A fight followed. Jep Dee had regained some of his strength in the hospital, and he put up an impressive sc.r.a.p. He knew every vicious trick of hand-to-hand combat, and he used them all.
Henry Peace got Jep Dee flattened out in the sand and tied and gagged with strips of his own hospital nightgown. The strips took almost all the nightgown.
"You better stay here," advised Henry Peace, "because you"re pretty naked, and it might embarra.s.s somebody if you start wandering."
There was not much chance of Jep Dee leaving. About the only thing he could move was his ears.
Henry Peace walked back to the trailer with no more noise than a shadow.
The man was lying on the trailer floor, exactly where he had been left. Henry Peace bent over him.
The prisoner instantly reached up and took Henry Peace by the throat.
"C"mon, Horst!" he yelled.
Out of the back of the trailer, and out of the front, where they had been concealed, men came leaping. They piled upon Henry Peace. They had clubs, knives, ropes, all ready for the combat.
Henry Peace was hopelessly outnumbered.
Chapter XI. THE VIOLENT MR. PEACE.
ANDREW BLODGETT-MONK-MAYFAIR was walking down a Key West Street, closely trailed by his pet pig with the large ears and long legs. They both stopped.
"Listen!" Monk exploded.
They were close to the sea, so near that swells breaking on the beach frequently shoved out tentacles of white spray that reached almost to their feet. Palm trees around them were, in the night, like giants holding up hands with fingers distended.
The hospital where Jep Dee had been confined was over a hundred yards distant, and on the left. They had called at a morning newspaper office and learned the story of Jep Dee, as much of it as the newspapers knew. It had been a quick source of information; the trouble was that the newspaper now knew some Doc Savage aids were in town, and reporters would haunt them for stories.The sounds seemed to come from a spot in front of the hospital. There were grunts, yells and thumping noises.
Long-bodied, long-worded Johnny c.o.c.ked an ear.
"A tintamarrous bombilation!" he remarked.
"Sounds more like a fight to me," Monk muttered.
Ham said, "That, short-and-hairy, is what he meant."
Ham, who was noted for being suitably dressed for every occasion, was attired in what Monk termed the "tom-catting"
suit. This was a black suit with black accessories-shirt, tie, socks, handkerchiefs, and hat, all black-which matched the harmless-looking black sword cane that he always carried. Chemistry, Ham"s pet chimp, was rather dark by nature and matched his owner.
They stood there in the darkness, listening to the fight, debating what to do.
The fight seemed to be in progress around a trailer.
The Havens, father and daughter, kept a disgruntled silence. They weren"t enthusiastic about being with Monk, Ham and Johnny, but they had not been able to do anything about that. They had been haunted by the Doc Savage a.s.sociates since they had been found in the tree following the aerial dog fight Ham nudged old Tex. "Good time for you to tell us what all the scrambling is for."
""Tain"t, neither."
"Might save us all a lot of trouble if you explained the mystery."
"Rootin" under that log," said old Tex, "won"t get you nothin"."
Monk was more than ever intrigued by the qualities of Rhoda Haven-not the least of these being her figure-and he was also convinced that he had a rival in the person of the missing Henry Peace. Monk had been making derogatory remarks about Henry Peace. He made another one now.
"Henry Peace," said Monk, "has disappeared, so he probably got scared and cleared out."
Rhoda bit her lip, snapped, "Listen, you robin-eyed-"
"Whatcha mean-robin-eyed?"
"Eyes that are always resting on limbs," the young woman said coolly. "Henry Peace is worth a squad of some of the people I"ve reluctantly become acquainted with."
Monk stood torn between two desires-the yen to make pa.s.ses at a pretty girl, and his always-strong liking for a good fight. The fight yen won.
"C"mon!" Monk barked. "Let"s see whether that sc.r.a.p needs our attention."
THE bedlam at the trailer stopped suddenly.
Almost complete quiet followed. They could hear the waves making the sounds that were like someone stepping into a wastebasket of paper. Their own feet crunched sand.
They came to the trailer, and blazed flashlight beams.
Johnny had a favorite word when he was astounded. He used it now.
"I"ll be superamalgamated!" he exploded.
The door had burst off the trailer. Inside, the bunks had been torn loose, windows knocked out, dishes broken, pots and pans trampled out of shape. Everything that could be used to hit a man over the head apparently had been employed for that purpose.Ham jumped around with his flashlight, counting the senseless men who were scattered about.
"Six!" he exclaimed.
Monk gazed at broken noses, scuffed faces, torn clothing.
"Brothers," he said, "a human hurricane sure went through here."
He took another look at the six victims.
"These are Horst lugs," he announced. "Some of them were with that gang who tried to throw us in a cistern on Long Island."
Old Tex Haven had been doing some eager inspecting for himself.
"But Horst ain"t among "em!" Tex said disgustedly.
"Depend on the head skunk to be out of the den when the roof fell in."
"I"ll bet," said Rhoda Haven triumphantly, "that Henry Peace did this."
"Humph!" Monk said.
They looked around the vicinity for some trace of the hurricane-Monk stated an unnecessary number of times that it couldn"t be Henry Peace that had done all the damage. They found no one.
A Horst thug stirred, groaned, sat up, wanted to know, "Where"s that red-headed devil?"
"You see!" Rhoda Haven e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed triumphantly. "It was Henry Peace!"
"Rats!" Monk said grumpily.
Ham walked over to the hospital and entered. When he came out and joined them, he looked so downcast that Monk commented on the fact.
"You went in there like a lion and came out like a postage stamp," Monk said.
"Like a postage stamp?"
"Licked."
"This is no time for such cracks!" Ham snarled.
" Jep Dee is gone from that hospital!"
THERE was a prompt rush for the hospital, where they put barrages of questions that got them no information of value. The visit to the hospital did, however, impress Rhoda Haven with a point. The information that Monk and others were a.s.sociated with Doc Savage worked wonders with the hospital people. They fell over themselves to offer any service. There were comments of the highest character regarding Doc Savage"s ability.
"This Doc Savage," Rhoda remarked when they were outside, "must be quite an individual."
Monk nodded violently. "For once, you"re right in your judgment of somebody!"
Johnny rubbed his bony jaw.
"Perscrutination seems pragmatical," he stated.
"Put it in English," Rhoda Haven requested.
"I suggest," said Johnny stiffly, "that we now resort to asking questions of people-you included."
"I see.""The questioning to be coupled with such persuasive violence as may be necessary," Johnny added.
"I see," Rhoda Haven repeated coolly.
A man walked up boldly in the darkness.
"You Doc Savage"s men and party?" he asked.
"You said it," Monk told him.
"A guy named Henry Peace sent me," the stranger explained. "He said to tell you he"d taken somebody named Horst, and was waiting for you with a man named Jep Dee. He said for me to show you where he was waiting, and to bring you if you wanted to come."
Monk scowled blackly, said, "We don"t want to come."
"Try not to be as simple-minded as usual," Ham advised the homely chemist. "Of course, we want to go."
Rhoda Haven turned a flashlight so Monk could see the triumphant expression on her attractive features.
"I notice," she remarked, "that most of the accomplishing around here seems to be done by Henry Peace."
Monk looked as if someone was feeding him worms. He did not say anything.
Ham and Johnny loaded unconscious Horst thugs into the trailer, tying them with bed sheets, fishing lines and anything else they could find.
"Inchoation is contiguitudinous," Johnny remarked.
"Eh?" said the messenger.
"Maybe he means," Monk suggested, "that now we start."
"Why didn"t he just say so?"
"He only speaks English when he has to."
"Oh. One of them kind of guys, eh? I don"t see why these foreigners who come over here can"t speak American."
The car attached to the trailer was a shabby-looking old heap, but at the first traffic light, Ham sprang out to inspect the motor in amazement. Instead of the wheezing four cylinders he had expected, he found sixteen polished ones that were snorting out at least two hundred horsepower.
Their guide was a rather hungry-looking fellow in overalls and a straw hat. He seemed somewhat dumb in almost every way.
He directed them to a lonesome, sandy road that led through some palmettos to a clump of lonesome-looking palms that stood up stark in the white moonlight. There he told them to stop.
The guide got out.
"There"s five or six army machine guns covering you fools," he said. "You stopped your car over a buried case of TNT that"s wired to explode when a switch over yonder is closed. If you want to get tough, just hop to it!"
Having delivered this news, he dived behind a convenient palm tree.
Chapter XII. THE BRONZE MAN.