Part 6 (2/2)
The door into the ramshackle hallway was partially ajar. The figure of a giant man appeared in the aperture.
He might have been a cloud of bronze-hued smoke for all the sound he made. He hurtled across the floor.
The men staring at the window did not yet realize it was the voice of a master ventriloquist which they had heard. Not one in the group was aware of Doc's presence.
Doc reached the first of the gang. One of his hands drifted out and up. He seemed merely to caress the back of the man's neck. The ligaments on the hands of the bronze man stood out like drawn steel.
The man Doc had touched gave a violent twitch. Then he fell to the floor. Something unearthly and horrible seemed to have happened to him. His body was in the grip of a strange paralysis. His arms and legs projected stiffly.
He hit the floor like a wooden man. His limbs remained rigid, sticking up at grotesque angles.
The noise of his fall aroused the other men. They whirled. Then they yelled, and grabbed for their guns.
Two of them were either more brave or less wise than their companions. They tried to seize Doc with their bare hands. Headlong, they pitched at him.
Doc Savage couched as if to anchor himself more firmly on the floor. His hands grasped with a blinding speed-one hand for the head of each man. The thewed bronze fingers found their mark.
With apparent ease, Doc knocked their heads together. He exerted just sufficient force to produce unconsciousness. The men dropped.Things were happening with a blinding speed. The other men had not yet succeeded in drawing their revolvers. They leaped wildly aside as Doc charged. This caused them to collide with each other.
After that, a tornado seemed to seize upon the gang. They slugged, kicked. Yells and groans flew out of the vortex.
Doc Savage was a kernel in that human maelstrom.
Monk's apish figure appeared abruptly in the door. He emitted a blood-curdling howl, and sprang into the fray.
The homely chemist's voice was ordinarily mild, childlike. But he liked lots of noise with his fights.
”Ye-o-ow!” he howled. ”Save some of 'em for me, Doc!”
Ham came through the door behind Monk, rapping: ”Get out of the way, you missing link! Let somebody fight that wants to fight!”
Ham was flouris.h.i.+ng his sword cane. The blade no longer looked innocent-it was a bared, glittering thorn of steel. On the needlelike tip was a mysterious, sticky substance.
Ham made a pa.s.s at the nearest enemy. He made no effort to run the fellow through with his sword cane.
Instead, he barely p.r.i.c.ked the man.
The man Ham had p.r.i.c.ked seemed to go to sleep on his feet. He fell over backward.
Ham's sword cane was tipped with a drug which produced instant unconsciousness-a sleep which would last an hour or more.
Possibly a minute of thundering action followed. When it ended, Doc and his men were blowing on their knuckles. Draped on the floor were all of their foes-seven rather evil-looking gentry.
DOC bent over Renny. The wire which secured the engineer's enormous fists was thick. It had been tightened with pincers. Doc's powerful fingers tore it away easily.
Moving to Long Tom, Doc freed him likewise.
”I overheard some of the talk here,” he said. ”It told me why they were holding you. But where is the girl in the gold dress?”
”Velvet and Biff took her away,” Renny explained.
”Where to?” Doc questioned.
”I haven't the slightest idea,” Renny replied.
”And what about John Acre?” Doc persisted.
Renny shook his head. ”I heard Velvet and Biff tell the girl that they had seized John Acre, but we never saw a sign of him.”
The men on the floor began to stir with returning consciousness. Doc's men began searching them rapidly, removing such weapons as they could find. Ham's victim, of course, still slept.
Doc himself went to the man who had become so rigid at the touch of his fingers. The peculiar stiffness had been brought about by an unusual ability which Doc had perfected.
In the course of his surgical research, Doc had learned how to apply pressure upon certain nerve centers so as to induce a paralysis. By readjusting the same nerve centers he could banish the paralysis.
He did this now. At the touch of the metallic fingers, the victim recovered use of his limbs.Doc lined the prisoners up along the wall.
”They look like a cop's nightmare,” he remarked.
Monk blew on his hairy fists, and made ferocious faces. ”Do we make 'em talk, Doc?” he asked.
Doc turned slowly, as if eyeing the walls of the room. Only his four friends caught the slight flicker which one of his eyelids gave. He wheeled back.
”We'll have to waste a lot of time to make 'em talk,” he said. ”They're not worth that.”
From inside his clothing, Doc produced a small case. This disgorged a hypodermic needle. He walked to one of the prisoners and jabbed the needle into the fellow.
The man fell heavily to the floor.
Doc gave another jab. Another one also toppled.
”What are you doing?” yelled one of the survivors in a frightened voice.
Doc pointed his hypodermic needle dramatically at the two men he had dropped.
”Those two will never know what happened to them,” he declared.
An uneasy stir swept the other captives. They changed feet. Their foreheads began to smoke in the cold air as sweat came out.
”Listen, can't we make a deal?” one mumbled hopefully.
”No,” Doc told him. ”But it might help if you talked freely.”
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