THE telephone rang. It was the Cleveland police. Two cars had been found abandoned on the outskirts of town. A message to Doc Savage was written on the floorboards of one. His plane took Doc and his aids to the spot in less than fifteen minutes.
The police officer who guided them to the abandoned cars said, "The message obviously indicates that the mob is hiding out on Nineteenth Street at a place called Blackie"s Garage. We"ve got a squad headed for there now."
Doc Savage studied the message in the car.
"You can tell your squad to forget it," he said.
"Huh?"
The bronze man indicated the strange-looking mark which Monk had made following his message.
"Ancient Mayan," the bronze man explained.
"Eh? A shunt may what?" The officer hadn"t got it.
"A hieroglyphic in prehistoric Mayan," Doc Savage elaborated."I"ll take your word for it. What"s it mean?"
"It conveys a message. It says that nothing written is to be believed."
"I"ll be d.a.m.ned!" said the cop. "Why"d he write something if he didn"t want it to be believed?"
"Monk was probably kidding somebody," Ham explained. "Monk is quite a brilliant fellow."
This would have startled Monk, who had never heard Ham call him anything less dense than a bob-tailed baboon who had fallen out of the nest at an early age.
Doc Savage left it to the police to locate the drivers of the cars, who would probably have made themselves hard to find by now. He flew back to the farm where the abandoned plane had been found.
"I noticed the boy had stopped flying his kite," Ham commented as they landed.
They found the youth in the cave where his mother kept her canned fruit.
He was working over Doc Savage"s portable equipment for developing motion picture film.
"It was simple enough that I didn"t have any trouble making it work," the young man explained, pointing at the developing apparatus.
"What is he doing?" Renny rumbled, and bent over some of the developed film.
"Holy cow!" he exploded after an inspection.
Each square of film showed a large area of the surrounding country. Aerial photographs!
"Doc gave me one of his aerial cameras," the boy explained, as proud as a pup with a bone. "I fixed it to my kite. It took a picture every minute or two. But they"re so small I can"t make out much."
"We will use a magnifying gla.s.s," Doc told him.
The bronze man produced, not a magnifier, but a projector out of one of the equipment cases. They operated it on the plane"s battery system, and threw the images in the cabin, with the windows covered.
The pictures had been taken frequently enough for them to fairly well follow what had happened. They saw Reservoir Hill captured, then Monk.
"Monk," Ham said, admiringly, "put up quite a fight!"
Ham never had a civil word for Monk, to his face or behind his back, except on those occasions when he had a horrible fear his sparring mate was in trouble.
The pictures showed the mob shifting their prisoners from the cars to the boat.
"Now!" Long Tom exploded, "if that boat just didn"t go too far for the camera to still get it!"
The boat had not gone far. Four or five miles down the coast, once it reached the lake. There was a small cove. The power boat had stopped at a houseboat, had tied up astern of the other craft.
"We will look into this," Doc Savage said, quietly.
WHEN their plane slid down over the cove with the motors cut, Doc and his aids could distinguish a number of things. First, the cove, while more than a quarter of a mile wide, was really the mouth of a stream. A fast-running stream, and a muddy one. It muddied the lake for some distance outside the cove.
They kept their heads inside the plane"s cabin. The alloy metal which covered it would deflect anything but a special armor-piercing bullet. Also bulletproof were the windows, through which they watched.Ham voiced the obvious. "n.o.body in sight."
They could have seen any one in the speed boat. It was open, except for the motor box. But the houseboat was different. It seemed about fifty feet long, needed paint, and could hide a hundred men from a plane in the air.
Doc swung once more around the cove. He flew up the stream a short distance, and back, close to its muddy bosom. They saw no one. They saw no boat.
"Eyes open while we land," Doc said, quietly.
The plane stroked its underside over the water, not throwing up much foam. Doc gunned the engines. They rode close to the houseboat, but not too close.
No sign of life.
"Take the controls," the bronze man said.
Renny took over, but gulped, "Doc! They may be ambushed aboard! They may have a bomb fixed-"
"Swing the right wing-tip close enough to permit my getting aboard," Doc interposed without appearing to have heard the objection. "Then stand by."
The bronze man wore under his clothing, as he always did when he goes into action, the alloy chain mesh which he had perfected. The stuff that was so light, yet almost as impervious to bullets as the skin of the plane itself.
Before the bronze man got out of the plane, he donned another device which he had lately invented. It was a hood, transparent, in shape not unlike a goldfish bowl turned upside down.
The lower part fitted his shoulders tightly, and there were straps to hold it on. The material was thick, not gla.s.s, nor any combination of gla.s.s, but a chemical product that was as tough as steel.
A shoulder pack breath-purifier could be used in conjunction with the hood, making the wearer independent of outside air. A neat gas mask.
Wearing it, Doc got out on a wing of the plane. Renny maneuvered the ship expertly. A leap, easy for the bronze man"s muscles, put him aboard the houseboat.
HE did not step on deck immediately, but maneuvered along the rail. There was a chance an explosive might be set off by weight on the deck"s planks. Finally, Doc did go aboard. He listened. Then, with a casualness that hardly showed the care he was using, he went below.
It had never been an expensive houseboat. The woodwork was cypress, painted. The furniture was cheap stuff, most of it made for land use. Dampness had caused some of the glued joints to come apart. The carpets were mildewed.
Some one had lived aboard recently. Men, evidently, and not seamen. Things were not shipshape.
There was no one aboard, no prisoners, and no niches in which any one could have been concealed.
Doc went forward and examined the manner in which boat was moored. It was not anch.o.r.ed. It was tied to a mooring buoy, in the manner of yachts in their home harbor.
Renny taxied the amphibian close and called, "Where"s Monk and Hill?"
"Not aboard," Doc replied without emotion. "Pick me up."
The bronze man got aboard."We are leaving immediately," he said.
Renny rumbled, "But, Doc! We oughta do somethin" toward finding Monk-"
"That," Doc Savage told him, "is exactly what we are doing when we leave here in a hurry."
Chapter IX. HIDE-OUT BELOW.
MONK was tough. Men had knocked him completely senseless in a fight, only to see him come out of it, get up, and dive into the sc.r.a.p again as if nothing had happened.
Monk sat up and tried to bust a nose which he recognized. He was, unfortunately, still tied. He looked around, at himself first. He was wet as the often-mentioned drowned rat. His clothing had leaked a big pool of water.
The owner of the nose retreated, muttering something about how "he"d be glad when the boss gave the word to turn loose the works." He was one of the mob.
Monk, realizing he was not gagged, let out a squawk which, if it did nothing else nearly deafened himself.
"Unless you enjoy doing that," said Reservoir Hill"s voice, "you might as well cut it out."
"Where are we?" Monk wanted to know.
"Don"t you remember?"
Monk made a face. This usually helped his thinking. "Oh, yeah!" he said. "They grabbed me and started to throw me overboard. I figured they was gonna drown me, so I tried to kick a guy"s head off. Did I?"
"You did well enough," old Hill chuckled. "But another tried a rifle barrel out on your head. The barrel won."
Monk felt his head, groaned, then asked a question, by making a statement, "The air smells kinda funny in here?"
"I don"t wonder," Hill told him. "We"re in a submarine."
"Submarine?" Monk squinted at the old oil man. "They must"ve given you a bat on the dome, too!"
"It"s an old submarine," Hill continued, unperturbed. "I don"t think it"s got an engine in it. I think it"s one that was showed at a fair in Chicago, or something, then sold for junk. Only some crooks got hold of it and made it an underwater hide-out. These crooks of ours rented it from the other crooks for a while, or something."
"It"s complicated," Monk said.
"I don"t know about that, but getting out is going to be complicated. We"re under the houseboat, I think.
Anyhow, they climbed down the mooring chain. I dang near drowned."
Monk said, "Doc will find us."
One of the men came in at that instant. He overheard Monk"s remark and guffawed.
"Your bronze guy came, had a look at the houseboat, and just left," he advised.
Monk squirmed around a bit. He could not get loose. So he relaxed.
"There must be plenty of money at stake in this thing," he said.
"Not for us," the man said, somewhat sourly.
"Huh?" Monk looked surprised."We get a hundred bucks a day apiece for holding you," said the other, even more grouchily. "We got a thousand apiece for catching you. We"re just doing a job.
Monk frowned. "You mean you"re the fellows who fixed up this underwater hang-out, and you were only hired to get us? You"re not members of the mob we"ve been fighting?"
"That"s the idea," the other said easily. "Running this hide-away is our business and-"
A man put his head in the compartment.
"I think you might go up and look around," he said. "It sounded as if that plane took off more than half an hour ago."
The man who had been grousing to Monk nodded and went out.
THE fellow obviously had no love for the job ahead. He picked up a diving contrivance consisting of a mouthpiece, a nose clip and a chemical purifier. One could buy them on the market for a little over three hundred dollars apiece. He adjusted it.
The men got in and out of the submarine by a simple method. There was a hole in the bottom, near the bow.
Air pressure held the water out. There was a compressor aboard.
At night, when no one could observe, they extended the periscope-it had been elongated-to the surface and pumped air down it until the compression tanks were full.
The man pushed himself down into the hole, felt for the rope which led to the mooring chain, and worked along it. The men followed that route back and forth to the surface.
The man had hardly started when he seemed to step into a gigantic bear trap. The jaws closed about his waist. Air left the man"s lungs so fast that it blew the mouthpiece from his teeth. He wrenched at what was around his waist. Legs! He twisted his head.
When he saw the individual who held him, the rest of the air left his lungs.
The man was almost drowned when Doc Savage got him up on the deck of the houseboat. It took time for him to speak.