"Is that our only chance?" the girl asked. "Suppose we can"t follow them."
"Our one chance," Doc said.
The approaching car slowed pace when it neared Doc"s machine. The man in the front seat turned said, "That"s the only car in sight on the streets around here. It must be the one that Monk guy came in."
Another man said, "I"ll fix it."
He stood up. In his hand was a siege weapon which they evidently had not used in the raid on the Bodine home-at least thirty sticks of dynamite tied in a bundle and equipped with cap and fuse.
The man lit the fuse and skated the dynamite under the car.
They drove on.
Doc s car lifted several feet off the ground and sat there briefly on a nest of red flame, like a dilapidated hen with feathers flying off, the feathers being fenders, wheels and various parts.
BRIGADIER GENERAL THEODORE MARLEY HAM BROOKS sat in the skysc.r.a.per headquarters and listened to the story with growing glumness.
"And you couldn"t find a car to follow them?" he asked.
"Not a one in the neighborhood," Doc Savage admitted.
Ham got up and stamped to the window impatiently. "Not a thing has come in here. I"ve been wasting my time sticking around headquarters waiting for something to turn up. If I had been out at Bodine"s place,"
he added malevolently, "I might have been some help. It might have turned out differently."
Doc said, "The raid was too unexpected for anyone to do anything about it."
Ham smiled at Lada Harland. "Then you"re not guilty of anything this fellow accused you of when he was pretending to be your brother?"
The girl shook her head. She looked at her hands and shuddered as if nauseated by their garish, fantastically unnatural florid hue. "All I"m guilty of," she said tensely, "is being the victim of something terrible."
There was a clawing emotion in her voice that led Doc to look at her sharply, sympathetically. He asked, "Have you had anything to eat?"
She ignored the query. Her hands were clenched. "Can"t you do something about-this?" She rubbed her hands over her arms.
"We are trying."
Lada Harland got up suddenly and came to him. Her hand on his arm was pleading. "Please! I"ve heard so much about you, about your ability as a scientist. Surely, you can do something about this horrible thing that has happened to me!"
He said, "But we can not tell-"
Her fingers dug in and trembled. "Please! I can"t stand this!"
She became hysterical then, and pounded her fists against him and sobbed, then became wildly abusive against her fate. Doc looked over her head at Ham, and gestured. Ham came to the girl. He had some difficulty holding her.
The bronze man went to the laboratory and mixed a sedative, came back and administered it. They waited several minutes and the drug took effect. The young woman became silent.
They retired to the library, and Doc said, "She has been under terrific strain. It was natural that she should turn loose."
"When will she be able to talk?" Ham demanded.
"That will depend on her stamina."
Ham made a distraught gesture. "Doc, I hate to sing the blues-but we"re in a mess. Monk and Ham and Johnny are in trouble-how bad trouble, we don"t know, but it may be mighty bad." He compressed his lips. "They may be dead by now.""I know."
"And Long Tom. I"m worried because we haven"t heard from him."
Doc Savage did not answer. He went over and picked up a book and stood looking at it. Ham knew he was nervous.
"Didn"t anything turn up while you were here at headquarters?" he asked. "That is why I left you here-in case Long Tom should try to get us information."
Ham shook his head disconsolately. "The morning papers came, and some mail, and I looked through the stuff but there wasn"t anything. Oh, yes, there was a telephone call from a man who wanted to know what you wanted done with the pigeons."
"What pigeons?" Doc asked.
"I presumed they were some you had ordered, or something," Ham explained. "I told him I would ask you, and telephone him back."
"I did not order pigeons." Doc Savage sat there for a while. Abruptly he straightened. "Have you the man"s telephone number?"
Ham said, "Yes," and searched through his pockets. "Here it is."
Doc went to the telephone. He was back in a very few moments. He whipped past Ham into the laboratory. "Get the girl on her feet," he ordered.
"What"s going on?" Ham demanded.
"The pigeons," Doc said, "were carrier pigeons. Long Tom had rented some from this man. The pigeons would naturally come back to their home cote. One of them came back. It had a message on it. The man telephoned you to know what we wanted done about it."
Ham paled. "He didn"t say anything about a message."
Doc"s flake-gold eyes were faintly humorous for a moment. "The man does not speak very good English," he said. "He calls a message a pigeon, and a pigeon a pigeon, so it"s a little confusing."
LADA HARLAND wanted to go with them. "I"m getting all right," she said. "And you haven"t got the story yet. You will want that."
"Come on," Doc said.
They drove out in a coupe, the three of them in the front seat. The bronze man handled the wheel. He headed north, then across town, doubled back and forth for some time, keeping a sharp lookout on their trail.
Lada Harland said, "My brother did not tell me exactly what it was. I think he was too horrified by what had happened."
Doc said, "Go back to the beginning and skip as little as you can."
She nodded."It was ten days ago, about," she said. "Peter-I mean Peter Harland, my brother-had gone down in the bas.e.m.e.nt as usual to the room he was using. I do not know what he was doing down there.
Something secret. He was always doing something secret down there."
"Didn"t the fact that he was doing something secret make you suspicious, or curious, Miss Harland?" Doc asked.
"Oh, no. You see, it was perfectly natural. My brother works for a concern which manufactures plastics-ash trays and dishes and things. You must have found that out by now."
"We knew he worked for a company manufacturing plastics," Doc agreed.
"Well, Peter is a chemist. You know that chemistry is the base and heart of the plastic business. They are all the time experimenting to develop new materials and new methods of making old materials. That was what Peter did in his bas.e.m.e.nt laboratory."
Doc Savage described the room which had been empty when he and his men searched the Harland home, and asked, "Is that the room in which Peter had his laboratory?"
"Yes." She nodded.
"What happened this night ten days ago?" Doc inquired.
"Peter was down there for four or five hours-then I heard a frightened yell, and he came upstairs," she explained. "He was-he was pink. It was horrible."
"Then what?"
"He . . . he wouldn"t tell me anything. He said he"d had an accident. But he was frantic. And he was such a horrible figure-" Her lips began twitching. "You have no idea what it is to be-like this."
Doc asked, "Then what occurred?" patiently.
"He called in Bodine for help," she explained. "Bodine had been Peter"s friend for a long time, although I had never trusted him. I thought he was a crook. Of course, I know that now."
"When did Bodine make prisoners of you and your brother?"
She eyed him quickly. "So you guessed that. It was that same night. Bodine called some men. They were thugs, and he hired them. They tied us up. And Bodine began trying to get my brother to reveal the secret of something in the laboratory-the secret of how he had become pink."
"Did Peter give up the information?"
"No. He refused. Bodine drugged me one night, and when I awakened, I . . . I was pink. He did that for a reason. He told my brother that unless he gave up the secret, that is what they would do to me."
"Then Bodine threatened to kill you if your brother didn"t give in?"
"Yes. That was why they pretended to burn me in the Hotel Troy lobby. You see, I had escaped. I was trying to reach you. I saw them following the cab I had hired, and I stopped and leaped out and tried to get in the lobby of the Hotel Troy to telephone you. But they caught me."
Doc said, "There was a report among the neighbors that a pink man had been seen to dash from your house with some other men after him.""That was Peter. He made a break. It failed."
Doc said, "There is one other thing-Chet Farmer."
"Another crook," she explained. "Bodine tried to hire Farmer, and they fell out over the division of loot.
Chet Farmer is now trying to grab everything to himself."
Ham put in for the first time, "Farmer is doing a good job of it, too. He"s got Bodine and everybody else.
Where did they take the stuff out of your brother"s laboratory?"
"That island, wherever it is," the girl said. "Or so I think."
Ham said, "My money says Farmer will make some of Bodine"s men tell him where the place is."
THE pigeon man was short and wide and had a flat red nose. He did more speaking with his shoulders and his hands than with his mouth.
"She"s pigeon nice I gotta," he said. "Thisa day before light she"s acome in as nice-a you pliss."
It was hard to tell about his accent.
"Where is the message?" Doc asked.
"Ah, thisa pigeon, pliss," the man said. He led them to a cote house where the odor of pigeons was overpowering.
Ham whispered, "I would think a self-respecting pigeon would be darn glad to leave this place."
The message, on thin paper, printed with pencil, read: Everything that counts is on Small Gull Island. Come out through the Marsh. Meet you at creek.
Long Tom.
"Boy!" Ham exclaimed. "We finally get a break!"
Chapter XIV. SMALL GULL.
SMALL GULL ISLAND was, strictly speaking, an island only at high-spring tide, when the sea lifted enough to cover the long and narrow finger of land that connected the dark, brush-covered hill that was the island proper with the mainland. The rest of the year, tides did not sweep entirely over the finger, except when there were storms, and tall salt-water gra.s.s grew there.
Doc Savage, Ham and Lada Harland crawled a long time through mud and gra.s.s.
The creek was narrow, fairly deep, bordered by higher gra.s.s and some brush. Gratefully, they sank into that. They soaked, and washed the worst of the mud out of their clothing.
The girl looked around nervously. "What"s that mound of weeds and gra.s.s over there," she asked.
"Just a bird"s nest," Ham told her.The mound of weeds and gra.s.s proved Ham a liar immediately by coming apart. Long Tom stood up-he had been concealed under it-half covered with mud.
Long Tom waded in carefully and paddled over to them.
He said, "Doc, this is no place for the girl."
"She has a very important reason for coming," Doc said, "and we had one for bringing her. She is pink, as you know, but it is not dye, such as you are wearing. Unless we can do something to help her, she will have to go through life that way. So we want her here, to see that we are doing the best that we can. And she has every reason in the world to help herself."
Long Tom sc.r.a.ped mud and sticks out of his hair, grimacing.
"Well, it"s a tough situation. Chet Farmer and his gang showed up here a while after daylight. They had a lot of prisoners. They had Monk, and Monk is pink. They had Renny and Johnny, and both of them are in bad shape from beatings. They can just about navigate, and that is all."
"Was there a fight when Chet Farmer took over?" Doc asked.