
  There  were some other things in the place which proved you were hiding out  there during the time you claim
  you visited this place called Ost."
  "Who are you, feller?"
  For answer, the old fellow handed over one of his  cards. The hand which came out from under the bed covers
  and took it  was hairy, brown and rather thick.
  "Yah," he said, after glancing at the card. "A  pill−pusher, eh?"
  "You are not insane," said the visitor.
  "Thanks."
  "You are a skillful liar."
   OST
  Chapter V. THE PHANTOM CELESTIAL
  24
  
  "I may be a sick man, but don’t get too tough with  me, you old goat!"
  "What is behind this?"
  This got no answer.
  "Der jig is up, ja", stated the elderly man.  "You had best talk."
  "You want the dirt, sawbones?"
  "Der truth, ja."
  The man on the bed grinned. "I wanted to get my name  in the newspapers."
  "Ach!"
  "Sure. All my life, nobody had ever noticed me. So I  got an idea, see. I had some money saved up."
  "Vot has der money saved got to do mit it?"
  "Shut up and you’ll see. I used the money to buy one  of them high−powered magic lanterns that they use to
  throw pictures on  clouds for advertising. I took a slide of a view of lower Manhattan  Island, sandpapered off
  some of the paint on it so it would look  spooky, and threw it on a cloud.
  "I pointed the machine through a porthole in the  hull of the ship, see. Nobody got wise. They saw this thing
  on the  clouds. That was the mysterious city them fool sailors thought they  saw."
  "Ja! 
  Amazing!" 
  "Sure it was, you old nanny. Then I disappeared into  the hold, made them iron things, and one night went on
  deck, waited  until I heard a sailor coming, then slid down the rope and got wet,  then climbed back and they
  all thought I was just coming aboard. Nobody  would see through that, eh?"
  "Nein. 
  Nobody vould." 
  "I told a string of lies about a visit to a city  called Ost."
  "Ja, 
  but suppose somebody questioned your ability to swim mit dot iron  you were carrying?" 
  "That’s why I left the one behind. I could swim with  one, all right."
  "Maybe you could," the visitor said grimly, "but Ben  Brasken could not swim."
  "Huh?"
   OST
  Chapter V. THE PHANTOM CELESTIAL
  25
  
  "You are not Ben Brasken."
  Chapter VI. THE NEW BEN BRASKEN
  THE man on the bed really bore only a vague facial  resemblance to Ben Brasken. He was almost a foot taller
  and nearly a  hundred pounds heavier.
  His hand came out from under the covers. It held a  gun.
  "Hold everything!" he gritted.
  The bearded old gentleman sat very quiet.
  "I ain’t Ben Brasken, all right!" snarled the man  with the gun. "I’m a pal of Ben’s. Two or three of Ben’s pals
  got tired  of them keepin’ ‘im in here and makin’ out he was a nut, so we took ‘im  out. I stayed here so that
  Ben would have time to get clear. Anybody  lookin’ in would take it for granted that I was Ben."
  "And dot story about der magic lantern?" the elderly  visitor asked thoughtfully.
  "That was straight. It was just a stunt of Ben’s.  Poor little feller. He didn’t know they would put him in the
  birdhouse."
  The man untangled himself from the bed covers and  stood erect. He was very muscular, dark, and had a not
  unhandsome, if  rather hard, face.
  "Two−bit!" he called softly.
  "Allee same on deck, Mis’ Lupp," said a perfectly  round and big Oriental, hauling himself in through the
  window, outside  which he must have been crouching.
  "You rice−eating ape!" said dark, athletic Lupp.  "You called out my name!"
  "You do same to me," reminded the big Celestial.
  Lupp looked angry, but motioned. "Tie up whiskers  here, and we’ll blow. Our gag didn’t go off so good."
  The Oriental advanced, picked off a bedsheet, rolled  it and made a rope. He evidently did not go to the
  movies, or he would  have made the mistake of tearing the sheet to make it into ropes. A  sheet that is torn is
  much more easily parted.
  He came close to the bearded old gentleman, stopped,  bent forward, and his slant eyes popped in
  astonishment.
  "This lowly one has many times wondered how Little  Led Liding Hood felt when she find wolf in little
  sheep’s clothing," he  said.
  "What’s wrong, you yellow peril?" Lupp growled.  "You’ve got the story cockeyed, anyhow. Red Riding
  Hood’s grandma was  the one the wolf pre�"
   OST
  Chapter VI. THE NEW BEN BRASKEN
  26
  
  "This fella all same on Benny Boston,"  interjected Two−bit.
  "What?"
  "He fella me tell ‘bout. Only now be all same  whiskel false!"
  Lupp sprang forward with an oath, gritted, "I’ll see  how false the whiskers are!" and grabbed the whiskers
  and yanked.
  Results were not quite as expected. The whiskers  came off readily enough. But Lupp cried out, dropped them
  with wild  haste, and ogled his palm.
  A small puncture in his palm oozed a drop of crimson.
  "There’s a needle or something in them whiskers!" he  snarled. "It stuck me! It felt like a spring or something
  made it drive  into my hand!"
  "That velly stlange," said Two−bit wonderingly.
  "Yeah�yeah�"
  Lupp drew in a full breath, shut his eyes and fell  heavily on his face.
  TWO−BIT, the fat Oriental, had nothing wrong with  what is technically called reactions. He whirled, and
  seemed to be in  the air before he was halfway around.
  His gigantic leap took him to the window. He sailed  through it, headfirst.
  The big man who had pretended to be a foreign  psychiatrist was only a jump behind. He reached the window,
  looked out.  He ducked back with great haste.
  Lightning struck three times outside the window, if  noise was any indication. Two−bit’s gun was evidently of
  enormous  caliber. Bullets gouged plaster off the ceiling. A patient upstairs  emitted an unearthly yell, which
  was promptly echoed by howls and  screams all over the hospital. Two demented persons began to laugh like
  hyenas.
  The big man inside the hospital room seized the  mirror which lay on a table, and used it to examine the
  vicinity  outside the window.
  But Two−bit was gone by now.
  Whipping back to Lupp, the big man picked the  unconscious fellow up, went to the window, dropped
  through, and glided  into the handiest patch of darkness.
  Over to the right, there was a series of metallic  squeaking sounds, then half a dozen sharp twangs. Some one
  was cutting  the wire fence around the rear of the hospital, using a stout cutter,  no doubt.
  The big man made for the sounds.
   OST
  Chapter VI. THE NEW BEN BRASKEN
  27
  
  Long before he reached them, he heard a low gasp, a  squawky Oriental curse, and a blow that was louder than
  either gasp or  curse.
  The big man quickened his pace. He heard an  automobile engine start, race, and connect with rear wheels
  with a  mighty gear clash. The car left. Its engine had a carbon knock which  did not seem to slow it up much.
  There was a hole in the high wire fence. The big man  boosted the senseless Lupp through�Lupp was still
  breathing�and  followed. It was very dark. He took five paces and his toe touched  something that yielded.
  The flashlight he had used on the Benny Boston,  the one which emitted a white splinter, came into use.
  The man on the ground was much taller than  necessary, and thinner than it seemed any individual could be
  and still  stay out of a coffin. It was not necessary to pick up his wrist to find  a pulse. The regular puffing of
  the artery in his wrist was visible.
  The man on the ground was the eminent archaeologist,  geologist and Doc Savage aid, William Harper
  Littlejohn.
  The big man carried both Johnny and Lupp and left  the vicinity.
  After a while, Johnny revived enough to say, "I’ll  be superamalgamated!"
  Chapter VII. THE BRONZE MAN
  JOHNNY let the exclamation, his favorite and the one  he used on all possible occasions, suffice until he had
  gotten his head  cleared. Then he did some thinking. The cogitation led him to making a  mistake, as it
  sometimes does.
  He hauled off and tried to knock the big man  carrying him senseless. He did not quite succeed. But he did
  cause the  big fellow to fall down with his double burden.
  "Johnny!" said the big man reproachfully.
  "Doc Savage!" Johnny exploded.
  "Yes," said the remarkable individual who had been  first a pigeon−eyed sailor, then an eminent psychiatrist
  from Vienna  and Berlin.
  "An indefeasible eventuation�I mean, I didn’t know  it was you!" Johnny gulped.
  Johnny was addicted to his amazing words on most  occasions, but when he was alone with Doc Savage, he
  did not use them.
  For Johnny, it was a marked token of respect to the  bronze man, or possibly he was afraid of misusing some
  of his  tongue−twisters, which it was to be suspected he did occasionally,  although no one had ever caught
  him.
  "What happened?" Doc Savage queried.
   OST
  Chapter VII. THE BRONZE MAN
  28
  
  "Well," Johnny said dizzily, "you disguised yourself  as a sailor this afternoon and entered the hospital to talk
  to Ben  Brasken. You left Long Tom, Renny and myself posted around the hospital  grounds to watch for
  anything suspicious. Then�"
  "With a reference to a moment ago," Doc put in.  "What occurred?"
  "I heard somebody cutting the wires of that fence,  ran to the spot, and got the most beautiful knock on the
  head I ever  received," Johnny said.
  "You feel all right?"
  "Not all right. Not by a long shot. But I think I’ll  live."
  "Can you walk?"
  "I might run if I had to," Johnny admitted.
  They walked quickly through the gloomy streets, Doc  Savage carrying Lupp.
  Johnny had a flashlight on his person. He turned it  on Lupp.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" he exclaimed. "His  con−naturalness of physiognomy�I mean, he is the guy
  Monk and Ham  described as being in the car with the Oriental and Kit Merrimore in  New York!"
  "Yes," Doc Savage agreed. "And the Oriental was the  same one who just knocked you out."
  "Ouch!" Johnny felt the back of his head where he  had been struck. "What does it all mean?"
  "Ben Brasken is evidently the key," Doc Savage said.  "They carried him off to get him in a spot where he
  would not be  questioned, is my guess."
  "You think Ben Brasken could tell us what all the  shooting is about?"
  "An examination of him might be of assistance, would  be a more accurate way of putting it."
  "Well, we should not have much trouble finding him,"  said Johnny.
  The gaunt geologist had been a little flippant for a  few moments, which was vastly unlike his usual self. It
  must have been  some after effect of the blow, or perhaps his real nature had loosened  up for a moment and
  asserted itself. At any rate, he was getting his  dignity back now.
  "What do you mean ‘no trouble finding Ben Brasken’?"  Doc queried.
  "Long Tom and Renny were left at the hospital with  myself," Johnny said.
  "Of course."
  "Well, we saw them carry off Ben Brasken. Long Tom  and Renny followed them. They should find where
  Brasken was taken."
   OST
  Chapter VII. THE BRONZE MAN
  29
  
  DOC and Johnny reached a car. This was a rented  machine which Doc Savage had secured for their use. The
  bronze man  drove, heading for his hotel.
  Johnny seemed to have a headache by now. He held his  rather large cranium and muttered. "It would seem
  that our elaborate  precautions to let no one know we were coming to San Francisco, as well  as your entering
  the hospital in disguise, were wasted."
  Doc reminded, "The disguise was largely to avoid  public attention and newspaper notice. Too much publicity
  for us would  not only point out to any possible enemies what we were doing, but it  would draw down a
  swarm of well−meaning amateur detectives which would  hamper us."
  "Circumstantiality indistinguishable�er�to say  nothing of the flood of imaginary and worthless clues which
  would  descend upon us," Johnny said.
  The fake Ben Brasken�Lupp, if that was his  name�stirred feebly.
  "He seems to be drugged," Johnny remarked. "How did  it happen?"
  By the time Doc Savage had explained the needle in  the beard, and touched briefly on the fundamental urge
  which seems to  dwell within every human being to grab the whiskers of a foe,  immediately he gets in a fight
  with one, they had reached the hotel.
  "Women apparently are driven irresistibly to seize  hair when in a conflict," Doc expounded. "A beard seems
  to offer the  same temptation to a man."
  They drove into an alley at the rear of the hotel.  From this, access could be had to the freight elevator without
  disturbing the hotel guests. The elevator operator looked deaf, dumb  and blind as he took them up.
  Johnny spoke when they were carrying Lupp down the  corridor to Doc’s room.
  "Long Tom and Johnny were going to report to the  hotel here when they found where Ben Brasken was
  taken," he said. "But  I wonder if it was the best idea to let them take Ben Brasken away?"
  "By trailing these men who seized Ben Brasken, we  may be able to find their headquarters, and by
  eavesdropping or  planting hidden microphones, learn what is back of this excitement,"  Doc explained.
  Johnny nodded. "I hope Long Tom or Johnny has  reported. If they have, it will be attached to that
  photographic  recording device we left in the room, hooked to the telephone."
  They reached their room.
  Doc and Johnny entered with their captive.
  Pale, undersized Long Tom and big−fisted Renny stood  in the room. Long Tom looked gloomy. Renny
  looked moderately cheerful,  which was bad, considering that the better things went, the more gloom  he would
  register.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" Johnny exploded. "Why  aren’t you two trailing the gang who got Ben Brasken?"
  Long Tom took in a long draft of air.
   OST
  Chapter VII. THE BRONZE MAN
  30
  
  "They gave us the slip," he imparted.
  DOC SAVAGE placed Lupp in a chair, got handcuffs out  of a metal box which held innumerable other
  gadgets, and handcuffed him  to the chair. Then he administered a chemical to the man with a  hypodermic
  needle.
  "A stimulant," the bronze man explained. "It will  cause him to revive in a few minutes."
  Johnny frowned grimly at Lupp. "If we fail to make  him talk, it looks as if we were going to be out on a limb
  without any  information."
  This caused big−fisted Renny to emit a rumble of  self−disgust.
  "We got a bad break trailing those fellows," he  said. "They crossed a street, and an instant later, a string of
  fire  trucks came down the street, and we couldn’t possibly cut through."
  Doc Savage said, "We had better get set before Lupp  regains consciousness. Johnny, you are something of
  psychologist, so  your job will be to sit out here and watch Lupp while we try our trick."
  "What trick?"
  Doc glanced at Lupp, who was showing signs of  awakening.
  "No time to explain," the bronze man decided. "Just  watch him, Johnny."
  Johnny took a seat in a secluded corner, picked up a  newspaper and arranged it so he could pretend to read it,
  but really  watch Lupp.
  Doc, Long Tom and Renny entered the adjacent room.  They had, as a matter of fact, taken the entire floor of
  the hotel.  They closed the door.
  Johnny continued to pretend to read the newspaper,  and watched Lupp. In a few moments, Lupp opened his
  eyes and looked  around. Johnny made a show of not noticing.
  From the next room came what sounded like Ben  Brasken’s rather whining voice.
  "I tell yuh, I’m scared to talk!" he said.
  Doc Savage’s trained, deep tone said, "What would  you say if that Oriental, Two−bit, had told us the whole
  story?"
  At this, Johnny saw Lupp give a distinct start. 
  Johnny kept his bony face expressionless. Doc Savage  was in the other room, imitating Ben Brasken’s voice,
  and making  conversation of a nature intended to soften Lupp up for the questioning.
  Ben Brasken’s faked voice said, "Two−bit didn’t lay  nothin’ onto me!"
   OST
  Chapter VII. THE BRONZE MAN
  31
  
  "No," Doc Savage said quietly, "but Two−bit is going  to be the cause of things becoming tough for Lupp, as
  well as the girl,  Kit Merrimore."
  "Two−bit laid it onto them?"
  "Yes. Possibly he was passing the buck, though." 
  Lupp’s face was twisted with astonishment and  uneasiness. He was deceived.
  The voices went on:
  Ben Brasken: "What’s Lupp supposed to have done?"
  Doc: "Plenty. What would you say if you were told  Two−bit claimed Lupp shot a hospital attendant during
  the excitement.  That sounds like murder, eh?"
  Ben Brasken: "Whew! Then they’ll hang Lupp!"
  Doc: "Possibly."
  Brasken: "Maybe they can’t prove it."
  Doc: "If Two−bit testified that Lupp murdered the  man, they would."
  Brasken: "Gimme a minute to think, and I’ll tell you  all I can."
  Doc: "Very well. In the meantime, I’ll see what Lupp  has to say, if he is awake."
  DOC appeared in the door, glanced at Lupp, seemed  surprised to find him conscious.
  "Ready to talk?" Doc asked.
  "Go to the devil!" Lupp snarled.
  Doc said wearily, "Johnny, you might as well call  the police."
  Johnny strode to the telephone.
  "Wait a minute!" Lupp exploded. "What’re you tryin’  to pull on me here?"
  Doc Savage said quietly, "It is very simple.  Listen." 
  The bronze man went back to the connecting door,  opened it and leaned through.
  "Two−bit," he said, "are you still sure Lupp  murdered that hospital attendant when he was trying to escape?"
  "Me fella velly celtain," replied a voice that would  hardly be taken for any but Two−bit’s.
  From where he sat, Lupp could not see the bronze man  imitate the voice.
   OST
  Chapter VII. THE BRONZE MAN
  32
  
  "Damn!" Lupp groaned. "Look here! How about us  making a deal?"
  "What kind?" Doc queried, turning.
  "You turn me loose," Lupp countered, "and I’ll let  you in on the biggest thing you ever�"
  At least four bullets came crashing through the door.
  Chapter VIII. MURDER VICTIM
  THE unexpected, even at its mildest, is startling. A  man who almost steps on a mouse may jump only a little
  less mildly than  if he had stepped on a jungle lion.
  Johnny leaped as high as his chair. When he came  down, he had in one hand a weapon which resembled an
  oversized  automatic pistol, but which was really a supermachine pistol of Doc’s  development. A Western bad
  man of the ‘80s could not have drawn his  shooting iron quicker.
  Lupp yelled, "I’m in the center of the room, guys!  Be careful!"
  Johnny leaped to the door into the inner room,  waited there, his machine pistol ready. He seemed surprised
  when Doc  Savage shoved him on into the room with Long Tom and Renny and slammed  the door.
  Lupp was now shut off from them in the next room.  And the guns were crashing in the corridor. Blasting the
  lock out, no  doubt.
  Johnny exploded, "But, Doc! When they come through  the door, with this pistol and mercy bullets, I can�"
  "You might," Doc Savage said quietly. "But that  would not find Ben Brasken."
  "Oh," Johnny said, understanding.
  "Keep them from getting in here," Doc warned.
  Renny and Long Tom had likewise produced machine  pistols.
  "Fat chance!" Renny rumbled.
  The shooting in the other room abruptly ceased. The  men in the hallway kicked the door in.
  The round Oriental, Two−bit, led the raiders. His  associates were tough−looking fellows.
  THEY ran to Lupp. Since he was handcuffed to the  chair, and the chair was stout, they could not get him
  loose. They  picked him up chair and all.
  "Get Ben Brasken!" Lupp yelled. "He’s in the next  room!"
   OST
  Chapter VIII. MURDER VICTIM
  33
  
  "That Doc Savage fella tell you stoly," explained  Two−bit.
  "What?"
  "We still got Ben Brasken."
  Lupp understood then that he had been tricked. He  was too shocked to get mad.
  "Beat it!" he ordered.
  Two−bit and the others showed willingness to do  that. They carried Lupp and the chair into the hall, popped
  into the  elevator. The elevator operator sat in one corner of the cage, mouth  open, jaw skinned, breathing.
  The cage went down.
  "How’d you find me?" Lupp wanted to know. 
  "Velly simple." Two−bit shook his shoulders. "Me  lait till men take you away. I follow."
  "Oh." Lupp grimaced. "Damn Savage anyhow. But he  still don’t know what it’s all about yet."
  Two−bit looked as calm as ever. "We listen," he  sing−songed. "We note stlange words coming from you."
  Lupp swore and looked fierce. "Don’t get the wrong  idea, pigtail! I was getting ready to save my neck, maybe
  set a trap  for Savage. I thought he had you and Ben Brasken, and that you talked."
  After that there was silence.
  The cage reached the lobby. Several persons were  staring curiously, and there was a crowd of small
  proportions out in  the street. The shots upstairs, of course, had been heard.
  The raiders calmly shot part of the bulbs out of the  chandeliers, shot some of the glass out of the front
  windows, and the  spectators all used good judgment: They dived into the handiest shelter.
  Two−bit and the others carried Lupp to two cars  parked on the street. They divided their number between the
  machines,  and the cars got going.
  A police siren was howling in the distance. 
  Big−fisted Renny, leaning out of a hotel window,  heard the siren. From the window, he could not see the
  street, but he  could hear the cars going away.
  On the inner side of the window sill was a deep  nick. The tine of a grappling hook had made it. To the end of
  the  grapple was attached a long, thin very stout silk line. Doc Savage had  gone down this.
  Renny squinted into the darkness. He could not see  Doc. For that matter, the bronze man had been gone for
  some moments.
  Renny snorted and went out to make explanations to  the police, who had by now arrived. This would not be
  too difficult.  Doc Savage and his men held a special commission from the California  governor designating
  them as special investigators with police  authority, which took in a lot of territory.
   OST
  Chapter VIII. MURDER VICTIM
  34
  
  Long Tom, the electrical wizard, opened a metal  case�Doc Savage’s equipment was transported in metal
  containers which  looked very much alike except for painted numbers�and brought out a  short−wave radio
  transmitting and receiving apparatus. The antenna  which this used was hardly larger than a walking stick, and
  telescoped.  He switched it on, adjusted the dials, and left it on.
  Soft crackles of static and nothing else came from  the loud−speaker for almost half an hour.
  "Long Tom," Doc Savage’s, voice said from the  speaker.
  "Coast Avenue and Tuna Street," the bronze man said,  when Long Tom answered. "Better hurry."
  COAST AVENUE meant water−front dives. Tuna Street  was wholesale fish. There was plenty of darkness.
  The wad of clouds  above had started leaking fine rain.
  Johnny stood in a dark alley and jumped a foot at  least when Doc Savage spoke beside him.
  "The pier to which the Benny Boston is tied  is at the end of this street," Doc Savage said. "The trail led to a
  waterfront rooming house near by. The proprietor of the rooming house  advised me, when he was questioned,
  that a man answering the  description of Ben Brasken had taken a room, along with some other men."
  "We’re gettin’ close to the end of the trail," Renny  rumbled softly.
  "The rooming house is a labyrinth of a place," Doc  continued. "There are at least three entrances and exits.
  That means  each of you will have one to guard, while I go up and flush the game."
  "Let’s go," Long Tom said grimly.
  One entrance to the rooming establishment�by  stretching a little it might have been called a hotel�was
  through a  gloomy drinking place which had sawdust and wooden sand box garboons on  the floor. Another
  entrance was a blowsy door with a sign, "Beds 15c,  25c, 50c." The third gave into an alley and was probably
  as much  used as any of the others. Doc stationed his men.
  The bartender in the drinking place also ran the  rooms, collecting for them at least. When Doc entered, he
  sidled over  and spoke.
  "Some of them fellers you was askin’ about just  left," he said.
  Doc described Ben Brasken quickly.
  "Was that one with them?" he asked.
  "Nope. Not unless he went out one of the other  doors. They do sometimes, you know. Don’t make no
  difference to me.  Everybody pays in advance here."
  The proprietor seemed all right. He could not have  any Chesterfield manners and run a place like this.
  Doc mounted the stairs quickly. Ben Brasken was  ensconced in a room which he had secured all for himsell
  by paying for  the three beds it contained. Or Ben Brasken’s companions had paid for  the room, rather.
   OST
  Chapter VIII. MURDER VICTIM
  35
  
  Doc gained the door, listened outside it. He  remained there for a long time. There was no sound of anything
  living  within the room. Doc turned the knob. The door was unlocked. The bronze  man went in.
  Ben Brasken was there.
  Doc backed out of the room and called his men. They  gathered around the bronze man and looked at Ben
  Brasken. The looks  they directed at Ben Brasken were short, and afterward they looked  everywhere but at
  Ben Brasken.
  "This makes it tough," Renny rumbled grimly, "unless  Monk and Ham turned up something in New York."
  Johnny drew a sheet over Ben Brasken to shut off the  sight. For Ben Brasken’s head had been practically cut
  off.
  Chapter IX. THE STOLEN AIRSHIP
  MONK and Ham, who had been left behind in New York  City to do various things, were quarreling. This
  would have surprised  no one who knew them. Rather, it would have been a surprise if they had  not been
  squabbling.
  "You’ll let me examine that nickel," Ham was saying,  "or I’ll separate you from your epidermis!"
  "That nickel," Monk grumbled, "was a perfectly  ordinary nickel!"
  This was a falsehood. The nickel had two heads. Monk  had just used it to flimflam Ham into going out to get
  their morning  ration of coffee and doughnuts.
  "You mistake of nature!" Ham gritted. "We’re going  to match over again!"
  "Any more argument out of you," Monk stated, "and  I’ll pop you so hard your spirit will have a heck of a
  time locating  your body again!"
  They were in Doc Savage’s waterfront hangar, a large  brick building on the Hudson River which
  masqueraded as a warehouse. A  sign on the front said, "Hidalgo Trading Company." The building was
  actually a giant, almost bombproof, surrounded by burglar alarms, and  held a number of planes, ranging from
  small single−seater true−gyros to  huge transport ships. Moreover, there was a small and unusual  submarine,
  some surface boats, including a diminutive but fast yacht.
  The most interesting object, however, was probably  the small demountable dirigible which Doc Savage had
  lately acquired,  an all−metal craft which was not large, but which was the only one of  its kind inexistence.
  It had only two motors, and one small cabin,  enclosed within the gas bag. It had a high speed, and was small
  enough  that it could be used to land men in a jungle, for instance, simply by  tossing out a grappling hook
  which would snag a treetop. Moreover, it  was stout enough that it could stand a good deal of banging around
  without damage.
  Monk and Ham were watching this dirigible in  particular. Kit Merrimore had wanted to buy it.
   OST
  Chapter IX. THE STOLEN AIRSHIP
  36
  
  Monk picked up an envelope, took some papers out,  and shuffled through them elaborately.
  "I wonder if we’d better telegraph this stuff to  Doc?" he pondered aloud. "He wanted information, whatever
  we could pick  up, about a man named Martin Space."
  Ham glared at Monk, tapping a toe indignantly. 
  "Are you gonna get that coffee and sinkers, you  fashion plate shyster?" Monk demanded.
  "Let me see that nickel!" Ham commanded. 
  "You’ll see stars if you don’t get going," Monk  said. 
  A shrill buzzer whined out. It was connected with a  button at the door.
  Monk went to a device of mirrors by which they could  view the vicinity of the door.
  "Blazes!" he squeaked. "It’s that girl, Kit  Merrimore!"
  Ham gasped, "She’s been hurt!"
  THE girl was draped against the door, hanging to the  huge handle. She was pale. Her garments were torn. Her
  right sleeve  from the shoulder down was soaked with red.
  Monk gasped, "She may be dying!" and started for the  door.
  "Wait a minute, nickelwits!" Ham snapped.
  "Huh?"
  "This may be a trick. The hangar here is literally a  fortress, and they may know it."
  "Yeah," Monk paused. "I’ll take a good look around."
  He used a pair of binoculars on the wide, almost  deserted water−front street. This was Sunday, and there was
  not much  traffic.
  "Nobody in sight," Monk decided.
  "Be careful," Ham warned.
  "Sure."
  Monk was careful. He got a boat hook, opened the  door a bare crack. The girl was now a limp heap on the
  grimy pavement  outside.
  Monk hooked the boat hook in the belt of her sport  frock, and gingerly hauled her inside without exposing
  himself.
   OST
  Chapter IX. THE STOLEN AIRSHIP
  37
  
  Ham stood back, in the meantime, his supermachine  pistol held ready.
  "Just like you to shoot a woman!" Monk sneered at  him.
  "These wouldn’t damage her," Ham snapped. "They’re  mercy bullets. Only make her unconscious."
  "She’s that now," Monk told him.
  Having closed the door and fastened it, the homely  chemist growled, "We’d better rush her to a hospital," and
  bent over  the young woman."
  With his pocketknife, Monk opened the young woman’s  sleeve from wrist to shoulder.
  He stared. His mouth fell open.
  "Huh!" he exploded. "She’s not hurt!"
  A smacking sound caused him to glance around.
  Ham had fallen face down.
  Monk made a frantic effort to stand up, but instead,  pitched down across Ham.
  MONK, when he opened his eyes, and found himself  looking at Ham, who seemed to be awake, made a
  disgusted face.
  "Next time," Monk croaked gloomily, "I’ll let you  shoot her, and won’t ask whether you’ve got mercy bullets
  or not."
  "Next time," Ham snarled, "I’ll have sense enough to  pay no attention to you, you stumblebum, when I
  suspect there may be  danger!"
  They stopped abusing each other, and looked around.  One thing struck them with the effects of a cold bath.
  "The dirigible!" Monk howled.
  "Gone!"
  Their shouts were hardly necessary. There was not  the slightest doubt but that the dirigible was gone. It must
  had been  taken out through the big rolling doors at the river end of the hangar,  because one of the doors had
  been improperly closed.
  Four men were loitering about the hangar. Monk and  Ham had never seen any of the four previously, but they
  had seen crooks  before.
  The girl, Kit Merrimore, walked up to Monk and Ham,  who had by now realized they were tied hand and foot
  with stout wire.
  "Feel sick?" she asked.
   OST
  Chapter IX. THE STOLEN AIRSHIP
  38
  
  "Yeah," Monk said. "Of embarrassment."
  "That gas generally makes them sick at their  stomachs," the girl said. "A nice old man I know who works for
  a  chemical concern in New Jersey made it up for me. He said it would  knock an elephant out almost
  instantly."
  "Skip it," Monk requested.
  "Oh, I like to brag," the young woman smiled. "I had  the stuff in a bottle in my sport suit pocket, and I
  managed to pull  the cork while you were ripping my sleeve to examine the wound that  wasn’t there. You
  certainly ruined my frock, incidentally."
  Monk looked at her. In spite of himself, he grinned.
  "How long we been out?" Monk asked.
  "About six hours," the girl said.
  Monk looked stunned. It hadn’t seemed like more than  a few minutes.
  "We borrowed your dirigible," said the young woman.
  They knew that already.
  THE young woman now snapped her fingers, called out  softly, and there was a stir over to the left. Two
  animals approached.  Habeas Corpus, Monk’s pet pig, which had thin, long legs and ears built  for flying. And
  Ham’s what−is−it, Chemistry.
  Both animals frolicked around the young woman’s trim  ankles, a behavior which moved Monk and Ham to
  stare with unbelieving  astonishment. Each man had spent innumerable hours training his pet,  and a major
  item had been lessons in not to take up with strangers.  Never before had it happened. Monk and Ham were
  mutually disgusted.
  "Ham," Monk said, "for years, you’ve been wanting to  have that hog for breakfast. You can have him. What’s
  more, I’ll help  you eat him."
  "Monk," Ham said as solemnly, "you can put  Chemistry’s hide over your fireplace, like you’ve been wanting
  to do."
  The young woman smiled sweetly at them.
  "In that case," she murmured, "I’ll just take these  two animals with me. I think they’re real cute."
  Monk and Ham groaned together.
  One of the men came forward and growled. "We’d  better blow, miss. No point in sticking around here any
  longer."
   OST
  Chapter IX. THE STOLEN AIRSHIP
  39
  
  He pounced upon Monk and Ham and proceeded to make  each one swallow a pill. The pills were about the
  size of Mexican  beans, and each one was as bitter as anything either man had ever  tasted.
  Monk and Ham lay there grimacing, spitting out the  bitter taste, and wondered what would happen. They
  soon found out.  Things began to go away in a grayish haze.
  The last thing they heard was the girl, Kit  Merrimore, thanking them in sugary tones for Habeas Corpus and
  Chemistry.
  Chapter X. SEA TRAIL
  TWENTY hours later, Monk and Ham were back on their  usual basis. Mutual sorrow over the shortcomings
  of their pets had  caused them to be halfway civil to each other for a while, but that had  not lasted very long.
  "That goriboon of yours," Monk growled, coining a  word, "was responsible for my Habeas taking up with
  that female  hell−cat!"
  "A soft touch for anything in skirts, you and your  hog," Ham sneered.
  "I think," Monk remarked, "that I’ll see how you  bounce."
  They glared at each other. Monk was flying their  plane with one hand, and had the other made into a fist,
  ready for  knocking purposes.
  The plane was over Nevada, just north of Reno, more  exactly and was high. It would have been bitingly cold
  in the cabin,  but they had the port closed and the heaters on. They were flying  toward San Francisco.
  Both Monk and Ham were a bit pale. The pills had not  been poison, as they had both thought for a few
  horrible moments, but  had merely rendered them generally useless for several hours. In truth,  neither felt too
  spry yet, and it was reflected in the temper of their  quarreling, which lacked its usual violence.
  The radio loud−speaker�the silent cabin permitted  use of the speaker instead of headsets�broke vociferously
  upon their  diversion.
  "KPOX to WDOC," the speaker said.
  KPOX was the Denver police radio station, and WDOC  was the plane. 
  "Yeah?" Monk said.
  "The network of Western police stations have managed  to gather only one more report of your dirigible," the
  police operator  explained. "A filling station attendant on Highway 40 at a place called  Vernal in Utah
  reported the coyotes’ howling woke him up last night and  he came out and saw a dirigible heading west.
  From what he said, I  guessed it had come down to get its bearings, then went up in the,  the�whatcha call it?"
  "Stratosphere," Monk supplied.
  "Uh−huh. Plenty high. Anyway, there’s no more  reports."
   OST
  Chapter X. SEA TRAIL
  40
  
  "Thanks a lot."
  Monk clicked off the mike and looked at Ham.
  Ham said, "The dirigible was sighted in  Pennsylvania, then at a place called Millard, in Missouri. And now
  this. They headed west. But a fat chance we have of finding them."
  Monk nodded gloomily.
  BY the time they met Doc Savage in San Francisco,  Monk and Ham were not on speaking terms. Each
  looked slightly bruised,  and their clothing had a few tears. It was to be suspected they had  come to blows. It
  was a strange feud they carried on, considering that  each would lay down his life for the other.
  Doc was not in a cheerful frame of mind.
  It was impossible to tell this by looking at the  bronze man. He never showed emotion. But Renny, Long Tom
  and Johnny  looked as if they were sitting around in a dead friend’s parlor.
  Monk, uneasy because he and Ham had let the  dirigible be stolen from them, tried to cover it up by a big grin.
  "You guys look as if you had been seeing ghosts," he  said.
  "We have," Renny said.
  "Huh?" Monk grunted, startled by the soberness with  which Renny had spoken.
  "We’re up against something we can’t understand,"  Renny rumbled quietly.
  "You mean you’ve found no trace of that Lupp,  Two−bit and the girl, Kit Merrimore?" Monk asked.
  "No," Renny said, "They have disappeared, and  although we’ve had the police and private detective agencies
  looking  for them, and doing all we could ourselves, we have had no luck. Poor  Ben Brasken was buried this
  morning. They murdered him to keep him from  talking."
  Renny took in a deep sigh. Long Tom swallowed.  Johnny fiddled absentmindedly with his monocle. There
  was something  strange about all their attitudes.
  "Look here!" Monk said suddenly. "What’s eating you  birds?"
  Renny looked at Doc. "You tell him, Doc." 
  The bronze man seemed to consider for a time. 
  "You know about the city of Ost which Ben Brasken  claimed he visited, and which the sailors on the Benny
  Boston  are sure they saw?" Doc asked.
  "Sure," Monk grunted. "What about it? Obviously,  there ain’t no such city."
  "Let us have a little demonstration," Doc said. 
   OST
  Chapter X. SEA TRAIL
  41
  
  The bronze man went to the bureau in the hotel room,  picked up the strange flatiron−shaped piece of metal
  which he had found  in the cubby in the bow of the Benny Boston, and handed it to  Monk.
  "Blazes!" Monk exploded. "What am I supposed to do  with this?"
  "Just hold it," Doc replied.
  "Say, what kind of a gag is this?"
  Big−fisted Renny put in, "Try to do something that  may, for you, be kinda hard, Monk. Just keep your mouth
  shut and stand  there for a few minutes."
  Monk, looking skeptical and half convinced that some  kind of trick was in the making, held the piece of iron
  in his hands.  It was the first time he had seen it, so he turned it slowly, examining  it.
  But as Monk continued to hold the iron block, a  change came over his features. He blinked his eyes three or
  four times.  He looked down at the block.
  An absolute and stark amazement came over Monk’s  face.
  "For the love of Mike!" he gasped.
  He dropped the block and sprang away from it.
  HAM let out one cracking guffaw, then sobered.
  "What’s the matter, you missing link?" he demanded.
  Monk said nothing. That was unusual for Monk.
  Doc Savage said quietly, "Ham, you might find it  interesting to try what Monk just tried."
  Ham looked confused, and gulped, "You�think so?"  rather inanely.
  When no one spoke, Ham moved over and gingerly  picked up the block. Where he had been sarcastic and
  skeptical a moment  ago, he was now doubtful and confused.
  He held the block. Nothing appeared to happen, and  this caused a sardonic grin to creep on his lips. Then the
  grin  straightened out slowly and vanished, then his lips parted slightly,  and incredulity dilated his eyes.
  He put the block down as if it were hot.
  "Wise guy," Monk said. "Now what do you say?"
  "Describe your sensation as you held that block,  Ham," Doc Savage suggested.
  Instead of doing so, Ham suddenly yelled, "What  caused that?"
  "Suppose you first describe what you felt," Doc  persisted.
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  Chapter X. SEA TRAIL
  42
  
  Ham whipped out a handkerchief and blotted his  forehead.
  "It was a feeling, all right," he said  slowly. "And that is what floors me. As I stood there with that iron  block
  in my hands, I naturally thought about what we know of its  history. And suddenly I had the feeling that Ost
  was real, and  furthermore, I got a sensation of another sort�kind of�"
  "As if a guy were pointing a gun at you." Monk  supplied.
  "Yes." Ham agreed. "Only not a feeling of any  definite weapon menacing me. Just a feeling of
  something�something  horrible�about to happen."
  MONK and Ham stood there registering emotions of two  fellows who had just met up with something they
  could not comprehend.
  Monk got his startled thoughts back on solid ground.  He snorted loudly to show that he was not buffaloed.
  "I’m gonna put that iron block under an X ray," he  said.
  "We already did that," Doc Savage told him. "The  block is solid iron."
  Monk, nonplused for a moment, thought of something  else.
  "Then I’ll try some chemical tests on it," he  declared.
  Doc Savage said, "We have given the iron block a  chemical analysis. It is an ordinary iron block. No
  chemicals, no other  elements than those which go into ordinary iron."
  Monk scratched his nubbin of a head, then pulled one  of his ears which bore traces of past fights. "Then how
  do you explain  that feeling?"
  The homely chemist looked at Doc Savage as he asked  for an accounting of the phenomenon. A natural act.
  Monk had an  enormous respect for the bronze man’s abilities.
  Doc would have an idea of what was behind the  mystery if anybody would have one.
  In his heart, Monk did not expect Doc to answer his  question. He was astonished when Doc spoke.
  "On the face of the thing, it is impossible," Doc  Savage said quietly.
  Monk blinked. "You mean its got you buffaloed?"
  "Something like that."
  "Blazes!" Monk muttered. "Blazes!"
  IT was the first time in Monk’s recollection that  the bronze man had admitted being confronted with a
  mystery to which he  could see no possible explanation. One had to know Doc to appreciate  what that really
   OST
  Chapter X. SEA TRAIL
  43
  
  meant.
  "There is a simple explanation somewhere," Doc  Savage added, "because every one knows there is an
  explanation for  everything that happens."
  "Yeah," Monk scratched his head again. "But what are  we gonna−do about this?"
  "The Benny Boston is sailing to−night on her  regular run to Melbourne," Doc Savage replied. "We are going
  to be  aboard her.
  "The Benny Boston is a clue of sorts. You  will recall that the city of Ost was seen from the old steamer on
  more  than one voyage. Therefore, we will sail aboard her, in hopes of seeing  Ost. If we do, we may be able to
  make something out of the phenomenon."
  "Phenomenon?"
  Doc seemed not to hear the question, which made Monk  look very thoughtful, because on past occasions the
  bronze man had  acted in that manner when he had a suspicion which was no more than  that, and which he did
  not wish to discuss.
  They went aboard the Benny Boston secretly,  letting no one know who they were.
  Chapter XI. THE WATCHFUL WAIT
  FIFTY years or so ago, almost every ship that sailed  the seas carried a few passengers. Nowadays, it is
  different. But the  Benny Boston had been built fifty years ago, maybe more, and she  had never been
  materially changed. She had a few cabins for passengers.  They were not much.
  The plumbing was china pitchers and washbowls, and  you threw the water out the porthole after you had
  washed your hands.  The berths were really berths, with a high board in front so you didn’t  roll out. The board
  was necessary, too, because the Benny Boston  in a seaway had a way of rolling like a hog in a mud puddle
  with lice  along its backbone.
  Ham, who liked the élite comforts of ultramodern  civilization, lifted his upper lip up against his finely
  chiseled nose  when he looked over the accommodations.
  "Putrid," he said.
  Doc and his aids had boarded the Benny Boston  in the night, and no one knew their identity, not even Captain
  Smooth,  the skipper.
  There was a bustle on the pier and below decks,  because some late cargo had apparently arrived, and had to
  be loaded  aboard before sailing time.
  "Going to look things over," Doc Savage said, and  left his associates in their connecting cabins.
  The bronze man wore dark clothing, including a long,  dark raincoat, and although he usually wore no hat, he
  wore one now, a  large one with a wide brim which he bent down all around and shadowed  his features.
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  Chapter XI. THE WATCHFUL WAIT
  44
  
  He prowled the decks, not in a rambling fashion, but  in a way that showed he was interested in one thing
  more than anything  else.
  Doc worked forward. The late−arrived freight was  being loaded into the hatch just aft of the bow. That meant
  it was  large freight. Small stuff they would have trundled up a sloping runway  into a door in the side of the
  hull.
  The bronze man found a secluded spot on the forward  rail, in the obscurity beside an elevator, and watched.
  The boxes were  new, large, not all the same size.
  Box after box came aboard. Doc watched closely. The  boxes were new. There was an electric light beside the
  hatch, and when  the boxes swung past it, he could read the name of the consignee:
  AUSTRALIAN FARM MACHINERY CO.
  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
  Doc watched for fully fifteen minutes.
  Then a strange thing happened: There came into  existence a tiny, trilling sound, small, fantastic, almost
  impossible  for any one who overhead it to describe. A tremulous note, it ran up  and down the musical scale,
  not a whistle, and yet not a product of  vocal cords, either.
  This was the small sound which the bronze man made  unconsciously on occasion when he was profoundly
  moved with surprise,  or in moments of mental stress.
  There was a very good reason for it now: He had made  a discovery.
  DOC SAVAGE left his niche beside the elevator,  worked aft, descended a companionway, moved a few
  paces, went down  another companionway, and was soon in the hold where they were stowing  the late−arrived
  freight.
  He did not go near the stevedores, and did not let  them see him. Seemingly in no hurry, he waited. After a
  time, the last  box came in. The stevedores departed finally and silence fell.
  Doc waited. Sometimes, a tool or something was  forgotten, and a man returned for it. When enough time had
  elapsed that  no danger remained of this happening, he went to one of the boxes.
  Their shape and size had interested him.
  Furthermore, the Benny Boston happened to be  the only steamer sailing for Australia immediately. The next
  one would  not depart for ten days, to be exact. 
  The pine boards which composed one box had a flaw in  one spot. A small finger grip was afforded. Doc took
  hold and performed  a rather remarkable feat of strength in tugging off the board.
  He reached into the box and felt around.
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  Chapter XI. THE WATCHFUL WAIT
  45
  
  His small, trilling sound came out briefly. It was  tiny, hardly louder than the drone of some small insect on
  the wing.
  He put a flashlight beam into the box.
  The box held the starboard stern collapsible gas−bag  section of Doc’s little dirigible.
  He replaced the board. Working quickly, he gained  entrance to two of the other boxes. There was no doubt of
  it by the  time he had finished. The thieves had selected the Benny Boston  for shipping the dirigible.
  The dirigible, then, had been seized for a flight in  the South Seas, or some equally distant part. Why the
  aircraft had not  been flown there was a question simply answered.
  It is a long distance across the Pacific Ocean. And  the dirigible, without special engine fuel of which Doc
  Savage probably  had the only supply available, was not capable, for instance, of even  making the San
  Francisco−Honolulu jump safely. With the special fuel,  it could make an infinitely greater hop. But the
  thieves would not have  that.
  Having learned all that was necessary�the name of  shipper and consignee on the boxes were undoubtedly
  fakes�Doc turned  away. He walked toward the companionway.
  The round, iron hardness of a gun against his face  stopped him.
  "You’ve stepped into plenty of trouble!" a harsh  voice rumbled.
  Doc maintained a wise stillness. Ebony was not  blacker than the darkness around him. He wore a watch, but
  it was a  special silent kind, and only a keen ear, placed against the case,  could detect its ticking.
  Yet it seemed audible in the stillness. The one with  the gun was holding his breath. He let it out with a careful
  slowness.
  "Renny," Doc said.
  "Holy cow!" Renny thumped softly.
  "Our airship is in these boxes."
  "Yeah, that’s what I suspected," Renny agreed. "I  sneaked out on deck, watched the loading, and it suddenly
  dawned on me  that the boxes were about the right size. I waited until everything had  quieted down, then came
  below for a look. Nobody saw me.
  "I saw your light poking into the boxes, but  couldn’t make out that it was you. I thought it was one of the
  gang  making sure the shipment was intact."
  "It is all there, apparently," Doc said. "We had  better get back to our stateroom."
  Both made the return without attracting attention.  Most of the crew had probably gone ashore for a final fling.
  Monk and the others opened their mouths when they  heard about the dirigible being aboard.
   OST
  Chapter XI. THE WATCHFUL WAIT
  46
  
  Dapper Ham, who had been putting a fresh coating of  unconsciousness−producing chemical on his sword
  cane tip, had a happy  deduction.
  "If the airship is aboard, the gang is probably on  the boat, too," he said.
  "A possibility," Doc agreed.
  Monk, looking very cheerful, rubbed his hands  together.
  "This is a break for us," he growled. "Maybe I’ll  get a chance to get my hog back."
  Ham snorted. "From the way he took up with that  crowd, my guess is that your hog won’t have anything to
  do with you.  Good riddance."
  "That what−is−it of yours made up to the girl  first!" Monk gritted.
  "That’s a lie, you lump of gristle and hair!" Ham  replied.
  Renny interrupted with a rumble.
  "That quarrel is gonna have to recess," he declared.  "We’re not attracting any attention in here. Another
  squawk out of  either of you, and I’ll take you both!"
  "Any time you’re feeling lucky!" Monk and Ham said  in chorus.
  Chapter XII. ADRIFT
  THREE weeks. Twenty−one days. Five hundred and four  hours. Thirty thousand two hundred and
  forty−minutes. A long time.
  After that much time had passed, Monk and Ham were  getting along fairly well, strangely enough. Or
  possibly it was not so  strange, for Renny was about to eat them both, as he put it earnestly.  Renny had
  appointed himself silencer in the matter of arguments, and  was doing a good job.
  Renny did not often put his foot down so vehemently.  Moreover, when he sat in a corner and cracked walnuts
  in his huge  fists, it was convincing, somehow. They were not English walnuts, but  the black ones, the
  thick−hulled kind.
  Monotony had done about as much damage to their  nerves as it could do. Nothing had happened in the three
  weeks, except  that the ancient hooker Benny Boston had cut more didoes in a  seaway than a washtub in the
  Niagara rapids. They took their exercises  in the stateroom, and had their meals there.
  They told their steward they were seasick. That was  the truth part of the time, as far as Monk, Johnny and
  Long Tom were  concerned. The steward had never seen all of them.
  There was a reason for their keeping under cover.  Long Tom, taking a constitutional the first night out, when
  every one  but the watch on duty had turned in, had come upon an old newspaper in  the bedraggled lounge. In
  it was an article about Doc Savage and  pictures of the bronze man and his five aids.
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  Chapter XII. ADRIFT
  47
  
  That meant Doc and his party would be recognized as  soon as they did any extensive promenading. So they
  had kept in.
  Each day, Doc Savage spent two hours in exercise,  sometimes a bit more. He used a routine, varying a little
  each day,  which he had been engaged in using since childhood.
  Through the porthole, the group had been able to  observe some of the other passengers, although not many.
  The Benny  Boston had had rough going, and only the hardy souls were on deck.
  There were a number of passengers. This was in  itself suspicious, because the Benny Boston was no liner. All
  the passengers, however, were hardly enemies, from their appearance.  There were even women, some of
  them young.
  On the night of the twenty−first day out, Monk  kicked over the traces. It was only a question of time until he
  was  bound to do this, anyway.
  Monk was not by nature a watchful, waiting soul. He  did not entirely approve of Doc Savage’s intention of
  waiting until  they were near Melbourne, Australia, their first stop, before  instituting a sudden searching of the
  ship and unmasking of the  villains, if any.
  Doc was waiting until they were near Melbourne  because it would be a shorter run to port with the prisoners,
  with a  correspondingly smaller lime for them to try to escape.
  The Benny Boston was nowhere near Australia  as yet. She was somewhere off the coast of New Guinea. The
  wilder part  of that coast, too.
  When Monk kicked over the traces, he left the cabin  while the others were sleeping, and strolled down the
  deck getting a  breath of sea air. Their cabins rather smelled, as cabins on old boats  will. The Benny Boston
  had given the impression of carrying  skunks in her bilge.
  Monk had not strolled far when he saw a woman  leaning against the rail. She was alone. She looked slender,
  and  therefore she was probably young.
  A woman was the downfall of Sampson, and as far as  Monk was concerned, history repeated itself.
  He went over and struck up a conversation.
  "KIND of a rough trip, huh?" he asked, propping an  elbow on the rail a discreet distance from the young lady.
  Monk was an old hand at this stuff. Somewhat  strange, that, since his looks frequently scared fierce bulldogs
  back  under their porches.
  "Eet ees bad," the young woman said.
  "You bet," Monk agreed. "Now I know why they make  portholes small."
  "Why, m’sieu’?"
  "If mine had been larger, I would have got out and  swam," Monk replied.
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  This got the chuckle he had hoped for. She had a  nice voice. She was probably a looker. These French babies
  were  generally pretty snappy.
  "I guess the ship is off New Guinea," Monk said.  "Probably not more than sixty miles or so. That storm drove
  us a little  out of our course."
  Monk knew this because Doc had taken some  observations through a porthole.
  "Qui," 
  the young lady agreed. "Ze captain ees tell me zat." 
  So she knew the captain. It was a cinch she was a  good looker then. Captains always picked off the peaches.
  "I bet your husband is seasick," Monk suggested.
  She laughed again. Very nice.
  "Zey always ask zat," she chuckled. "Non. I  ‘ave no oosban’."
  "Swell," Monk said. "You like Australia?"
  "Oui!" 
  the young woman replied quickly. "I love ze seety of  Melbourne." 
  "Live there?"
  "Oui!"
  Great stuff, Monk thought. Get her telephone number,  then persuade Doc to hang around Melbourne for a
  while.
  Monk opened his mouth to tell her she should see his  pet pig, then remembered he didn’t have any. A tough
  break, that one.  Habeas Corpus had a way with the girls, Monk had discovered. Monk could  lead Habeas
  down Fifth or Park Avenues any day and make half a dozen  conquests.
  Before Monk could think up another subject for  conversation, the young woman turned from the rail.
  "Au revoir," 
  she murmured sweetly. "I theenk I will retire now." 
  "Nuts!" Monk thought, but he said, "Pleasant sleep,  and I’ll see you again sometime."
  That was the stuff. Don’t let them think you were  chasing them.
  The young woman walked away, and the night took her.  Monk had not seen her face, but there was no doubt
  in his mind but that  she would do. For that matter, if she had taken a look at him, he had  not observed it.
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  Oh, well, she’d see him in the daytime, and his was  the kind of hairy beauty that seemed to impress the
  femmes.
  Monk went below in a happy frame of mind and turned  in.
  He got a lucky break, then. He could not get the  young woman off his mind, and he had done nothing for
  days but sleep  and quarrel with Ham when Renny was not watching, so he was not sleepy  anyway.
  He laid awake with his thoughts.
  That was how he happened to see the puddle of stuff  come creeping under the door.
  MONK liked to sleep with all his pillows and  sometimes a suitcase under his head. Ham claimed this was
  because his  close ancestors had roosted upright in the trees with the monkeys and  birds.
  Monk saw the stuff coming under the door  immediately. He thought it was water, and reflected that it was not
  raining, and he had not heard a sea break on deck which would send  water into the corridor.
  Then he got a whiff. Monk was a chemist. He knew  what things were when he smelled them.
  And he retained his presence of mind. Springing out  of bed, he made no sound. Nor did he make a noise in
  scooping up the  bedclothes, carrying them over and depositing them on top of the puddle  spreading from
  under the door.
  Monk held his breath.
  He ran into the connecting cabins which the others  occupied. He looked at the doors. Other puddles were
  spreading there.
  He awakened the men quickly.
  "Poison gas!" he breathed. "Quiet!"
  The activity for the next few moments was wild but  silent. It was Doc Savage who seized the rest of the
  bedclothing and  spread it over the liquid, which had obviously been poured under the  doors from the corridor.
  Then he opened the windows.
  It was the bronze man, too, who really saved them.  He did it by hurriedly opening his equipment cases which
  held  chemicals, getting out various bottles, mixing the contents quickly in  one of the big washbowls, and
  pouring the concoction over the saturated  bedclothing.
  A yellowish vapor arose, but this was harmless. The  chemicals Doc had added to the gas liquid had rendered
  it harmless,  just as water added to alcohol in quantities makes it noninflammable.
  "Whoever poured the stuff under the doors probably  fled immediately," Doc said. "They won’t be back, but
  will wait for our  bodies to be found."
  Renny growled, "What I want to know is, how did they  discover us?"
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  MONK had been doing some tall wondering on that  point. And Monk, while he was a fellow who lacked
  discretion at times,  firmly believed that confession is good for the soul.
  "I don’t think I done it," he said.
  "You ape!" Ham grated instantly. "What have you been  up to?"
  "Aw, I hadda have some air," Monk explained. "I went  on deck."
  Ham sighed. "Well, if nobody saw you, that don’t  explain it."
  "No, it couldn’t have been me," Monk agreed. "The  girl wasn’t one of the gang."
  Ham almost yelled at that. "What girl?"
  "A French oo−la−la," Monk elaborated. "But she was  just a passenger, and lived in Melbourne."
  "Was she about the size of Kit Merrimore?" Doc  Savage asked abruptly.
  "Well, now�" Monk floundered. As a matter of fact,  the girl had been about the size of Kit Merrimore.
  "I examined Kit Merrimore’s past," Doc Savage  stated. "She was at one time an actress, and her best part was
  that of  a French girl in America."
  Monk emitted a feeble squeak.
  "Catch me, somebody," he croaked. "I think I’m going  to faint."
  Ham said grimly, "Renny!"
  "Huh?"
  "How about letting me cut him up in little pieces?"  Ham demanded.
  "Go ahead," Renny directed.
  "And I’ll stand still for you," Monk contributed,  after which they did not have the heart to roast him to the
  brownness  that they would have liked.
  It was now apparent that the enemy was not only  aboard, but was going to make trouble. Doc’s group
  hurriedly set about  opening their equipment cases which held such weapons as they thought  they might need.
  They had hardly started on this task when a face  appeared at the porthole. It was a face Doc’s men knew. The
  owner was  one of the men who had been with Kit Merrimore at the dirigible  stealing in New York.
  The face disappeared instantly.
  Doc flung to the porthole. It was open. He thrust  his head through. The man was legging it down the deck.
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  Several men were gathered toward the bow. Doc looked  in the direction of the stern. More men gathered
  there.
  There was a cheap leather suitcase standing under  the porthole, on deck.
  Doc whipped back out of the porthole.
  "Run!" he said, and his voice was a crash.
  DOC’S men had learned to do things quickly when the  bronze man spoke like that, and they dived through
  the doors into the  corridor, and when Doc gestured, dashed down the corridor.
  Something hit the ship as if it were a great drum.  The doors fell into the corridor. The old carpet jumped up
  off the  floor. The light bulbs broke and came jingling down; only no one heard  them jingle, because sound
  had pushed eardrums in and strained them  until they could hear nothing for moments.
  Probably Doc Savage was the only one who knew what  had happened. His friends had not seen the suitcase.
  Had they, they  were astute enough to guess it held explosive.
  The bronze man was bringing out small objects and  hurling them first one direction in the corridor, then
  another. They  were smoke bombs, and blackness bloated up and engulfed the group, and  it was darker than it
  had ever seemed to be before.
  A gun banged, and another, and a small machine gun  snarled like an iron bulldog. Bullets pecked and sizzled.
  "Top deck," Doc Savage said. "Get together with me."
  His associates got together with him.
  "Your supermachine pistol, Renny," Doc said.  "Demolition cartridges. The ceiling."
  "Holy cow!" Renny said, which was the equivalent of  O. K., and they stood there a minute.
  Renny’s supermachine pistol hooted; explosive−driven  air buffeted them, and wood and metal fell. The
  Benny Boston’s  rusted old whistle started on a long toot, while all over the hooker  men yelled, cursed and
  shot off their guns.
  There was a hole in the ceiling now. Renny had made  it with his little supermachine pistol bullets that were
  packed with  high−powered hell. It was a big hole, and parts of the ceiling hung  down, so that by grabbing
  and hauling, Doc and his men climbed out.
  The smoke bomb smoke poured out around them. They  got out of the smoke. The stars looking down at them
  seemed small, the  moon big, a little red as if blushing.
  Doc and his men started for the bridge, but red  sparks sprang up along the bridge rail, and bullets began
  making those  strange, awful sounds which nothing, but bullets make.
  "Gas!" Monk squeaked. "We’ve got some!"
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  "They have gas masks, too." Doc pointed out.
  Men ran here and there, mostly fore and aft, and  once in a while they were in a spot where there was some
  light, and it  could be seen that they were wearing gas masks and iron military hats.
  "The ventilation funnels to the engine room," Doc  said. "If we control the engine room, we control the ship."
  Ventilators, flower−mouthed monsters, reared up from  the top deck all around. Doc ran to one of these,
  sprang, caught the  lip. Hanging half inside, he listened. It would be easy to go down,  bracing his back and
  hands against one side, his feet against the  other. But he did not go down. He listened.
  Then he slapped his hands against the ventilator,  making sounds.
  A big, nonexistent snake hissed in the bottom. Hot  steam came up. Scalding clouds of it. Men had been
  waiting with steam  hoses at the bottom, and they had thought Doc was coming down.
  A searchlight came on, splashed Doc’s little group.  Monk shot it out. Bullets traveled about without much
  system. But fore  and aft, the attackers were organizing themselves for a charge.
  Captain Smooth had had his ship taken away from him  by now.
  "The boats," Doc Savage said.
  LONG TOM exploded, "You mean we’re going to get off  the ship?"
  "Right."
  "But we may be able to lick them!"
  "Maybe. But we are leaving the ship anyway."
  "Why?"
  "A good reason," the bronze man said. "Quick! The  third boat on the starboard is a motor dory."
  There was no inclination for a lengthy debate on  whys. Doc’s group got the boat down to the water. The boat
  was the one  modern thing about the Benny Boston, or rather, the davits by  which it was lowered were. They
  were the type which could be operated  mechanically from the boat.
  Doc and his men got into the boat. Two of the group  watched the controls. The others used flashlights and
  machine pistols.  The flashlights gave bright light. The machine pistols gave out streams  of mercy bullets at
  the right time.
  The boat was now adrift. The Benny Boston  went gurgling past, and the boat rocked and turned completely
  around  twice in the boil pushed back by the propellers.
  The dory had shipped a little water. Monk and Ham  bailed. Doc did things with the motor and it began
  making noises; the  bow of the lifeboat picked up, the stern settled down, and they made  ten knots or so.
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  "Diesel," Doc Savage said of the motor. "It will run  a long time on what fuel we have."
  The bronze man and his aids were not as worried as  landlubbers might have been. The Benny Boston had put
  about, it  was true, and it could run them down as easily as a drunken motorist  would run down a pup, if it
  found them.
  If it found them. This was the open sea. There had  been storms for days. It was calm now. But big swells
  kicked up by the  storms were still rolling mountain high, and it was dark.
  The only searchlight on the Benny Boston had  been shot out. As long as the ship showed no light, Doc’s little
  band  was in no great danger of being picked up. And they would not show a  light.
  Twenty minutes put them in safety.
  And Long Tom got around to finding out why they had  left the ship in the open sea, when there still remained
  a chance that  they could have overcome their foes. A very good chance, from what Long  Tom knew of Doc
  Savage.
  "I don’t see yet," the electrical wizard said, "why  we gave up the ship."
  Doc pointed. "There is the reason."
  They all looked, and they all saw.
  "Ost!" Monk breathed.
  Monk was awed�It was rarely that he was awed.
  OST! The little band had heard about it. Now they  were seeing it. Fantastic vision of the sea. All had read its
  description as printed in the newspapers. It was all of that.
  Ost was high. It was as if it sat upon a distant  mountainside, yet they could not see a mountain, and they
  could see the  city.
  Luminous. Like a photograph done, by some unknown  process, in the radioactive stuff which is put on
  watches and clocks to  make them tell time in the dark. And like that radioactive material  when seen from a
  distance, this picture was indistinct. It seemed to be  a trifle out of focus.
  A city, it had been called. It was more of a town.  There were buildings, dwellings or places where businesses
  were  conducted, if this weird place had businesses.
  Pyramids, these buildings. Every one of them. Broad  at the bottom, sloping up, somewhat erratically, as if
  there was a  porch or veranda every so often.
  Topping each pyramid was an irregular something,  tall, narrow. It was impossible to distinguish, due to the
  indistinctness of the image, what these topping things were.
  Strangest of all, though, was the building at the  back of the city. The big structure. A pyramid, too, but it was
  upside  down. Inverted. Suspended in the air, apparently.
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  Hanging upside down with nothing to hold it.
  Monk laughed. Did it suddenly, loudly, somewhat  irrationally.
  And somehow no one was surprised at the laugh, or  even looked around. It was the perfectly natural thing to
  do. The thing  they were viewing was too impossible, of course.
  "Well, now we’ve got to figure out what we’re  seeing," Ham said.
  "If it’s a slide thrown from a powerful magic  lantern on the Benny Boston, we should be able to see the light
  of the lantern," Long Tom contributed. "The Benny Boston is  behind us."
  But the group could see no magic−lantern glow.
  Gaunt Johnny picked from a pocket a pair of  binoculars which he had been carrying there. He studied the
  vision with  the binoculars.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" he exploded.
  "Eh?" Monk demanded.
  "Look," Johnny said, and handed the homely chemist  the glasses.
  Monk looked. He put the glasses down, and said  something that was only a mumble of astonishment.
  "What’s the matter with you two silly−sallies?" Ham  asked sarcastically.
  "Nothing," Johnny muttered.
  "Yeah," Monk said. "Nothing except that these  binoculars don’t magnify that city."
  "Don’t magnify it? The glasses do not�"
  "See for yourself," Monk invited.
  Ham looked, and when he put the glasses down, his  manner showed that they hadn’t done their duty.
  "Somebody took the lenses out as a joke!" he barked,  an instant later.
  But the lenses were in the glasses, and they  magnified everything except what it was wanted most that they
  magnify  now.
  THERE was silence in the boat. Silence and  eyestrain. Wonder. Bafflement.
  "What’s over there, Doc?" Monk asked at last.
  "New Guinea," the bronze man said.
  "How far?"
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  "Sixty miles or so."
  "Nobody can see sixty miles at sea at night." 
  Doc Savage said nothing. No one else said anything.  Doc headed the motorized lifeboat for the city.
  No one talked much. They all watched what they could  see high above the sea ahead. It was so wonderful, so
  amazing, that  they did nothing but wonder and puzzle about it.
  The little band hardly noticed the breeze when it  kicked up. It was the type of breeze that always kicked up
  before dawn,  and it turned into one of the vicious little squalls noted frequently  happening in that part of the
  sea. Before long spray, and occasionally  green water, was coming over the side of the boat.
  Two thousand years ago, before the birth of Christ,  the Norsemen built boats, open cockleshells fastened with
  thongs and  wooden pins, and in them crossed the Atlantic. This lifeboat had lines  like them, and it was
  perhaps not much smaller.
  Doc and his men came through without much more  hardship than a thorough wetting.
  But the city was lost somewhere in the excitement  and darkness and whining wind and stinging spray. They
  had been  surprised at how long it had remained visible. Only near the height of  the squall could they no
  longer see it; and after the squall had  abated, they were too tired from their battle with the elements to show
  much interest in it. They lay down and slept as only exhausted men can.
  Doc Savage remained awake and steered and nursed the  fuel supply of the Diesel.
  Between the big bronze man’s feet as he stood at the  tiller was an equipment case of metal. One of his own.
  He had gotten it aboard during the excitement and  none of the others had noticed.
  Chapter XIII. THE SUMMONING VISION
  DOC’S men were glad to see the dawn�and they  weren’t. The sun was warm. Furthermore, it showed them
  land.
  But it did not show them the city. There was no  city. Johnny used his binoculars, and they magnified the land,
  so there  was nothing wrong with the glasses.
  The little band reached the land before noon. There  was no city on it.
  The shore was rocky, but here and there was a patch  of dark, smooth sand, and they landed on one of these,
  hauled the  lifeboat up, and tied the painter to a palm. There was fresh water and  canned foods in the boat. The
  canned foods were good.
  Captain Smooth, a hard man, had been a good seaman,  and kept his lifeboat larders stocked. That was a good
  idea on a ship  like the Benny Boston, when the boats might be needed at any  time.
  Doc and his men ate.
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  "I feel better," Monk said. He looked at the  mountains, searching for the city, and not finding it, said grimly,
  "Maybe I feel better!"
  "That’s funny," Renny said. "I feel that way, too."
  "If you mean, you have a sort of fear, I have it,  also," said Long Tom.
  Ham made a clucking noise. "I thought I was the only  one who was scared. If you ask me, it’s darned queer.
  There’s nothing  here to be scared of."
  All stood there, looking, as Monk expressed it,  funny. That is, they wore the expressions of men who could
  feel fear.
  Then something happened which startled them all: Doc  Savage’s tiny fantastic, trilling sound came into
  being, rose and fell,  and ebbed away into nothingness.
  Doc’s aids stared at the bronze man. The trilling  never came without reason. Always it marked something of
  major  importance. They waited for him to explain.
  Doc did not explain.
  "We are heading inland," he said.
  "What for?" asked Monk, who was always full of  questions.
  Doc seemed not to hear. After that, there were no  more inquiries. The bronze man, all knew, did not feel
  ready to explain.
  The bronze man and his men took the food and water,  and marched inshore. They were not too badly
  equipped. They would miss  hammocks and mosquito netting, and perhaps antidotes for snake bites,  although
  Doc might have that in the remarkable carryall vest which he  wore.
  Doc Savage carried the metal equipment case which he  had brought. It was the smallest of their assortment of
  cases. It  seemed very heavy, even for Doc.
  Once, Monk volunteered, "I’ll carry that for a  while, Doc," and picked the case up. The homely chemist
  immediately  looked queer, and put the case down.
  It was so heavy he could hardly lift it, much less  carry it any distance.
  There were palm trees around the party for a while.  Then they began to climb, and there were no more palm
  trees. Palms grow  best around salt water.
  NIGHT saw all�with the exception of Doc�hot, tired  and more or less quilled with thorns. They had made, at
  a liberal  estimate, ten miles. It was not bad. It was, in fact, good, and they  were proud of it, for the way had
  turned into one of the thickest  jungles they had ever seen�when it was not straight up.
  There was not much talk as the group cooked and made  smudges to keep away the insects. There was a
  reason: The fear. It was  still with them, and still they could not explain, identify or even  fully comprehend it.
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  Renny gave the best description of how it felt.
  "The first time I sat in a front−line trench,  knowing we were to go over the top, and not knowing the exact
  zero  hour, I felt this same way," he said. "I guess I was scared. Don’t know  how else you would describe the
  feeling, although some lunkhead captain  kept telling us good soldiers never got scared."
  "Only mental defectives do not get scared," Doc  Savage said. "Fear is a normal emotion. If you do not feel it,
  you are  not normal."
  "Then I’m too dang normal!" Renny grunted. "Right  now, I don’t feel a bit brave."
  "Bravery is the power of determination that pushes  you toward a goal when the natural instincts of fear urge
  you to turn  back."
  Doc and his men were now on their backs on pallets  of soft boughs which they had plucked. The smudge
  fires were to  windward, and the dense smoke lifted just enough to make a cover a few  inches above their
  faces as the breeze carried it past.
  "What I want to know," Monk complained, "is what is  scaring us. Me, I ain’t used to getting scared when
  there ain’t nothing  to get scared of."
  All were too tired to stay awake long. They slept  silently and deeply, except for long Johnny, who
  occasionally emitted a  snore that disturbed the birds roosting in the surrounding jungle.
  Doc Savage awakened his men once that night, and let  them look at the city of Ost, which had become visible
  through the  jungle. The vision was not much more distinct than it had been the  night before, although perhaps
  a little.
  When the sun came up, there was no city.
  Doc Savage led the march onward. He carried the  heavy metal equipment case, and seemed not to mind
  greatly its enormous  weight, although the going was intensely difficult, almost impossible  at times.
  On such occasions as this, the real power of the  enormous muscular development the bronze man had built up
  through years  of exercise and living as strict, always, as an athlete in training,  became a thing that amazed his
  aids.
  Time after time, while they rested, gasping and  perspiring, he would range through the jungle and come back
  with fruits  and roots which, when eaten, had special strength−giving values.
  The going became worse as the group progressed, a  circumstance that seemed impossible.
  They pushed ahead for nine days.
  NINE days was a long time to march through green  hell with nothing, actually, to urge them on. To be sure,
  Doc’s band  saw the fantastic city ahead frequently, but it was always like a  mirage; and they realized it was
  much more distinct, yet it did not  seem a lot closer.
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  They were a bedraggled crowd by now. There was only  one whole shirt among them. Pants had been docked
  off above the knees,  with the exception of Ham, who was still trying to preserve his  sartorial splendor. Ham
  had the one whole shirt.
  The night of the tenth day was an unsettled one. The  five aids were convinced they were on a wild−goose
  chase, and when they  thought of the terrible trek back to the coast, they felt like eating  nails.
  Doc Savage alone was an exception. He had not said  what he felt. But he had not let down any in the forward
  drive.
  Then Monk awoke in the night and saw the old man  with the spider arms.
  This strange apparition of a being stood on the far  edge of the clearing in which they had camped for the
  night. There was  bright moonlight. Yet moonlight at the best is not the finest  illumination when it comes to
  showing up details. That made it stranger  that Monk could see the fellow so well.
  The being’s face was wrinkled. Like a melon in a  loose blue sack. Blue. His skin was distinctly blue. His
  garment seemed  to be made out of one piece of dark−red cloth�simply a long piece of  goods which he had
  wrapped this way and that around his body until he  had it all covered. He had incredibly long arms which
  were very thin,  and his legs were almost as thin, but only about a forth as long.
  "Wake up, guys!" Monk barked. "Here’s Goa!"
  Monk was not as amazed then about what he had said  as he was later.
  The others awakened. They looked. All of them  exclaimed in surprise.
  And all five dashed forward. Doc Savage alone  remained where he was.
  The spider−armed old creature looked very happy when  he saw them coming. He beckoned wildly, urging
  them to come on. Then he  turned and ran on ahead of them.
  The group shouted at him to stop, but he paid no  attention. At intervals, he would wave at them to come on.
  Doc’s men did not gain on him. This surprised them,  for they were running their fastest. Their quarry did not
  have legs  built for running, if appearances were any indication.
  But they were not half as surprised, though, as they  were an instant later.
  They came to a meadow of soft, deep grass. Monk  glanced back. They were crushing down the grass with
  their feet, and  leaving a plain trail.
  But the old man ahead was leaving no tracks whatever.
  "Hey!" Monk squawled. "There’s somethin’ phony!"
  The others stopped. The bony, old man went on, still  beckoning, and was lost in the dark jungle.
  Monk and the others produced flashlights. They  looked around, examining everything soft enough to have
  taken a  footprint. They did not find a single track.
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  They went back to camp walking in the manner of  small boys passing a cemetery after having heard a good
  ghost story.  They told Doc Savage about it. The bronze man did not say what they  expected.
  "Anxious to go on now?" he queried.
  "Darned right," Renny rumbled. "Holy cow! There’s  something blamed queer behind this, and I wanta get at
  the bottom of  it."
  There was more than a third of the night remaining.  They had a little difficulty going to sleep.
  "Monk," Ham said.
  "What is it, you spook−chasing shyster?"
  "When you awakened us, you said, ‘Here’s Goa.’ What  I’d like to know is, how you knew it was Goa. Did he
  call out his name  while we were asleep?"
  Monk made a startled, choking noise.
  "Well, did he?"
  Monk said, "I refuse to speak."
  Ham chuckled. "If it’ll make you feel any better, I  knew his name was Goa, too. I don’t know how I knew it.
  I just did."
  All did sleep a little before dawn.
  THIS jungle country was inhabited. Doc’s group had  seen signs of natives, footprints usually. A few times,
  they had seen  furtive faces, but the natives had fled, and they had not bothered to  try to make contact with
  them. Meeting a peaceful native tribe usually  meant lengthy ceremonials, and they were in a hurry.
  Doc Savage always led the way, flake gold eyes  alert. Just how little his trained scrutiny missed was brought
  home to  the others when, a little before noon, he stopped abruptly while  striding along with seeming
  casualness.
  "Back," he said.
  He advanced a few paces alone, bent forward and  scrutinized something. He went back to the others at once.
  "Poisoned  thorns," Doc said. "We will have to take to the trees."
  Ham demanded, "Can we not go around?"
  "Easily. But we might not see the next ones. Natives  are sometimes clever at handling them."
  "Oh! You mean�"
  "Yes," the bronze man replied. "They were thorns set  by natives to trap other natives. We are now in warlike
  country."
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  Gaunt Johnny, the archaeologist, put in,  "Head−hunters?"
  "Probably. Some of the few remaining head−hunters in  the world are in this district."
  The party’s means of travel from now on was unusual:  First, Doc Savage disappeared for a time, leaving the
  others crouched  in the jungle with eyes and supermachine pistols ready, and with  stimulants and poison
  antidotes handy. Native head−hunters were not  lads to take chances with.
  Doc reappeared, and he had a huge armload of very  fine fibers which he had plucked from jungle plants. The
  little band  plaited these into thin, stout ropes, one for each man.
  The task took them until noon the next day.
  Then they took to the trees. Every one but Monk  viewed this with great skepticism. But once aloft, they
  found it even  easier than working through the jungle at earth level. The reason was  simple:
  The higher trees of this part of the jungle were  huge, scrawny−leafed things, and nearly every tree had at least
  one  branch which was like a horn in that it could be roped easily.
  Doc’s men had but to stand on one bough, rope a  distant one, and drop a loop in their own end of the rope
  over another  hook of a branch, then swing across. Some of them speedily perfected a  way of going across
  upright, in a squatting position, gripping the rope  on each side with their hands.
  They had not gone far in this fashion before Monk  made a remark.
  "It looks as if some of these boughs had been used  this way before," he said.
  "Doubtless," Doc agreed.
  "Huh?"
  "This method of travel is much used in these  islands," Doc replied. (Explorers have often reported the method
  of  savage travel. The Ibilao tribesmen of the isle of Luzon are notable  examples.)
  MONK proved especially adept at the new mode of  travel, which was no surprise to Ham, and he found
  occasion to say so  repeatedly and sarcastically.
  The jungle below seemed to get more and more dense.  It was an incredible mass. Where they could see the
  ground at all, it  was usually covered with pools of vile green water inhabited by vicious  looking
  water−snakes and reptiles. Travel on the ground would have been  almost impossible.
  Ahead, they could see a fanged mountain range, not  especially high, but remarkably rugged. They were
  headed directly for  these.
  Doc and his aids slept that night in crude platforms  which they constructed in the forks of a big tree.
  A distinct chuck! of a noise awakened them.  It was made by a short, heavy war spear which stuck in a bough
  of the  tree.
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  Chapter XIV. THE STINGING BREATH
  THE sun had not arrived, but there was enough  predawn light to show the surrounding jungle, and as Monk
  expressed it,  "more fierce natives than you could crowd on a battleship."
  The natives were little brown fellows, and they  looked not greatly different from savages in other parts of the
  world,  except perhaps they were a little more naked. The nearest were a long  spear throw away. Behind them,
  the trees were almost bending with their  fierce human freight.
  As soon as Doc and his men stirred, the natives all  began howling. Drums and weird−sounding reed whistles
  added to the  uproar. Here and there was a chief or a witch doctor in a grotesque  mask.
  Monk drew a bead on the nearest with his machine  pistol, which was loaded with "mercy" bullets.
  "Careful," Doc warned.
  The bronze man listened for a few moments to the  shouting. He could speak innumerable languages
  fluently�sometimes not  as fluently as he thought he should, considering the years he had spent  mastering
  them. This one was a variation of one of the more civilized  Guinea tribesman.
  Doc called out in the nearest tongue he could  manage, demanding what the hullabaloo meant.
  The natives showed no surprise. It probably never  occurred to their ignorant heads that there was any other
  language but  their own, unless it might be the language of their witch deities.
  The business of replying to Doc’s question became  quite a ceremony. One man would squawl for a while.
  Then another. And  another. This continued. Then they started squawling at each other.
  "What’s the idea, Doc?" Monk asked. "What they  talkin’ over?"
  "Making selections," Doc said.
  "Of what?"
  "Our heads," the bronze man replied quietly. "They  are aggravated because we have not enough heads to go
  around."
  "Blazes!" Monk yelled. "Head−hunters!"
  Ham listened with interest. "Whose head are they  bidding the highest for, Doc?"
  "Monk’s," the bronze man admitted.
  "Aw−w−w!" Monk groaned.
  Johnny asked uneasily, "What are they waiting for?"
  "They consider that they have us trapped," the  bronze man said dryly. "And they enjoy this palavering among
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  themselves. Furthermore, there will be more light for hunting us in the  jungle later in the day."
  "Then what are we waiting for?"
  "Shortly after the sun is up, a breeze usually  starts blowing," the bronze man replied.
  Johnny fumbled with his monocle, which he had  preserved, although he scarcely had a piece of clothing left
  to which  to attach the black ribbon.
  "I don’t see what good that will do," he said.
  DOC SAVAGE did not seem especially concerned by the  fact that he and his men were surrounded by
  head−hunters who were  playing with them in their queer way. But that did not make his five  aids feel any
  easier. They knew Doc. He would not look especially  concerned if he were falling out of a plane without a
  parachute.
  The five aids got the ammo drums for their  supermachine pistols ready. There were unpleasantly few drums.
  Moreover, the jungle was so thick that the capsulelike mercy bullets  would not be especially effective.
  Came the time when the besiegers seemed to get  settled the matter of who was to have whose head. They
  indulged in a  babble of extremely loud yelling by way of warming up.
  The breeze had by now piped up. It blew toward the  mountains.
  Doc Savage dropped several small objects into the  jungle under the tree.
  Then he strode out on a high, naked branch,  balancing there. He called out sharply, and the great crash of his
  voice brought comparative silence to the jungle.
  The bronze man leveled both arms in a dramatic  gesture toward the distant mountains.
  "We are white men who come in peace, and we are  going on to those mountains," he said, in the native
  tongue.
  The reply this got was surprising.
  "No one goes to those mountains," was the substance  of it. "It is forbidden by he who has all power."
  Doc acted unimpressed.
  "You intend to kill us?" he asked.
  They shouted happily that they did.
  Doc waved his arms and got some silence.
  "We are not ordinary men as yourselves," he called  loudly. "Should we die, our breaths would leave our
  bodies and go on to  the mountains, and it would not be pleasant for you."
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  This got the head−hunters equivalent of a horselaugh.
  Doc called out again with great volume.
  "In this manner it would happen," he said.
  He cupped his hands about his lips, filled his chest  with a great breath, and blew it noisily in the direction of
  the  mountains.
  For a moment, nothing happened. Some of the natives  started cackling derisively.
  Then a brown fiend shrieked, grabbed his eyes, and  fell off his limb into a springy bush. Others shrieked.
  General bedlam  seized those natives who stood between Doc’s party and the mountain.
  Within three or four minutes, they were as helpless  as men become when dosed with tear gas.
  The small objects which the bronze man had dropped  had been tear−gas grenades, his aids knew by now.
  Doc’s voice roared over the hullabaloo.
  "And our spirits would rise like black monsters to  haunt you," he called. "In this fashion."
  He made an elaborate gesture of plucking something  out of his own head, and releasing it. Simultaneously, he
  opened one of  the little smoke bombs.
  An enormous cloud of black smoke immediately  materialized above the bronze giant’s head, and drifted off
  lazily with  the wind toward the mountains.
  DOC SAVAGE’S knowledge of primitive psychology was  excellent, and his theatricals got the results he had
  aimed for.
  Fight oozed out of the throng of natives. They began  to howl, but there was a different tone to it, a mournful,
  scared  quality. Weapon after weapon was thrown away.
  "All right," Doc called to his aids. "They are  convinced we are supernatural. We may be able to go ahead
  now."
  They swung their rattan lariats, and began moving  from tree to tree.
  Doc still carried his extremely heavy metal  equipment case.
  As the bronze man had hazarded, no hostile move was  made by the natives. Not wanting to spoil the effect
  created by the  tear gas by themselves getting into it, the party moved to the right.
  Coming to a stretch of higher ground, where the  jungle was a bit too thin for fast traveling aloft, Doc and his
  men  swung to the ground. Soon, they were surrounded by natives. The little  brown fellows had discarded
  their weapons. They had a strange way of  showing humiliation. The process seemed to be for a man to grab
  his own  throat and go through the motions of choking himself.
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  This was definitely amusing to Monk. He got started  chuckling, but did manage to keep his face straight.
  His mirth died a gulping death when at least twenty  natives suddenly surrounded them, genuflecting and
  choking  themselves�and abruptly seized Doc Savage and his men.
  "Hey!" Monk yelled. "What’s the idea of this?"
  Doc spoke rapidly in the dialect. He was answered.  "They are not going to harm us," the bronze man
  translated.
  "Then what’s the idea of grabbing us?"
  "They are not going to let us go to the mountains,"  Doc said. "They are going to keep us here."
  Chapter XV. THE OTHER WHITE MAN
  THE native hut had one thing to recommend it: A  roof. There were other things to discount that�a few overly
  ripe fish  and some small animals hanging to the ridgepoles. This provender had  been smoked for preserving
  purposes, but with doubtful success. There  were flies in the hut. Monk was pretending to count them.
  "One quintillion, seven quadrillion, two trillion�"
  "Give it up," Ham requested, "or I’m going to slam  you over the head so hard you’ll bite your toenails."
  Renny, Long Tom and Johnny also occupied the shade  under the hut roof, on the side from which the wind
  blew. The flies  were less thick there.
  "Ouch!" Monk complained. "It wouldn’t be so bad if  these weren’t man−eating flies!"
  Doc Savage was nowhere in sight. His aids had  pondered about where the bronze man had gone, and had
  decided he was  moving about the village, talking to the natives, perhaps arguing.
  The bronze man’s helpers doubted if the arguing  would help much. They had already done plenty of that, but
  without it  getting results. They were here in the native village, prisoners, with  nothing to do but stroll around
  and peek into the huts, a pastime that  was not especially inviting, since the principal ornament in each hut
  was a human head, singly or in clusters.
  Doc Savage appeared suddenly and called, "Ham!" 
  The dapper lawyer arose and accompanied the bronze  man, and the others remained behind, it being obvious
  that Doc wanted  only Ham.
  Monk rolled over and frowned at Renny.
  "Say, how does this thing all stack up to you?" he  wanted to know.
  "It has me buffaloed," Renny admitted. "Holy cow!  Some of the things that have happened are impossible.
  That city, and  that old spider−armed man, for instance. Blamed queer."
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  Monk nodded. "That’s not all. When Doc asked these  natives questions about that mountain range, and why
  we should not go  on there, they clammed right up. Acted scared."
  Long Tom put in, "Listen, if you birds haven’t got  any ideas, why not keep still? I can do my own puzzling."
  "Yes," gaunt Johnny echoed. "Verbosity  superabundantly�"
  He stopped with a croak. Pointed.
  "Look there!" he gulped. "There’s Lupp!"
  MONK, Renny and Long Tom came to their feet as if  jerked by strings. They looked, and their eyes popped.
  Lupp! The man who had been with Kit Merrimore, the  fellow who was the real leader of their opposition.
  They had last seen  him in the fighting aboard the Benny Boston. And here he was in  this savage village.
  Swaggering along the makeshift street area between  the huts, the newcomer came. And the natives, to a man,
  backed away  from him, took themselves by the throats, wrestled with themselves,  then got down on their
  hands and knees.
  "It’s Lupp!" Renny rumbled softly.
  "This is bad!" Long Tom breathed. "That fellow is  obviously some kind of deity to these natives! If he sets
  them on us�"
  The dark, muscular white man in the native street  stopped and shouted what sounded like two words. The
  natives began to  gather toward him. Lupp retreated until he stood close to the wall of  the jungle, and the
  natives clustered before him. He lifted his arms.
  Words poured from his lips. Words in the native  tongue, which Monk and the others could not understand. In
  response,  the natives chanted and throttled themselves.
  Then Doc’s aids got their big surprise. The man who  had addressed the natives lifted his voice and spoke
  English.
  "Doc Savage, or any of his men!" he shouted. "Can  you hear me?"
  "He knows we’re here," Monk muttered, then howled,  "We hear you, you scamp!"
  "You are free to go," the man called. "I have just  told the natives that they shall not prevent your departure.
  They were  holding you because on a previous visit, I told them to prevent any  white man reaching those
  mountains. They were obeying orders. To them,  I am a powerful witch doctor. But now you can go."
  The man spoke a few words to the natives, turned and  disappeared into the jungle.
  "Dag−gone!" Monk said, when astonishment freed his  tongue. "You reckon we can walk right out of here?"
  "We can try," Renny said.
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  They tried. And they did it. Not a war spear or  poisoned arrow was lifted to stop them.
  The little band penetrated about a quarter of a mile  into the jungle, then stopped, their supermachine pistols in
  hand.
  "There’s some trick to this," Renny stated  emphatically. "We’ll wait here for Doc, then, if he don’t come on,
  we’ll go back hunting him."
  "And when we find Doc, we’ll trail that Lupp, Monk  declared.
  "You will not have to go far," a voice said almost  beside them.
  Doc Savage and Ham walked out of the jungle.
  "You shyster!" Monk growled. "What do you mean by  that?"
  "I was the Lupp you saw back there," Ham vouchsafed  with a smile.
  MONK blinked twice, said, "I don’t believe it!"
  "We had better get going," Doc Savage said.
  The aids climbed into the trees and used their  ropes, which had been coiled about their middles. Doc still
  carried his  heavy equipment case.
  Monk declared, "I don’t savvy what happened back  there."
  Ham said, "Simple, you Siamese gossoon. Doc got to  listening and inquiring around among those natives,
  and he learned two  men stayed with the tribesmen several months ago. Two white men. They  answered the
  description of Lupp and that Two−bit."
  "I’d hardly call Two−bit a white man," Monk said.
  "That’s quibbling!" Ham snapped. "Lupp and Two−bit  were with those natives for a while. They came from
  the  direction of those mountains ahead. When they left the tribe, they went  on toward the coast.
  "But before they left, Lupp had established himself  as a medicine man, not a difficult thing for a clever white
  man to do.  And Lupp had impressed upon these natives that they must not, under any  condition, permit any
  other white men to go toward those mountains."
  "But Lupp�" Monk paused and squinted intently at  Ham. "Aw, bugs! I can see traces of make−up on your
  face! So Doc made  you up to look like Lupp."
  "Ham has a physical build nearest that of Lupp’s,"  Doc admitted.
  Ham added: "It was Doc done the voice imitating. I  might have managed that, but I couldn’t speak the darn
  head−hunter’s  language."
  Big−fisted Renny, who had been silent during the  recital, broke into a rumble which sounded pleased.
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  "We’re on the right trail to the mystery!" he  boomed. "We know that now!"
  That very certainty which Renny mentioned injected  new enthusiasm into the group’s tired muscles. They
  made very good time  through the treetops, looking back often to detect a sign of following  head−hunters.
  They saw them.
  The squat, brown natives kept some distance to the  rear, so far back that they looked like monkeys in the
  trees. But they  only followed for a few hours, then stopped and went back.
  "They fear these mountains ahead," Doc Savage  remarked.
  "Wonder why?" Monk wanted to know.
  "They call the region a name which, liberally  translated, means, ‘The Land of the Spook men,’" the bronze
  man  replied. "That was about all I was able to gather."
  Doc and his small group kept traveling far into the  night, for the moon was bright. And only when they
  turned in for the  night did they realize the mountains ahead were making strange sounds.
  Queer sounds indeed. Rumblings, sobbings�noises that  were probably distant many miles, yet which must be
  very loud. More  striking were the sounds which came less often. They were best  described as a long, gurgling
  whoosh! As if something titanic  were letting out breath.
  "Reminds me of the time we found some prehistoric  monsters in a volcanic pit," Monk muttered uneasily.
  "Boy, did they  show us a time!"( The Land of Terror)
  Johnny polished his monocle absently.
  "A monticolous terrestrial cacophony," Johnny said.
  "Huh? What’d you call it?" Monk grunted.
  "Mountain music," Long Tom translated dryly.
  BY mid−afternoon the following day, the aids began  to realize what had made the noises. They climbed
  sharply, crossed a  ridge, and descended into a low valley beyond which lay the piled  masses of bare rocks
  that were the mountains.
  All became aware of an odor. It became highly  distressing.
  "Calefactive thermae of earthly orgination," Johnny  said.
  "Blazes!" Monk groaned. "What?"
  "Hot springs," Long Tom translated again. "Geysers.  Look!"
  Over the treetops, the associates saw a plume of  steam hurl upward for a hundred feet or so, accompanied by
  the loud,  roaring sound which they had heard the night before. In the fashion of  geysers, this one hurled up
  water and steam for a while, then subsided.
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  For the first time, all realized they were headed  into a region of intense volcanic activity. Geysers, boiling hot
  springs, great areas where the entire earth became mud that was hot  enough to cook.
  "Kind of like Yellowstone Park," Monk offered.
  There was a difference. Yellowstone was picturesque.  This region was most displeasing to the eye, and made
  doubly unbearable  by the brimstone smell which grew stronger and stronger.
  Then the aids were pleased indeed that they had not  discarded what equipment they did have, during the
  march. They still  had the tiny gas masks which Doc Savage had perfected, and they donned  them, after which
  the going was more bearable, except for the heat.
  The heat got more intense. Earth heat. It made the  sun, which they had previously thought was hot, seem
  almost cooling by  contrast.
  Time after time, Doc and his men were forced to  retreat and pick another route. Since the mud lakes, almost
  frying hot,  were covered with an innocent−looking crust, it became necessary to  fling rocks ahead to test the
  going whenever there was the least doubt.
  A moment later, they saw the spider−armed being,  Goa, again.
  THE creature appeared ahead of them, as on the other  occasion, and waved at them, beckoning. All yelled at
  him, or every one  but Doc did. No answer.
  The aids hurried after him, and the being receded;  they were beginning to have strong doubts that he was
  human.
  Speedily Doc’s aids discovered that the spider−armed  man was not showing them a trail. He merely urged
  them to come on. And  there was something pitifully pleading about his exhortations, it  struck them.
  "The old coot seems kinda worried," Monk took his  mask off a moment to say.
  Goa, it developed, could apparently pass over  regions of soft mud and hot fissures where they themselves
  could not  traverse. Doc warned of this.
  "We will have to pick our trail," he said.
  By noon of the following day, the bronze chief and  his men had passed through the worst of the region. They
  reached higher  ground, and the mountains shoved up around them. Sheer cliffs, for the  most part.
  Time after time, Doc and his aids managed to climb a  few hundred yards, only to be blocked. They would go
  back and try a  different route.
  The rock higher up seemed to be veined in places  with some dark formation.
  The spider−armed apparition had been lost to sight  for a while. But now it appeared again. For once, not
  ahead. To the  left. They went in that direction.
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  Soon the group came to a stream, a creek which  flowed steaming hot water. The spider−armed one went up
  this. Doc  Savage and his aids followed. The going was easier, which meant they  were not on hands and knees
  clawing up sheer rock faces more than half  of the time.
  Goa, the fantastic being with the long arms and the  enveloping cloth garment, appeared to slacken his pace,
  so that they  came nearer. Then he disappeared.
  A few minutes later, Doc and his men stopped and  stared.
  "Holy cow!" Renny rumbled. "He musta gone into  that!"
  They had come to a cavernous opening in the face of  the mountain. Out of this the boiling stream poured.
  Above and to the  sides, the rock wall was too sheer for any man to climb.
  The stone around the hole was of dark quality. The  same darkish stone composed most of the mountain
  behind.
  It was very hot, and Monk sighed and laid down his  pack, including his supermachine pistol. A moment later,
  he reached  over, picked up his gun, then gave a startled yell.
  "Hey!" he squalled. "Somethin’ was holdin’ my gun to  the ground!"
  "And something," big−fisted Renny barked, "is  playing the deuce with the needle of my compass!"
  IT was gaunt Johnny who cleared up the mystery. He  pointed at the dark stone around them.
  "Lodestone," he said. "The biggest deposit of the  stuff, or strata of it, that I ever saw."
  Monk looked relieved, bent over, and tested the pull  of the black rock with his supermachine pistol. He was
  startled. He  could free the gun only with a strong pull.
  "First time I ever seen any of it this strong," Monk  said.
  "Lodestone," Johnny explained, "is a magnetic oxide  of iron, and this particular deposit of it seems to be of
  high magnetic  strength."
  "Holy cow!" Renny interposed. "Look!" He indicated  Doc Savage.
  The bronze man had opened the metal equipment case  which he had carried on the long trek. The case which
  Monk personally  knew was so heavy he could hardly lift it.
  Out of the case, Doc lifted six pairs of pieces of  iron shaped like large flat irons. Exact copies of the strange
  iron  implements which Ben Brasken had possessed.
  He passed them out. Monk promptly lowered his to the  rock underfoot, then tugged and grunted, trying to lift
  it against the  pull of the lodestone.
  "Blazes!" he complained. "What a place! You can’t  lay anything down!"
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  Big−fisted Renny peered doubtfully at the cavity out  of which the boiling stream poured.
  "I take it you’re goin’ in there, Doc?" he muttered.
  "Right," the bronze man admitted.
  "Why?"
  By way of answering, Doc Savage called them to the  mouth of the subterranean hot−water stream and
  showed certain scratches  on the rocks which had escaped the aids’ notice.
  "These are several months old," he said. "But they  indicate some one entered this tunnel, using iron blocks
  probably  similar to ours."
  "You think these things will support our weight?"  Renny countered.
  "Easily, judging from the pull outside here."
  "How will we move them?"
  "Slide them along. It is a crude process, but  workable."
  It was. Doc and his men prudently used the  precaution of tying their wrists to the handles of the iron blocks
  before they started in. And they linked each other together with the  rope, in the manner of mountain climbers,
  before entering.
  It was not as bad as the aids had expected. The  heat, terrific at first, was not so great but that they became
  accustomed to it.
  The roof of the water−worn tunnel was smooth, hence  it was possible to slide the iron blocks along by
  swinging and jerking.  The better method was to swing up and actually shove ahead with the  feet.
  Yet it was probably lucky that the distance through  the tunnel was not great.
  Doc and his men came out at the foot of a great  cliff which seemed part of the wall of a cuplike depression in
  the  mountains. And the excitement started immediately.
  Monk leveled an arm, yelled, "Our dirigible!"
  Chapter XVI. THE THIRD VICTIM
  THE little dirigible was perhaps half a mile  distant, moored beyond a clump of trees. The back of the craft
  glinted  in the sunlight.
  This valley, or cup, crater, or whatever it was,  seemed to have only a few hot springs and geysers. These
  appeared to be  confined to the lower end, where Doc and his party had entered.
  Ham breathed deeply of the air, mopped perspiration  and moved away from the stream of hot water. He had
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  managed to tug his  irons free of the tunnel side, and he carried them with him. However,  the rock all
  about�almost the entire wall around the valley�seemed to  be of lodestone.
  When Ham put his irons down, the magnetic force  seized them, yanking him over forcibly. He sat down with
  a sigh.
  "Of all the crazy stunts!" he groaned. "Doc, how on  earth did it occur to you to make up these iron things and
  bring them  along?"
  "A natural move," Doc replied. "Ben Brasken’s talk  indicated they were necessary as keys."
  "Ben Brasken!" Monk exploded. "If that guy swam  ashore, worked through that jungle, then back, and swam
  around in the  ocean until he met his ship�well, somebody is crazy! A thing like that  couldn’t be done!"
  Doc Savage did not comment. The bronze man was  studying the dirigible. Then he glanced at his aids, noted
  that it  would take some time for them to recover their strength, and  made a suggestion.
  "While you rest, I am going ahead and look over the  situation," he said.
  "Go ahead," Monk groaned. "I got Chancy horses in  both arms."
  Monk was pretty far gone when he willingly passed up  a chance for action.
  Doc Savage went forward. He came to a rill of fresh  water, tasted it, examined it closely, even using a
  magnifier from his  compartment vest�the most intact garment he still retained.
  Convinced the striking clarity of the water did not  indicate that it was poisonous, he drank. He was always
  suspicious of  very clear water in the jungle. Fish, frogs and other creatures that  roil water do not live in
  poison pools.
  There was a cool breeze through the valley, and from  the manner in which the tops of the trees bent to the
  southward, it was  evident that this was a continuous wind. Probably it was created by the  rising of air warmed
  by the region of geysers and hot springs.
  The breeze made the going pleasant enough. The  jungle was not unusually thick when Doc reached it, and he
  worked  through it. There were many birds in the trees. Surprisingly, most of  these seemed edible fowl,
  guineas, gamecock and species of wild  chickens peculiar to the Orient. He also observed pigs, fat eating
  goats, and other food type animals.
  Nearing the dirigible, the bronze man used caution,  circling once entirely, listening often. There was no one
  around. He  swung aboard the craft.
  The airship was still in flying condition, but it  had been carelessly and inexpertly handled. Many small things
  were  broken, and a number of the special gadgets, such as the infra−light  projecto−receptor for watching the
  earth at night with invisible light,  had been taken apart by persons who did not have enough skill to get  them
  back together. The dirigible had carried more than a dozen  passengers, judging from the sleeping
  arrangements.
  Kit Merrimore had been aboard. Doc found the  innumerable bottles and boxes or beauty aids which women
  seemed to need  in the tiny cabin which she had occupied.
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  The soft earth around the dirigible had been  trampled a great deal. The craft was tied to trees with stout lines,
  and was in no danger of damage. Doc scrutinized the tracks.
  The footprints were fresh. The motors bore a faint  trace of warmth when he tested them.
  The airship had apparently not been here long.
  The footprints headed up the valley. Doc followed  them.
  HIS quarry had taken a straight course, which  indicated they knew where they were going.
  When he had covered no more than a quarter of a  mile, the bronze man began hearing the shots. There was a
  half dozen in  the first volley. After that, only a few, scattered. Doc quickened his  pace.
  He saw human beings. Kit Merrimore, in whipcord  breeches, silk blouse and sun helmet. Lupp, dark,
  muscular and evil.  Two−bit, the Oriental, impassively watching. And a dozen others, more  or less. All were
  heavily armed.
  They were holding two prisoners.
  The man captive had the frame of a  two−hundred−pounder, and probably weighed not much more than half
  of  that. He was near fifty, and had a great deal of white hair.
  The woman captive was about the same age, a tall,  sturdy figure of a lady who had been pretty in her youth
  and was now  quite handsome.
  Both prisoners were whites. They were holding their  hands up.
  "�and you were a fool ever to come back as you have,  Lupp," the man was saying. "When we found this
  place, it was only by  the rarest accident. We all might have escaped, if it had not been for  your greed. But no.
  You saw what was here, and you tried to take it."
  Lupp laughed harshly. "It’s plenty worth taking,  Space!"
  The white−haired man continued. "As my assistant and  manager of my exploring expedition, you took
  advantage of my trust. It  was only by double−crossing myself and my wife, leaving us behind, that  you and
  Two−bit escaped."
  Two−bit, the Celestial, squirmed uneasily and looked  pained. Lupp was unaffected.
  "Martin Space, the eminent explorer!" he jeered.  "What the hell do you think I am? You and your kind get
  along on the  few dimes your museums and societies hand out to you. But me, I like  dough. Plenty of dough. I
  thought I was gonna get it, only they up and  repealed prohibition in the States. Then I ran onto my big chance
  here.  What kind of a sucker do you take me for?"
  "You’re not a sucker," replied the white−haired  Space. "You are as unprincipled a devil as was spawned."
  Lupp laughed again. "Now that we’ve got that  settled, we’ll proceed."
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  "And what do you think you are going to do?" Space  asked calmly.
  "Get rid of you and your wife permanently," Lupp  said.
  "Murder?"
  "It’s only murder when you get caught. There’s not  much chance of that."
  Lupp cocked the large revolver he was carrying and  raised it.
  "Lupp!" Kit Merrimore cried out, in horror.
  LUPP half lowered his gun and looked at the young  woman who was known around New York as a
  thrill−hunter with too much  money.
  "What’d you think we would do?" he demanded.
  Kit Merrimore gasped. "When you came to me in New  York to finance this thing, you told me there would be
  no killing, and  that you would rescue Martin Space and his wife!"
  Lupp laughed. "I’ve changed my ideas."
  "You’ll change them again!" the young woman snapped.  "You are not going to murder these people or
  anybody else!"
  Lupp nodded at his men. Several lifted their weapons.
  "We’re going ahead with it," Lupp said grimly. "And  let me tell you something else! I’ve been making a play
  for you ever  since we started this thing, and not been getting any place. From now  on, that is going to be
  different, too!"
  Kit Merrimore bent forward a little. She showed her  teeth, and it was not a smile.
  "You touch me," she said too calmly, "and I’ll kill  you if it’s the last thing I ever do!"
  It was not a loud declaration, but it had a quality  in it that caused Lupp to move back a step, as if he had just
  missed  being bitten by a poisonous snake. He recovered immediately.
  "Grab her!" he ordered his men.
  Four men sprang for Kit Merrimore. She tried to whip  a small gun out, but did not quite succeed. She fired at
  one of the men  from her pocket, and the bullet damaged his leg slightly, causing him  to emit an earsplitting
  howl. Then they got the young woman’s gun and  held her.
  Lupp looked her up and down evilly, but at the same  time he seemed to be thinking. He had evidently
  observed Kit Merrimore  enough to realize she would be dangerous as long as she was alive. Too  dangerous,
  he must have thought, for he shrugged.
  "Put her with Space and his wife," Lupp ordered.  "Women will be a dime a dozen when we get back outside."
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  They shoved Kit Merrimore toward the explorer and  his wife.
  "You’re going to kill me?" Kit Merrimore demanded.
  "Hell, yes," Lupp said frankly. "I’m afraid of you."
  The men stepped back from Kit Merrimore and the two  Spaces. They got their guns ready.
  Martin Space said desperately, "Goa is my friend  now! You will never live to leave this�"
  "Give it to them!" Lupp rapped. "We’ll take care of  Goa and the rest of�"
  He did not finish it. The rock made an almost  metallic noise hitting the side of his head.
  HAVING thrown the rock, Doc Savage lost no time. He  heaved erect, charged. During the excitement
  connected with Kit  Merrimore’s seizure, he had crawled close.
  He hit two men, lifted them, flung them into two  others. All four went down. Doc had a smoke bomb in one
  hand. He flung  it to the earth. It bloomed a black mushroom, and an instant later no  one was very sure where
  anybody else was.
  Doc Savage, who had started quite effectively, was  himself somewhat out of luck, because he made a few
  hearty swings at  the spot where Lupp had been, but Lupp had moved, fortunately for him.  The bronze man
  finally connected with some one else, and knocked him  completely out of the smoke cloud.
  The smoke had a certain stinging effect on the lungs  and eyes, not enough to blind, or even make one cough,
  if one used  self−control. The sting was vastly disturbing to those who did not know  much about it, for they
  immediately thought it was gas, probably poison.
  Doc changed position, found Martin Space and his  wife, whose feet were tied. He picked them up bodily.
  Some one said, "No, you don’t!" and hit him three  times about as fast as he had ever been hit before. It was
  Kit  Merrimore.
  Doc said, "Stop that!" and she stopped. Furthermore,  she was of some aid in getting out of the mêlée, to the
  extent that she  tripped some one.
  They got out of the smoke cloud.
  "Run!" Doc said, and they ran.
  The man whom Doc had knocked out of the smoke was  sitting on the ground and he saw them.
  "Here they go!" he began to bawl. "Here they  go!"
  That was the wrong thing from his standpoint. He  should have said, "There they go." His friends ran for his
  voice, and by that time Doc Savage had steered his party around to the  other side of the smoke cloud�and
  back into it.
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  Going back into the smoke was a smooth move. The  clearing was one of size, and the group would probably
  have been shot  full of holes had they tried to get across it.
  As it was, the enemy thought by some miracle Doc and  the prisoners had traversed the distance to the jungle,
  and immediately  began to shoot the luxuriant tropical growth full of holes, to the  immense distress of wild
  guineas and not−so−wild goats.
  Meanwhile, Doc Savage and his party simply kept in  the smoke cloud and walked along with it�the bronze
  man’s judgment of  the wind speed was nice�as the breeze swept it to the opposite side of  the clearing. Once
  under cover, Kit Merrimore took off her nice, shiny,  but stiff and clumsy boots, after which it was remarkable
  with what  silence she could move.
  The party traversed all of a half mile without  anybody saying anything but, "Watch that dry stick," or "It
  looks more  open over here," and such stuff.
  At the end of the half mile, Kit Merrimore stopped,  looked Doc Savage up and down, and shook her head.
  "What a prize one I’ve been," she said.
  SOME men might have agreed with her, but Doc Savage  had acquired restraint, and moreover, was afraid of
  women. If not  afraid, he at least considered them too difficult, one never knowing  what they would do.
  Kit Merrimore began, "They played me for a sucker to  finance them. Lupp is a former gangster and
  bootlegger, and when he  needed men for this job, he gathered up his old associates; but they  did not have
  money enough to buy a plane or finance a trip here. So  they used me, telling me�"
  Doc told her he had heard all that, thus heading off  a redundant explanation.
  "Well," the girl said, "there is a lot you don’t  know about this place and what it is."
  Doc told her he had formed some ideas and left the  impression that he was interested in knowing how close
  his guessing had  been.
  "But Lupp and the gang will hunt for us," he said.  "And we are too close to them."
  The band appreciated that.
  "What is the best direction for safety?" Doc asked.
  "To Ost," Martin Space said. "It is at the far end  of the valley. You cannot see it from here."
  Doc indicated they would go in that direction. They  did.
  Kit Merrimore reminded, "Your men. What about them?  Or are they with you?"
  "They can take care of themselves about as well as  any five men alive," Doc said.
  Then he was reminded of something else which would  likely interest Monk and Ham:
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  "What about the pig and the what−is−it?" he asked.
  "So that’s what you call that thing that looks like  a monkey," the girl said. "Well they must be around, in the
  jungle  somewhere. They never did take to Lupp, and both pets ran when Lupp  seized Martin Space and his
  wife."
  Martin Space said, "We saw the dirigible land, and  ran to meet the crew. We did not dream it was Lupp."
  Doc asked, "What about the Ostians?"
  "I guess they saw the dirigible, too," Martin Space  decided. "But they would fuss around some before they
  started to see  what it was. Have to consult old Goa and their other yogis first, you  know. They’ll be along in
  time."
  "On our side?" Doc asked.
  "Oh, definitely," Martin Space declared. "They are  my friends."
  About this time, men began walking out of the jungle  around them. They were grotesque fellows with
  incredibly long arms, big  heads, bodies which were mostly belly and legs which did not amount to  much.
  They were all blue. Some were more blue than others.
  Each man carried a short stick made of some dark  wood resembling mahogany and about as long as a
  walking stick. To one  end of each of these sticks was affixed a noose made out of stuff which  resembled
  braided fiddlestrings.
  They showed every indication of intending to lasso  Doc and the others with these unique weapons.
  Chapter XVII. GOA
  DOC SAVAGE leaped backward a few paces, picked up a  long branch which had fallen from a tree and took
  a swat at the nearest  blue Ostian. The fellow got out from under with the nimbleness of a  fly, using his long
  arms. Doc whacked and poked and temporarily  discouraged the assault.
  "So they are your Friends!" Kit Merrimore told  Martin Space dryly.
  Space said, as if it explained everything, "These  are some low−caste Ostians."
  "High or low, they mean business," the girl  declared. "What is the difference?"
  "Ignorance," Space said. "These chaps are dumb,  frenziedly given to superstitious beliefs. They think white
  people are  evil spirits or devils, who will do them no good."
  "If they knew the history of American Indians," Kit  Merrimore declared, "they would know they weren’t so
  far wrong."
  Doc made a few more passes with his long stick. The  twig was thicker than his wrist, and the Ostians
  appeared to marvel  greatly at the kind of man who could wield such a tree as if it were  really light. This held
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  them back. Then they came closer.
  They now used some of the strategy which American  Indians found rather effective on covered−wagon
  trains. They circled,  yelling, jumping up and down, and occasionally jumping at Doc or one of  his group.
  They held their sticks with the nooses on the ends  ready.
  "This is the craziest thing I ever dreamed of!" Kit  Merrimore gasped. "I’ll bet an audience would kill itself
  laughing if  they saw this on a screen!"
  "The audience," Martin Space said, "wouldn’t be able  to feel those nooses like we will."
  "You mean they’ll choke us?" the girl cried.
  "It’s their religion," Space said, talking like a  scientist telling a student a bug had five legs. "They believed
  they  will go to hell if they kill anybody or anything. But if they tie  something around your neck and you
  suffocate, they figure you just died.
  "They don’t understand what suffocation is, so they  don’t believe it is anything they caused. It’s a custom
  throughout the  South Seas, for that matter. Why, the natives on many islands choke a  chicken instead of
  ringing its neck when they want one for supper. In  other words�"
  "That’s enough words!" groaned the young woman who  liked her thrills.
  The words were hardly out when she followed them  with an "Eeek!" An Ostian had lassoed her. He gave the
  stick a  yank, the noose tightened more, and punch−hunter Kit Merrimore began to  act like a chicken which
  had suddenly lost its head.
  Every Ostian low−caste emitted a brother−greeting  howl and sprang to the attack. Doc instinctively felt of his
  pocketed  vest, but he was out of the smoke bombs which had proved so effective.
  A supermachine pistol would have helped the  situation materially, but Doc never carried one of the weapons
  himself,  feeling that carrying any sort of firearm made the carrier too  dependent upon the weapon. This was
  not the first time the theory had  looked bad in practice.
  A lasso got Doc’s arm. The blue human spider who  held it started to yank, but was himself yanked forward
  against Doc’s  fist. A man rushed in�he probably did not realize just how foolish he  was being�and grabbed
  Doc. The blue devil was strong in the arms, but  weak in the legs. Before Doc could get rid of him, another
  was on them.
  Doc reached for his tear−gas capsules. He had only  one, and he had intended to save it if possible. It did not
  look as if  it were possible.
  There was a sound as if some one had broken the  smallest and tightest string on a piano.
  An Ostian fell over with one of his eyes shot out.
  THE crash of the rifle reached them an instant  later. It was followed by more bullets and more crashes. Some
  of the  bullets missed, but some didn’t.
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  Doc did not need Kit Merrimore’s, "Lupp!" to know  what was happening.
  "Run!" the bronze man ordered.
  They had no trouble doing that. The Ostians had  stopped everything else and were looking at each other.
  When one of  their number would fall over with a bullet in him, they would look at  him with their mouths
  open, and even walk over and peer down at him,  kick him, and cackle at him, asking him what kind of silly
  game the man  was trying to play.
  It was pitiful because they did not know what a  rifle was and did not realize they were being killed.
  Doc whirled and yelled at them in a dialect which he  believed was, of all those he knew, closest to the one
  they spoke.
  "Run!" he told them. "A strange devil is killing  you!"
  The dialect which he used happened to be an  Indo−China tribal one. And Indo−China was not very near to
  New Guinea,  unless two thousand five hundred miles could be called near.
  The Ostians paid no attention to the yell, but kept  on acting like chickens when another chicken is shot. They
  understood  what Doc had shouted, but their reaction was the wrong one.
  Any time their deities sent a devil which squeaked  and banged to kill them, they probably needed killing, one
  yelled. This  last was what Martin Space gasped out as the group plunged into the  jungle. He could understand
  the tongue.
  A number of bullets smashed through the foliage as  Lupp and his men fired.
  "Go on!" Doc said.
  "But you?" Kit Merrimore gasped.
  "Go on!" Doc said, and there was something in his  voice that shut the young woman up and made her run on
  with the Spaces.  And Kit Merrimore had not taken an order from anybody in a long time.  When she did think
  of that, it made her mad, and she stopped.
  "Come on!" Martin Space said.
  "Nobody is going to order me around!" said Kit  Merrimore. "That big fellow is too free with telling people
  what to do."
  Martin Space then demonstrated that he was a judge  of character.
  "You are a young woman without much judgment," he  told Kit Merrimore. "And that man is Doc Savage,
  who was just beginning  to be known as one of the most remarkable men who ever lived, about the  time I
  started this New Guinea exploration which brought me here."
  "If you were a woman, I’d slap you!" Kit Merrimore  said angrily, not being used to being told the truth.
  Mrs. Space, who had said almost nothing up to this  point, said, "I’m a woman, and I’d love for you to slap
  me. I’d paddle  you good!"
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  Kit Merrimore got madder and madder and finally  burst out laughing.
  "Let’s run," she said.
  DOC SAVAGE had turned back for two reasons, any one  of which would have been enough: He wanted to
  save the lives of the  silly blue Ostians. And he wanted to get Lupp and his men off the trail  of Martin Space,
  his wife and Kit Merrimore. The same move would  accomplish both purposes. He made it.
  He simply showed himself to Lupp’s gang. The latter  started yelling and shooting. Doc got behind a big tree
  near which he  had foresightedly looked for. He got down low enough so that the  irregularities of the earth
  sheltered him, and left, making a plain  trail.
  A pack of redbone foxhounds would not have made more  noise following the trail than Lupp and his men
  made. They must have  brought plenty of ammunition along, because they were free with it.  None of the slugs
  would have hit a quarry who used ordinary sense, and  Doc evaded them easily, keeping well ahead.
  Lupp’s men began to get discouraged. And possibly a  little scared. By now they knew the bronze man could
  pass muster as a  blend between a ghost, a magician and a bobcat. He was nobody to be  loose in the same
  woods with if he didn’t like you.
  Doc egged them on a little with an old bobwhite  trick. He fell down when he came to a soft spot where the
  marks would  show, and dragged his legs as if he were wounded.
  The howl that went up when the pursuers came to that  place made every one happy.
  When Doc had led them over to the northern wall of  cliffs, about a mile, he took to the treetops, swung from
  branch to  branch with an agility that seemed uncanny unless one had studied the  tricks of circus acrobats, and
  left the pursuers to poke around the  terminus of a trail abruptly ended, and eventually to start calling  each
  other names that meant stupid.
  By that time, Doc had found Kit Merrimore, Martin  Space and the latter’s wife. Kit Merrimore had a sweet
  smile for the  bronze man.
  Kit Merrimore was a remarkable young woman in that  she could carry her peeves when the danger and
  mystery around her would  have made another weak with unease. She had decided to use her feminine
  weapons on Doc. Get him agog about her. Then squash him plenty.
  She did not know Doc very well yet, or she would not  have wasted time with that idea.
  "You really think it is safe to go to this Ost?" Doc  asked.
  "Indeed I do," Martain Space said. "Goa is my  friend."
  "So were those Ostians back there," Kit Merrimore  remembered aloud dryly.
  WHEN the party got their first glimpse of Ost, they  all stood still and nobody spoke or hardly breathed. They
  did that for  almost five minutes.
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  People do that when they see the Grand Canyon.
  Ost was black. So shiny black that it almost hurt  the eyes. The pyramids seemed to be made of stone, and
  looked as if one  great slab had been placed on top of a greater one, then a smaller one  on the very top, to
  make each house. That was only the effect, though,  for the slabs were doubtless rooms, or floors of rooms.
  Every building was made with mathematical precision,  and they were arrayed in a neat semicircle�a letter C
  of buildings with  the opening of the C against a tremendous overhanging cliff. A wall  connected the
  buildings.
  The really gigantic size of this cliff, and the fact  that it overhung hundreds of feet, did not become fully
  apparent until  later.
  It was vaguely like the city of Ost which had been  seen at sea. Yet different. That had been an outline, vague,
  like a  phosphorescent photographic print, underexposed.
  Martin Space speared out an arm.
  "The temple of Goa the Mighty," he said.
  There was no mistaking what he meant�the upside−down  building. It was like the others, a pyramid of black
  stone. But it was  upside down, against the underside of the great cliff which was such an  overhanging mass.
  The amazing structure, because of its incredible  position, looked larger than some of the others, but probably
  was not.
  "The black rock is all magnetic iron oxide," Doc  Savage said.
  Martin Space nodded. "Commonly called lodestone. The  mineral of nature which attracts metal like a
  magnet."
  "Whew!" gasped Kit Merrimore. "What a relief! I was  just beginning to think we were in a land where the
  natural course of  things had reversed themselves. The cliff is lodestone, and that temple  or whatever you
  called it is lodestone, too, and they attract each  other. That is why the temple sticks to the underside of the
  cliff that  way."
  Martin Space nodded again, then added, "But let me  warn you."
  "What about?"
  "You are going to find some things in Ost that are  much harder than that to explain," Space said. "But let me
  warn you  now. Everything you see here, which may seem impossible, can be  explained by modern science.
  Everything! Remember that and it may  literally save your reason."
  "You sound," Kit Merrimore said, "as if this was  quite a place."
  "The place is not as unusual as the beings you will  find here," Space replied.
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  Chapter XVIII. SIEGE
  CULTIVATED fields were around the party as they went  forward toward Ost. It was an intensive kind of
  cultivation. First,  there was a wall across the valley, a low wall inset along the top with  pointed stakes. A
  fence to keep back the goats and other  semi−domesticated animals.
  Doc, observing closely, noted that they scaled the  wall without trouble. At intervals along the fence were
  poles atop  which were contraptions turned by the wind and which flapped bits of  leather and made noises
  calculated to frighten out of his wits any crow  or buzzard. Scattered through the fields were other such
  scarecrows.
  Doc, observing closely, noted that the parts of  these scarecrows which turned were inscribed with what were
  apparently  prayer symbols similar to the "Om mani padme hum," of the  Tibetans. Each revolution of the
  wheel was doubtless construed as  offering a prayer for the wheel’s owner and builder. Thus the wheels
  served both as prayer mediums and as warnings to the birds.
  The fields were as intensively cultivated as hotbeds  or greenhouses. Each patch was surrounded by a stone
  retaining wall,  and there were stone−walled ditches, some filled with water for  irrigating.
  Everything stood as if work had been suddenly  interrupted. Here and there were baskets, still filled with
  fertilizer,  and hoes and leveling rakes had been dropped in the fields.
  "They fled to the temple when they saw the  dirigible," said Martin Space.
  The black pyramids and connecting wall of Ost grew  larger�at least that was the effect�as Doc and the others
  approached.  The great ledge shoved out toward them, and it was not apparent that  the gigantic shelf of stone
  literally overhung at least half of the  strange metropolis of Ost itself.
  "Whew!" breathed Kit Merrimore. "Are these  inhabitants of Ost invisible or something?"
  When Martin Space did not reply, the young woman  stared at him and her lips came apart and her eyes got
  wide.
  "Are they?" 
  she gasped. 
  "Oh, not exactly anything like that," Martin Space  muttered. "But�well, I am afraid you will begin to think
  your mind is  going haywire before long."
  The black wall connecting the pyramid was too high  for any man to jump, even with the aid of a pole, and
  was glass smooth,  so that there was no climbing it.
  But at one point there was an opening, rectangular,  evidently arranged to be closed by a sliding panel of the
  stone. Doc  Savage and the others passed through.
  "I do not know what will happen," Martin Space said.  "But keep your heads."
  Kit Merrimore looked around when they were through  the aperture in the wall. There was no one in sight.
  Ahead stretched a  flat area, and on either side was the ring of strange pyramidical  houses. There was one very
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  striking thing about the whole picture: The  incredible neatness.
  There were no small objects about. No baskets. No  implements, vessels or trinkets. There was no dust or dirt,
  even; not a  single article of clothing could be seen anywhere.
  There was no sound. Only the shiny blackness of the  unusual lodestone of which everything was made. And
  the cliff, a  looming black silence overhead, with the upside−down building under it.  Stillness�
  Mrs. Space said, "Goa�he always�I feel, when I see  him�as the Egyptians must have felt when they saw the
  waters part for  the Israelites."
  Martin Space, as if the words had been all that was  needed to give him a final shove, stopped.
  He said, "Mr. Savage, perhaps I should try to make  some things clear before we go any farther."
  DOC SAVAGE came to a halt. For a moment, the weird  silence seemed as real as a monster.
  Doc Savage said, "These people are of Hindu descent,  the original followers of the yogi beliefs, and have
  been at it for  centuries."
  Martin Space did not seem surprised. He nodded.
  "You have an analytical and reasoning mind," he  said. "I hoped you would realize that what you will see here
  is real,  and absolutely possible. You are right about these people of Ost being  of Hindu and Yogi descent."
  "You know the history of the Ostians?" Doc queried.
  "They once populated a city in what I presume is now  Indo−China," Space replied. "Whether it is the lost city
  which was  found in the Indo−China jungles a few years ago, I do not know. You  will recall that such a city
  was found, and no one has as yet been able  to explain what became of the people who built it and vanished
  centuries ago."(Such a city was found in Indo−China by explorers, and  movie patrons may recall having seen
  motion pictures which were made of  the fantastic place and later exhibited over the United States.)
  Doc said, "That is true."
  "The Ostians were driven out of their original city  by a plague," Space continued. "Their yogis, or medicine
  men, got them  here, to this place. It must have been a terrible trip, but boats were  known in that day, although
  it was long before the time of Christ.
  "They reached this valley and the magic black  mountain, and stayed here because of the mountain. You and I
  know the  mountain is only magnetic iron oxide, or iron oxide magnetized by the  earth itself. But the Ostians
  considered it a magic mountain."
  "They have been here since?" Doc asked.
  "Oh, yes. Remember, I said they were followers of  the yogi belief from the first? Yogis are believers in few
  comforts for  their bodies and much deep thinking. A great yogi would spend his time  in sitting and thinking
  about things and the world and the mysteries of  life, instead of trying to make a lot of money."
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  "Sort of the opposite of the way things go in New  York," Kit Merrimore said dryly.
  "Twenty−three or twenty−four hundred years of  thought and reflection explains what you are going to see
  soon, and  some of what you have already experienced," Martin Space finished.  "Come. We will speak to
  Goa."
  He walked to a spot under the strange temple hanging  from the underside of the cliff. As they drew near, a
  stout cord with a  knot every foot or so came snaking down from the upside−down temple.
  Goa descended the cord.
  THERE was nothing new about the appearance of Goa.  Doc Savage and his aids had seen, apparently, the
  fellow before. The  master yogi�that was what he turned out to be�was the spider−armed  fellow who had
  appeared in the jungle and urged them on toward Ost.
  His age was undoubtedly beyond seventy, and he was  clad only in an enormously long red cloth which he
  had wrapped around  and around his person, tucking the end in. His arms were strong,  judging from the easy
  manner in which he descended the line. When he  spoke, it was in excellent English, although there was
  nothing  Caucasian about the cast of his features.
  "You will climb the rope, and at the top you will  find a spot where you can talk," he said.
  Doc Savage tested the line. It seemed solid. Martin  Space went up. He seemed to have had practice, for he
  had no trouble.  His wife, a muscular woman, also mounted. Then Kit Merrimore, and  finally, Doc Savage.
  They left the remarkable creature, Goa, at the  foot of the rope.
  Doc Savage swung through a hole into a square black  room which was absolutely bare and lighted only by
  such illumination as  was reflected up through the hole. The room had no other opening.
  Kit Merrimore looked down at Goa standing at the  foot of the rope.
  "He gives me the creeps," she said.
  The next instant she jumped and cried out. Goa was  suddenly standing almost beside her. And he had not
  climbed the line!
  Kit Merrimore blinked at him. "Why�why�you must be  twins!"
  "I have been standing here all the time," Goa said  calmly.
  Kit Merrimore looked suddenly indignant. She opened  her mouth, and it was plain to be seen she was going
  to state in no  uncertain terms that she knew when she was being kidded and didn’t like  it.
  Doc Savage stopped her.
  "Goa is a master of self−projection," the bronze man  said.
  The young woman obviously knew what that meant. She  stared at Doc as if about to call him a liar, then
  thought better of  it, moistened her lips and said, "I�well, I’m just a bit too modern for  that. There is no such
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  thing!"
  "On the contrary," the bronze man replied. "You have  just seen proof of it. Goa stood here, yet we saw him
  down there at the  front of the rope."
  "There is some trick to it!" the girl snapped.
  The bronze man shook his head: "It is real enough in  this case, apparently. Just how it is accomplished is
  beyond my present  ability to explain. At any rate, it is known the brain definitely does  set up tiny magnetic
  fields, and that nervous impulses are probably  electrical in nature, so it is not absolutely impossible that the
  brain  does send out impulses just as a radio station sends out ether  impulses. Not the same kind, naturally."
  "I’ll be darned if I can believe it," said Kit  Merrimore.
  "Myself and my men saw Goa plainly on the seacoast  many miles from here, and later in the jungles," Doc
  explained. "And  you will recall that many sailors saw this city of Ost, a likeness of  which Goa must have
  projected by mental power."
  "All right!" snapped Kit Merrimore. "That’s enough.  I don’t believe any of it. I won’t believe anything that
  anybody can’t  explain to me so I can understand!"
  "Science has been unable to explain many of the  mysteries of the Orient," Doc Savage reminded. 
  (Among the mysterious feats of Hindu fakirs which  science has been unable to explain is the one where the
  yogi  floats unsuspended and unsupported in mid−air before the eyes of the  observers. For many years,
  travelers have reported witnessing this  impossible feat. For years, it was claimed by scientists that hypnotism
  was used. But within recent months actual pictures have been  taken of the subject suspended in mid−air.
  Such pictures appeared in  the Illustrated London News among other publications, and were  reprinted in some
  magazines in the United States. While it may be  possible to hypnotize an individual and make him think he
  was seeing  something which was not happening, hypnotizing a camera is something  else again.
  For years, skeptics have laughed off these  impossible feats of the yogis by saying that it was hypnotism since
  a  camera photograph showed nothing. But the above instance definitely  refutes this contention.�Kenneth
  Robeson.)
  Goa said calmly, "There are more important things to  discuss than what I can and cannot do."
  "What?" Doc Savage asked.
  "Not a pleasant subject," the strange creature  replied. "Death."
  THE bronze man did not change expression, but Kit  Merrimore blanched a little.
  "Whose death?" Doc asked.
  Martin Space answered that question. "My own and my  wife’s," he said. "And now, probably the lives of this
  young lady,  yourself and your men."
  Goa nodded. "I might add, my own as well."
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  Martin Space looked at the strange blue, long−armed  old fellow in red.
  "I am sorry, Goa," Space muttered. "You befriended  me, and used your mental powers in an attempt to
  summon help from the  outer world to take myself and my wife back to civilization."
  Doc Savage listened with interest to this.
  "You know a sailor named Ben Brasken?" Doc asked Goa.
  "No," the old man replied, "except that I read your  mind after a fashion. That is one of my powers, as you
  would call it. I  see by your thoughts that Ben Brasken is some one who caught my  projection of the city."
  Kit Merrimore gasped, "Then Ben Brasken didn’t come  here?"
  Doc replied, "He did not. He could not have, because  it was physically impossible, and Ben Brasken was no
  yogi. What  happened was this: Ben Brasken had a dreamer’s mind, and was more  receptive to Goa’s thought
  projection than the other sailors on the  Benny Boston. Ben Brasken was put into a state of coma, so greatly
  was his mind affected.
  "He crept off to a recess in the ship, probably one  where he was in the habit of going when he wanted to be
  alone. He  remained there for days, not entirely himself mentally, under the spell  of Goa’s projected thoughts
  all the time. He made those iron blocks  while under the spell." The bronze man paused and glanced at Goa.
  "Naturally, I included instructions in how to get  here in my projected thoughts," Goa said. "I also sent out
  mental  pictures of Martin Space and his wife."
  Doc Savage nodded. "There is one other thing which  Ben Brasken mentioned that you have not explained."
  "What?"
  "Something that Ben Brasken called a terrible fear."
  THE strange silence was no longer outside. As the  party had entered Ost, the sinister quiet had been perhaps
  the most  striking thing. But now there were noises, low calling for the most  part, but occasionally a sharper
  shout. And as moments dragged on,  there were more and more of the shouts.
  Goa seemed interested in the noises more than he was  in the conversation they were having.
  "The fear?" he said vaguely. "Oh, that! Perhaps  Martin Space had best explain it."
  Martin Space nodded. "Goa is my friend, you  understand. He is the only friend I have here, or that any white
  man  has, really. It was different when we first came, when we first  stumbled on this place by accident and
  slid down into the valley with  ropes. Some of them were friendly to us, then. But Lupp killed some of  them
  when he escaped."
  "I did not know that," Doc said.
  Space nodded. "Only Goa’s warnings saved my life  then."
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  The muttering below was louder, more ominous.
  Doc Savage asked Goa, "What makes your beliefs  differ from those of the other Ostians?"
  Old Goa shrugged. "They do not believe as I," he  said. "Thinking is hard work, and for the last generation or
  two, it  has rather stopped. I am the last of the great thinkers. The human  brain is like what you call a muscle,
  and if it is not used, it falls  off in strength. As for the question of the life of this man Martin  Space�why
  should he die?"
  There was really no reason. 
  Doc said, "Lupp came back."
  "We were afraid he would," Space muttered.
  "Why did he return?"
  Space looked at Goa. The queer old fellow shrugged  in a perfectly human way.
  "No harm in telling him," he said. "The real harm  was done when Lupp found out about it."
  Space told Doc. "When these people left their  ancient home, they brought along the accumulations of
  generations of  wealth. At the expense of sounding trite, I will say that they have  gold and jewels such as you
  never dreamed existed. You know that even  to−day some of the greatest collections of hoarded wealth are to
  be  found in India. The instinct to hoard must be a racial one."
  Kit Merrimore said, "Lupp told me he saw a pair of  cut diamonds as large as his fists!"
  "The eyes of an ancient image of some kind," Space  nodded. "Such huge jewels were almost invariably used
  for such  purposes."
  There was a sharp cackle of shouts below. They had  an angry imperativeness.
  Goa went to the floor aperture and stared downward.  They babbled up at him.
  Goa looked at the bronze man and the others.
  "It is too bad you are not up to the task of  self−projection," he said softly. "If so, you might make them think
  you  were elsewhere. I, myself, may be able to escape them in that fashion."
  Doc Savage went to the aperture and looked down. The  area immediately below was blue with the
  spider−armed men. They were  armed with their queer sticks and nooses, and with large blocks of  wood,
  bundles of reeds, and jars which seemed to contain an oil of some  kind.
  "They look as if they meant business," Kit Merrimore  said.
  OLD Goa, who talked as if he were one of them in  spite of his amazing appearance, said, "Lupp and his men
  killed some of  them, and they have decided to kill every white man in the valley.  After all, it is a very simple
  conclusion for them to reach. And not a  bad one."
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  "They will have their difficulties when they tackle  Lupp," Doc Savage said, "Lupp is armed with some very
  modern machine  guns and military equipment."
  Kit Merrimore made her jaw firm.
  "If you think they’re going to bump us off  easily, you’ve got another guess coming!" she snapped. She
  whirled,  eyed old Goa. "What is there around here to fight with?"
  Goa shrugged. "Nothing."
  Kit Merrimore squinted at him. "Look here! You sound  phony to me! You are supposed to be some kind of a
  yogi or medicine man  who spent his life sitting here meditating. That don’t ring right,  because you speak
  English as if you had been throwing it around all  your life!"
  Goa shrugged again, spread his hands.
  "My friend Martin Space has been here a long time,  and Lupp and the Chinaman, Two−bit, were also here,
  and from them I  learned the tongue," he said. "It does not take me long to learn  things. My brain is a
  storehouse which I keep well in order."
  A puff of smoke drew the party’s attention to the  opening again. The Ostians had made a great pile of
  timbers, kindling  and tinder below, had dumped their oil on the whole, and some one had  come running with
  a hot coal. The mass was blazing up. They were  bringing more fuel.
  Space swallowed, said with an effort, "Trying to  suffocate us!" and looked at his wife.
  "It’s all right, Martin," his wife said.
  Kit Merrimore declared, more as a statement of fact  than in a panic, "I’m not ready to die yet by a long shot!"
  Old Goa sighed.
  "I think there is a part of man which never dies,"  he said. "I confess a great curiosity to find out about that,
  yet I am  a bit reluctant to be shoved into taking the step."
  Chapter XIX. THE REST OF THE VICTIMS
  DOC SAVAGE’S five associates were still at the mouth  of the underground boiling−hot stream by which
  they had entered the  valley. The bronze man had told them to wait there. They had waited.  About long
  enough, they were thinking.
  Renny stood up and blocked and unblocked his huge  fists.
  "Holy cow!" he rumbled. "Something has gone wrong.  And I’m in favor of using our judgment."
  The others agreed. That was the usual procedure.  Orders from the bronze man were to be obeyed, but not if
  their better  judgment told them there was some good reason why they should not be.
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  The shots they had heard much earlier had impressed  them as being reason enough.
  "We should ‘a’ gone to find out what that shooting  was about right off the bat," Monk muttered.
  The party headed for the dirigible. Having rested,  they felt much better. The heavy iron contraptions by
  which they had  entered the valley were difficult to carry, so they buried them at the  foot of a prominent tree,
  and hid the spot well.
  Approaching near the dirigible, Doc’s men discovered  three of Lupp’s men guarding it. The trio were much
  too alert to be  captured without a noise. They might easily be winged with the machine  pistols and mercy
  bullets, but that would mean a racket, too.
  "I got an idea," Monk whispered.
  "Treat it gently," Ham snapped. "It’s in a strange  place. What is it?"
  "Take the carburetors or somethin’ off the airship,  you clothes−horse shyster, so the thing won’t fly," Monk
  said.
  Ham gritted his teeth to show what he thought of  that.
  "I suppose them three guards won’t have anything to  say about it?" he sneered.
  AT this point, two more men appeared out of the  jungle and walked toward the three guards watching the
  dirigible. There  was a short conference, then the two climbed into the motor gondolas,  which were really
  compartments entirely contained within the craft.  There was a clinking of tools on metal. The men climbed
  out again in  about five minutes.
  They carried the injection jets, very essential  parts of the special Diesel motors with which the craft was
  powered.  The Diesels did not have carburetors, as Monk now recollected.
  "Blazes!" the homely chemist gritted. "They thought  of it ahead of us!"
  Lupp’s men now walked away from the dirigible,  heading up the valley. They carried the jets, which were not
  heavy.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" bony Johnny muttered.  "An obreptitious reconnoiter is propitious."
  "Eh?" Monk said.
  Long Tom translated, "I guess he means we better  trail ‘em."
  They did that. It was not difficult. Monk, as if he  had something he wanted to think over, dropped behind.
  Perhaps fifteen minutes later, the others suddenly  discovered Monk was no longer with them. He had
  disappeared.
  "Do you suppose something could have happened to  him?" Ham gasped.
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  The stark anxiety in Ham’s voice was surprising in  view of the things he had been telling Monk about the
  latter and his  ancestors and how little he�Ham�would care if Monk fell into one of the  sulphur−exuding
  volcanic cracks they had passed enroute, which would be  only a sample, Ham claimed, of where Monk was
  eventually going, anyhow.
  Ham, when Monk came stalking out of the jungle a bit  later, flew into a rage again, however.
  "We thought you had got killed," Ham gritted, "and  had just stopped to cheer!"
  Monk grinned amiably. The homely chemist was  carrying some metal objects.
  "The airship won’t fly without these, either," he  said, and exhibited them.
  He had removed certain very essential gears from the  Diesels.
  "Now I gotta find a place to bury ‘em," he said.
  He looked around. Immediately, his eyes protruded.
  "Glory be!" Monk gulped.
  The Chinaman, Two−bit, had come out of the jungle  and was watching them.
  MONK, who looked as clumsy as a Missouri snapping  turtle, produced his supermachine pistol with
  astonishing speed.
  "Start somethin’, heathen!" he squeaked. "I think I  could die happy, once I got to pepper you good!"
  Two−bit grinned at them as if they were his very  dear friends.
  "Velly happy see you fella," he said.
  Monk and the others exchanged startled looks.
  "Me look all ovel hellee fo’ you fella," Two−bit  explained blandly.
  Monk growled suspiciously, and said, "There’s a  Celestial in the woodpile here somewhere!"
  While Two−bit stood smiling happily at Doc’s men,  and they stood waiting for whatever to happen that was
  going to  happen�nothing would really have surprised them�the pig, Habeas Corpus,  and the what−is−it,
  Chemistry, came out of the jungle and stood at  Two−bit’s side.
  Two−bit bent over and scratched each animal.
  "Velly nice hog and velly nice funny monk," he said.
  Monk and Ham gave signs of having been struck dead  where they stood.
  "They likee me," Two−bit explained.
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  "Habeas!" Monk yelled. "Ain’t you got no pride  a−tall!"
  "Shut up, you dope!" Renny thumped softly. "They  could hear that yell back in San Francisco!"
  "This is a yelling matter!" Monk gurgled. "Ham, that  danged flea−carrier of yours has plum corrupted my
  hog!"
  "My�my�" Ham sputtered his indignation. "If there  was any corrupting done, your hog�"
  "Missy Kit Mellimole likee two animals, too,"  Two−bit offered.
  "There!" Monk croaked. "That’s what caused it. That  danged girl!"
  Long Tom strode forward alertly and addressed  Two−bit.
  "Just what are you doing here, fellow?" the  electrical wizard demanded.
  Two−bit said, "You fella make mistake about me all  along."
  "Yeah?"
  "Me fliend of Maltin Space," said Two−bit.
  NATURALLY, none of Doc’s associates believed  Two−bit, and since nature seems to have endowed each
  Oriental with a  poker face, they were not much more certain after they had questioned  him closely.
  Two−bit, in answer to their queries, maintained he  had been a faithful servant to explorer Martin Space
  throughout, and  had joined Lupp only with the idea of getting to civilization and  bringing help back to get
  Martin Space and his wife.
  Two−bit blandly explained that the reason Lupp had  returned to the valley was to get the store of ancient
  wealth which the  Ostians had brought here from their original dwelling place.
  "The story is hokum!" Monk declared.
  "It tluth," Two−bit declared.
  "It’s a lie! You had plenty of chances in the United  States to escape from Lupp and tell your story."
  "You no savvy," Two−bit complained. "It do me no  good to escape, because only Lupp know how find this
  place again. Me, I  tly and tly to steal papel with location on it, but Lupp keep it hid  some place all time."
  The bronze man’s aids put some sharp queries to  Two−bit about this, but did not shake him. Even Ham, an
  expert at such  stuff because of his legal training, could not make the Oriental admit  he was lying.
  They gave it up in disgust.
  "We’ll take him along and go see what’s in the upper  end of the valley," Monk said.
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  Doc’s men started forward, after searching Two−bit  and finding a revolver on him. They came to a
  well−worn trail, headed  along it.
  Two−bit immediately balked.
  "Not this way!" the Oriental objected. "You fella  fall in tlap!"
  "Yeah?" Monk inquired.
  "Lupp fella watch this tlack," Two−bit explained. 
  Monk thought that over, then grinned thinly. 
  "So that’s it!" the homely chemist growled. "Listen,  fellows! Lupp sent this rice−eater to steer us wrong!
  Probably he’s got  a trap set, and Two−bit, here, wants to lead us into it. What do you  think?"
  "I say follow the trail," Renny rumbled.
  The others agreed, and they followed the trail. 
  Two−bit lost his temper and said some rather  expressive words which he must have picked up around the
  water fronts  of English−speaking countries, after which he accompanied them. There  was nothing else for
  him to do, when it came right down to it.
  Monk and Ham became involved in a deep, whispered  discussion about whether to forgive their pets, who
  now appeared to  want to adopt their respective masters again.
  It ended with painful abruptness when the bronze  man’s aids became aware of gun muzzles protruding from
  the jungle on  either side of the trail.
  Lupp’s voice said calmly, "I hope you gentlemen  don’t think for a moment that I won’t shoot!"
  Chapter XX. PAYMENT IN DEATH
  DOC SAVAGE’S five men had no doubts about what Lupp  might do. They had been trapped, and they were
  the more stupefied  because Two−bit, the Oriental, had warned them about it.
  Two−bit, it now seemed, had been on the level.
  Doc’s men lifted their hands, and when they saw the  number of foes who came out of the jungle with ready
  guns, were glad  they had not tried to fight. All Lupp’s gang seemed to be present. More  than a dozen.
  Two−bit gave Lupp a big, happy smile, said, "This  lowly and foolish one got lost. These bad fella glab him,
  which is what  he had coming fol being such clumsy ox."
  Lupp gave the Oriental a dark−eyed scowl, opened his  mouth, closed it, and said nothing.
  Monk and his companions said nothing, either. They  almost held their breaths. Two−bit, they were
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  convinced, was all right.  And if he put this over, he might help them.
  Two−bit apparently put it over.
  "Stand still!" Lupp ordered his prisoners.
  They were relieved of their weapons, their pockets  were emptied, and Lupp’s men produced strong cords and
  applied them to  their wrists. Judging from the workmanlike knotting, there were  ex−sailors in the gang.
  "Shoot that hog and that other thing!" Lupp snarled. 
  At this, Habeas and Chemistry vanished into the  jungle. Two bullets could hardly have gone more swiftly.
  Lupp, enraged, turned on the prisoners. "Where is  Doc Savage, Kit Merrimore and the Spaces?"
  This was the first the prisoners had heard about Doc  Savage having encountered the young woman or any one
  named Space, and  their startled expressions undoubtedly did more than their vocal  denials to convince Lupp
  they really did not know where Doc was.
  "Well, we’re going to keep you alive for a while,"  Lupp advised them. "You may come in handy."
  He barked commands, and the march got started toward  the end of the valley where Ost lay. Lupp had no
  hesitancy about  following the trail. He simply made his captives walk ahead, so that  they would fall into any
  trap of poisoned thorns or hidden arrow−guns  which might be planted.
  Monk, to keep his mind off possible traps in the  trail, asked questions.
  "How did you birds get the dirigible off the  Benny Boston?" the homely chemist wanted to know.
  "Velly easy," Two−bit volunteered. "We lun ship  aglound on’ island, lock clew in hold and put boxes on
  beach. We fix up  ailship and�"
  "Shut up, you laundryman!" Lupp snarled.
  Eventually Monk and the others caught sight of the  black overhanging cliff under which Ost was situated.
  About the same  time, they began to hear sounds of shouting and screaming, and to  observe a sheet of smoke
  creeping out from under the face of the cliff.
  "I’ll bet Savage is having some trouble!" Lupp  chuckled gleefully, and made every one put on speed.
  HAM, Monk and the other three, anxious and consumed  with curiosity to know what was happening, dashed
  ahead so briskly that  it was only by running at full speed and clubbing with gun stocks that  Lupp and his men
  slowed them down. Even after that, they made a brisk  pace, and came in sight of the strange city of Ost.
  The party ran with their mouths open in astonishment  and wonder for a time, and it was only when Lupp
  managed to stop them  that they realized what was happening.
  Lupp used field glasses on the smoke pouring out  from under the cliff.
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  "Hah!" he yelled. "They’re smoking Savage, that  girl, the Spaces and old Goa out of the temple!"
  This seemed to be what was happening. An enormous  amount of smoke, and probably a great deal of heat,
  was pouring up from  a fire kindled under the temple. The fire had evidently been burning  some time, judging
  from the gigantic column of smoke hanging above the  cliff.
  Lupp said, "That’ll get Savage out of there, if he’s  in the place. But we can work it as well as them blue
  mugs, and now is  a swell chance to make a surprise attack and clean out the place."
  Monk and the others were now lashed to trees, one  man to each tree, and a thorough job was done with the
  tyings, as had  been done with their wrist bindings. They could scarcely move when  Lupp’s men were done,
  and Lupp assigned a rifleman, a thin fellow with  one bad eye, and that entirely evil, to watch them, making it
  highly  unlikely they would get free.
  Lupp and the others rushed off in a charge. Monk  promptly emitted a yell for whatever good it would do. It
  got him  knocked senseless, the rifleman seeming to take a pleasure in the job.  And the Ostians did not hear it,
  being too busy jumping and yelling  around their fire.
  Renny could see, from where he was tied, almost all  that happened. And the awful cries told him the rest.
  Lupp and his men got through the hole in to the city  before they were discovered. Each of them carried a
  submachine gun or  automatic rifle, and apparently, plenty of ammunition. They turned  loose.
  A roaring as of rain on a great roof came out from  under the cliff. The acoustics of the place made the
  machine−gun  roaring hollow sounding.
  It was impossible to see over the wall, but the  cries told enough. The helpless Ostians must have died by the
  dozens.
  Then the unexpected happened. Lupp and his men  appeared, running wildly in flight. Three of them were
  being carried by  the others. These three seemed to have something wrong with their legs.
  The Ostians then appeared. But they were not chasing  Lupp and his gang. The Ostians seemed to want only
  to get away from the  horrible place.
  Something other than the Ostians, then, had routed  Lupp. Monk, who had regained his senses, and the others
  learned what it  was when Lupp arrived.
  Lupp swore until his face was almost as blue as that  of an Ostian.
  "Space’s rifles were in the temple!" Lupp snarled.  "He and Savage are using them. They didn’t use ‘em on
  the Ostians. I  guess they weren’t in any danger from that fire and smoke. But they  sure used them on us!"
  "Velly tough," Two−bit said. "Mebbeso cannot get  close to cliff evel."
  Two−bit did not sound as if he thought it was very  tough.
  FOUR or five hours now dragged past. None of the  Ostians put in an appearance. Things appeared to have
  become too much  for them, and they had hidden out, and were no longer a force to  contend with.
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  Doc Savage showed himself in an aperture which  opened in one of the sides of the temple. There seemed to
  be a number  of such openings, fitted with doors so skillfully made that their exact  location could not be
  detected when they were closed.
  Doc dropped a line down, a line with a knot every  foot or so. Whether or not he intended to descend, no one
  ever knew. He  might have been merely seeing what would happen.
  At any rate, Lupp’s men cut the rope with bullets  before it had stopped swinging.
  "We got him penned in there," Lupp said. "But with  them rifles, he can keep us away. I happen to know
  Space had plenty of  ammunition when he came to this place."
  That seemed to be the impasse.
  Renny, Monk and the other three waited with their  breaths almost bated for what Lupp was pretty sure to
  decide to do. He  had not mentioned the idea eventually, but it was logical that he would.
  He would threaten to shoot them if Doc Savage did  not surrender the temple fortress�that strange, suspended
  building  which hung under the cliff for no good reason but that it was made of  blocks of lodestone filled with
  a magnetism that held them to the  cliff, which was also of lodestone.
  But Lupp was slow getting the idea they feared he  would get. Lupp even disappeared later in the day, with
  two of his men,  and was gone for considerable interval. Almost three hours.
  Doc Savage’s men next observed Lupp close to the  walls of Ost, yelling at Doc Savage. The bronze man
  appeared and yelled  back. This shouted exchange continued for several minutes.
  The prisoners were too far distant to hear exactly  what was said.
  Lupp left the vicinity of the Ostian wall, and next  appeared before the prisoners wearing a big grin, and
  followed by two  men carrying large boxes which were obviously so heavy that their  weight was all the men
  could stagger under.
  Lupp leered, expanded his chest.
  "Well," he said, "We made a deal."
  THE idea of Lupp making a deal with Doc Savage  smacked of the impossible. Monk and the others stuck
  their ears out and  listened.
  "You seen me havin’ a talk with Savage?" Lupp said. 
  "Uh−huh," Monk admitted.
  "O. K.," Lupp continued. "We made a deal. It’s this:  I give Savage a share of the treasure and turn you mugs
  loose, and  Savage gets out of Ost, and stays in the jungle until we get clear of  this place in the airship."
  "Oh!" Monk exploded. "You already got the loot, eh?"
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  "Of course," Lupp said, looking surprised. "We got  that the first thing."
  He paused and pointed at the boxes. "There’s the  share we’re gonna give Savage. We’re gonna turn you
  loose, see, and you  take it into Savage in the city. Have him examine it if he thinks we’re  trying to run a
  whizzer on him."
  "Something about this smells," Monk said.
  Lupp swore. "You’re damned right it smells! But what  am I gonna do? I can’t have Savage gettin’ out�"
  He stopped, looked confused.
  "So there is a catch!" Monk growled.
  Lupp glared at him. "All right, there is. I don’t  think Savage and the rest of you will ever be able to make it
  out of  this place. Maybe you will. But if you do, it’ll be months from now,  and I’ll have the swag disposed of
  and be out of the picture."
  That, Monk reflected, sounded more reasonable. The  homely chemist swung his arms briskly when he was
  untied, and was  contemplating taking a swing at Lupp for luck when one of the boxes was  shoved into his
  arms. It was a stout pine box, one which had evidently  been brought to the valley aboard the dirigible. It was
  extremely heavy.
  The others were untied. Ham, Johnny and Long Tom  were handed boxes. This was all of the boxes.
  "I’ll help with one of them," Renny rumbled.
  "Wait a minute," Lupp said. "I’ve got something for  you to carry."
  With that, he walked over to Two−bit, the wily  Oriental, and with a sudden blow of his revolver barrel,
  knocked  Two−bit senseless.
  "He thinks he’s been kidding me," Lupp said sourly.  "But I’ve had a hunch he was working for Space all the
  time."
  Renny picked up Two−bit. Monk, Ham, Long Tom and  Johnny carried their boxes.
  They were permitted to walk to the strange, black  metropolis of Ost.
  Monk called a parting word over his shoulder.  "You’ll probably try to shoot us down when we leave!"
  "You can trust me," Lupp said smugly.
  WHEN Monk and the others had staggered out of  earshot with their burdens, one of Lupp’s men addressed
  his chief.
  "They’re suspicious as hell," he said.
  Lupp chuckled. "Sure. But not suspicious of the  right thing."
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  "But Savage may guess the truth!"
  "Unlikely. I told Savage the boxes would contain  food, arms and ammunition, and a part of the treasure
  which we had  already recovered. I told him he could take them and leave the valley,  or fight it out, as he
  pleased, providing he would leave the city. He  agreed to leave the city to get his men released."
  "Oh," said the other. "Then he won’t suspect. But I  thought the treasure was all in that hanging temple?"
  "The bulk of it is," Lupp agreed. "But there is a  little scattered around over the valley in little shrines. Savage
  and  even old Goa will think we have gathered that."
  The other man shivered. "But maybe Goa is mind  reader enough to detect the trick?"
  Lupp shook his head, cursed softly. "Goa can read  minds, but he has to be face to face with the subject, then I
  think he  judges quite a bit by facial expressions. But don’t think for a minute  that he can’t project or teleport
  his thoughts, crazy as that sounds.  He made them sailors on the Benny Boston think they saw this  whole�"
  He stopped to watch Monk and the others file through  the narrow aperture in the wall of Ost. A few moments
  later, Doc Savage  swung down from the hanging temple. Goa followed the bronze man more  slowly. Then
  Martin Space, his wife, and lastly, Kit Merrimore.
  "Swell!" Lupp growled. "A perfect set−up! Now, all  we’ve got to do is wait until they open the boxes!"
  "You sure there’ll be no slip?"
  "No chance. There’s TNT enough in them boxes to sink  half a dozen battleships. And the moment one of
  those boxes is opened,  an electric contact will be closed and set it off."
  The other nodded, moistened his lips. "How did you  get wise to the chink?"
  "Oh, he’s probably all right."
  "What?"
  "Sure. I just figured I’d get rid of him. Never did  like the whelp. Too chicken−hearted. During that business
  with the  machine guns a while ago, he claimed his gun jammed. I think he jammed  it himself. Afraid to kill
  anybody."
  They stood there conversing, mainly about what their  swag would bring. Lupp, on his previous sojourn into
  the valley, seemed  to have appraised the treasure rather closely, and he had definite  ideas about what the
  venture should pay.
  "Beauty of it is we won’t have to deal through  fences," he explained. "Nobody’ll know how we got it. I
  should say five  or six million, anyway, and maybe more."
  Mention of so much money made the listener a little  flushed.
  But the roaring explosion which came an instant  later made him pale again.
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  Chapter XXI. THE TRAP
  LUPP was running an instant after he heard the  blast. He kept in the open, and could see all that happened.
  The boxes, he decided, had been taken into one of  the pyramid black houses at the end of the city wall for
  opening. The  house came apart, and the pieces jumped high, buffeted about and licked  and split by tongues of
  flame.
  Dust and smoke came up to engulf the stones while  they tumbled about in the air, and the whole cliff
  trembled, and a few  big fragments came loose and ran bouncing down.
  The roar, strangely enough, was not a single sound,  but a booming series of them, due to some strange,
  echoing effect of  the cavity under the cliff.
  Lupp wrenched to a stop, and waited until a few  rocks had come rolling toward him and stopped, and the dust
  had lifted  to show a tumbled mass of black stone where the house and that portion  of the wall had been.
  "Come on!" Lupp yelled at his men.
  They scrambled wildly over the mass of blasted rock,  some portions of which were still settling, making
  groaning noises.
  Lupp listened to these unpleasant sounds and  chuckled.
  "I’ll bet Savage or some of his crowd are making a  few of those!" he declared.
  The men got over the mass of stone which had been  the house before the explosion.
  Lupp saw that the rope was still hanging down from  the temple which clung so queerly to the underside of
  the cavernlike  cliff overhang.
  "Climb up!" he ordered. "Lower the stuff down. Them  fool Ostians may get their nerve back. If we’re away
  before they do, so  much the better."
  Lupp held the rope, and two of his men climbed. Then  greed to see the wealth he knew was above got the
  best of Lupp, and he  yelled at another man to steady the line, and himself started up. The  knots were large
  enough so that it was not at all difficult to climb.
  Lupp got ten feet or so up.
  A man below yelled, "Hey! Look!"
  Lupp looked. And he promptly fell the ten feet back  to earth, bruising himself, but hardly noticing. He sprang
  erect with  his gun in his hand.
  "Tricked us!" he squawled.
  He was apparently right. Doc Savage and all his  party had appeared�outside the walls of Ost. Obviously,
  they had crept  out through the narrow city gate while Lupp and his men were clambering  joyfully over the
  blasted remnants of the house.
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  Doc and his party was furthermore now stationed so  as to cover the hole blasted in the wall, as well as the
  narrow city  gate. And they had Martin Space’s rifles.
  Two of Lupp’s men, overly reckless, raced for the  hole made by the explosive.
  Doc Savage and big−fisted Renny aimed deliberately.  Their rifles made noise. They must have made a slight
  mistake and both  aimed at the same target, for one of the two men fell, shot through  both legs. The other
  whirled and fled.
  "Get down!" Lupp snarled. "They found out about the  explosive and managed to explode the boxes so we
  would think�"
  He stopped, fell to eying the blasted remains of the  house narrowly. Something struck him. The explosion
  had seemed amply  large when it had occurred, but now that he thought about it, and the  power of TNT, he
  came to a decision.
  "They only exploded one box!" he snorted.
  Lupp got himself under cover, looked around, and hit  on a campaign.
  "We’ll blow six or seven holes in those houses and  the wall!" he yelled. "From them, we can do plenty of
  good sniping!"
  Lupp himself carried hand grenades, and several of  his men were likewise equipped. They produced the
  violent little metal  eggs.
  "Listen!" a man muttered. "That guy is yellin’ at  us."
  THE fellow meant Doc Savage. The bronze man’s  powerful voice was plainly audible. He was conveying a
  warning.
  "Do not use your grenades," Doc called, which proved  he had heard Lupp’s yell. "It is dangerous�"
  Lupp gritted, "Who the hell does he think he is!"  and began hurling grenades.
  They were powerful grenades. The first one rolled  into a pyramid house, went off, and lifted the roof and
  kicked the  walls outward. The second upset a line of black wall.
  Lupp, looking pleased and enthusiastic, snarled,  "These eggs can do plenty!" and let fly a third.
  He was right. The grenade could do plenty, and it  proceeded to do it�much more than Lupp or any of his men
  expected. It  did what Doc Savage had tried to warn them that it would do.
  The bronze man had always adhered to his policy of  never taking a human life if it could be avoided, and it
  was for that  reason that he had yelled.
  Lupp’s grenade lit in a house with the other three  boxes of TNT. Doc and his men had set off only one with a
  small grenade  of their own which had contained a time fuse. Doc chanced to have one  of these left on his
  person.
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  The shock was terrific. It was more of a shock than  an explosion, even out where the bronze man and his
  companions stood.  It hurt their ears, even their eyes, with its sudden pressure.
  The earth jumped and shook, so that they  instinctively doubled over and put their hands on the ground to
  keep  from falling.
  A few rock fragments reached as far as the spot  where Doc and his aids stood, mostly coming bounding along
  the ground,  and driving them behind trees for safety.
  There was a great roaring and grinding after the  first smash of the blast, a kind of delayed shock with it, too,
  as if  the explosion had caused something to happen.
  "The cliff fell down!" Monk yelled.
  MONK was wrong. It was only the temple. But it might  as well have been the cliff, for all it meant to Lupp
  and his men,  because they happened to be under the temple at the time it came down.
  The sudden shock had been too much for the strange  temple sticking, by the force of magnetic attraction, to
  the underside  of the cliff.
  "Magnetism," Long Tom, the electrical wizard  explained, "can be disturbed by a shock, as any one can prove
  by taking  an ordinary horseshoe magnet and hitting it a sharp blow with a hammer.  Sometimes the
  magnetism will be almost completely destroyed. The shock  disturbs the atomic arrangement which causes the
  magnetic lines of  force, and�"
  "I should say the fellow most disturbed was Lupp,"  said Monk, who was a bit callous, and who had been
  looking around. "Ham  found something he claims is all that is left of Lupp, but it looks to  me like nothing but
  a big, greasy mass."
  Then Renny came up to explain that only two of  Lupp’s men were alive.
  "They cleared out during the excitement," Renny  rumbled.
  Monk shouted, "They may try to get the  airship�Remembering he had removed certain essential parts of the
  airship, the homely chemist looked more relieved.
  Renny said, "What you had better worry about is  finding those jets for the dirigible Diesels which Lupp’s
  men removed."
  Their searching located some of the jets, but others  they did not find.
  It took the group almost three weeks of rather  painstaking work to fashion new Diesel jets out of the materials
  at  hand.
  In that interval, the Ostians came around to a more  level−headed way of thinking. They accepted the presence
  of Doc and his  men, and agreed to let them depart.
  The falling of the temple, the Ostians announced  elaborately, must mean that the spiritual power of their
  deities�another way of describing the magnetism in the lodestone  mountain�had relaxed and let the temple
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  fall. Therefore, things should  be changed.
  The wealth brought with them from their ancient home  centuries ago was accursed, and should be handed
  over to the white men.  It was so that it could be handed over to the white men that the  deities had relaxed the
  hold on the temple and let it fall.
  Just how much old Goa had to do with this impression  getting around among his people was problematical.
  When Doc went to  question Goa, the old fellow had vanished somewhere into the jungle.
  Doc Savage spent a good deal of time hunting Goa,  desiring greatly to hold lengthy conversation with him,
  for Goa was the  one being the bronze man had ever encountered who had actually  accomplished many of the
  things that the more liberal psychologists and  experts on the human brain have admitted possible.
  But there was no trace of Goa. He was a sly old fox.
  DOC SAVAGE’S men took no part in the Goa hunt. They  were occupied with the Diesel jets, and with the
  jewels and yellow  metal which they were collecting from the wreckage of the temple, with  the aid of the
  Ostians.
  There was a great deal of the wealth. Even more than  they suspected. The value unlucky Lupp had put upon it
  would not cover  more than a fraction of it, because Lupp had never seen the full extent  of the trove.
  The bronze man’s aids had to discard every  nonessential part of the dirigible in order to carry the full load.
  Doc, having failed to find Goa, did some research on  the subject of why all Ostians had blue skins. The
  solution turned out  to be a simple one: A sacred color, blue. So the Ostians simply took  all their baths in
  water which had been dyed with the juice of a berry.
  None of the Ostians would consider leaving the  valley. They said so in no uncertain language. Furthermore,
  they  insisted that if they never saw any more white men, it would be  perfectly all right with them.
  "Heck with them," Monk grinned. "Who would want to  stay here, anyhow?"
  Ham said, "I know what your objection to ‘em is, you  missing link!"
  "What, you shyster?"
  "These short−legged, long−armed Ostian girls don’t  appeal to you."
  Monk grinned.
  "They were kinda spidery at that," he said.
  The dirigible got all of them out of the valley, and  most of the way back to civilization. They only had to
  walk through the  jungles for about three weeks after the lifting gas gave out.
  THE END
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SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Vault2.0.-.Fiction-and-audiobooks/Books/R/Robeson, Kenneth/054 Ost.pdf