TEXT:  REPEL
  A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
  
  Table of Contents
  REPEL.................................................................................................................................................................1
  A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson.....................................................................................1
  Chapter 1. THE BLOW−UP....................................................................................................................1
  Chapter 2. THE MAN OF MIGHT..........................................................................................................8
  Chapter 3. THE UNSEEN.....................................................................................................................13
  Chapter 4. THE SCARED GIRL...........................................................................................................20
  Chapter 5. THE THING ON THE BOTTOM.......................................................................................25
  Chapter 6. BAD BALDWIN..................................................................................................................32
  Chapter 7. THE SECOND BAD BALDWIN........................................................................................37
  Chapter 8. THE CAPTIVES..................................................................................................................41
  Chapter 9. THE TRAPPER TRAP........................................................................................................46
  Chapter 10. THE FINE HAND OF FATE.............................................................................................52
  Chapter 11. THE THING THAT LEFT................................................................................................58
  Chapter 12. STRANGE STORIES........................................................................................................61
  Chapter 13. THE TRAIL AGAIN.........................................................................................................67
  Chapter 14. THE MASTER CROOK’S TOUCH..................................................................................71
  Chapter 15. DEATH UNDERFOOT.....................................................................................................74
  Chapter 16. CHOICE.............................................................................................................................80
  Chapter 17. THE LOST REPEL............................................................................................................84
  Chapter 18. TERROR............................................................................................................................90
  Chapter 19. THE COMING OF REPEL................................................................................................93
  Chapter 20. SURRENDER....................................................................................................................96
  Chapter 21. THE END OF TRICKERY  TRAIL................................................................................100
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  REPEL
  A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  http://www.blackmask.com
  Chapter 1. THE BLOW−UP
  • 
  Chapter 2. THE MAN OF MIGHT
  • 
  Chapter 3. THE UNSEEN
  • 
  Chapter 4. THE SCARED GIRL
  • 
  Chapter 5. THE THING ON THE BOTTOM
  • 
  Chapter 6. BAD BALDWIN
  • 
  Chapter 7. THE SECOND BAD BALDWIN
  • 
  Chapter 8. THE CAPTIVES
  • 
  Chapter 9. THE TRAPPER TRAP
  • 
  Chapter 10. THE FINE HAND OF FATE
  • 
  Chapter 11. THE THING THAT LEFT
  • 
  Chapter 12. STRANGE STORIES
  • 
  Chapter 13. THE TRAIL AGAIN
  • 
  Chapter 14. THE MASTER CROOK’S TOUCH
  • 
  Chapter 15. DEATH UNDERFOOT
  • 
  Chapter 16. CHOICE
  • 
  Chapter 17. THE LOST REPEL
  • 
  Chapter 18. TERROR
  • 
  Chapter 19. THE COMING OF REPEL
  • 
  Chapter 20. SURRENDER
  • 
  Chapter 21. THE END OF TRICKERY TRAIL
  • 
  Scanned and Proofed
  by Tom Stephens
  Chapter 1. THE BLOW−UP
  WHEN Ethel’s Mama blew up, she shook the earth in  more ways than one.
  Ethel’s Mama was on Fan Coral Island in the South  Pacific when the lid came off. But probably the first man
  to discover  what had happened was a professor in the laboratory of Yale University  in New Haven,
  Connecticut, U .S. A. He happened to be watching the  seismograph. What he failed to realize was that he had
  noted something  momentous, something that was going to stand the world on its  collective ear.
  Ethel’s Mama was a volcano. On the maps she was  tagged Mount Ettilusamauma, but it was easier to say
  Ethel’s Mama. An  earthquake apparently started Ethel’s Mama off. That was what fooled  everybody. It
  looked like an ordinary earthquake. The Yale seismograph  registered the shake at two hours and eleven
  minutes and forty seconds  past noon, Eastern Daylight Saving Time.
  The Yale professors said there had been a central  earth disturbance about ten thousand miles distant.
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  A few newspapers carried a paragraph or two.
  Then the palm tree landed on the Fan Coral resident  governor’s house. It happened in the night. It was a big
  palm tree.  Afterward the resident governor’s house was not worth rebuilding. The  resident governor himself
  was out on a rum−and−lime spree, or there  would have been a vacancy on his country’s political pay roll.
  How a two−ton palm tree came to be sailing around in  the night sky over Fan Coral Island was a question. It
  was not  scorched, so it was not some morsel ejected by Ethel’s Mama.
  A newspaper reporter who had foolishly quit his job  to write a book was on Fan Coral Island at the time.
  Otherwise the  world might never have heard about the palm. The erstwhile journalist  sought needed spare
  change by cabling, or radioing, volcano yarns to  every news agency which would take the stuff collect.
  The lone newshawk had unwittingly discovered a gold  mine.
  The uphill landslides were next. When the Fan Coral  journalist radioed the story about the avalanches that
  slid uphill,  three of his newspapers radioed right back that they wanted no more of  his stuff. They thought he
  was a goof who was drawing on a not−too−sage  imagination.
  But it was just what the misjudged journalist said  it was. Patches of rock and earth came loose and slid uphill.
  They were  not very big patches. The strips were probably fifty feet wide.
  The next night it rained coconuts. And there was no  cyclone which could have picked them up and dropped
  them on Fan Coral  City.
  Newspapermen from various parts of the Pacific began  to drift toward Fan Coral Island by airplane and boat.
  A fine yacht named the Fifth Wind turned up  in Fan Coral harbor. It belonged to a man named Cadwiller
  Olden, the  crew of the craft said. No one had ever heard of Cadwiller Olden. The  cables carried a color story
  which mentioned the yacht. No one dreamed  how important that was going to be.
  Ethel’s Mama was getting interesting.
  FIVE days after Ethel’s Mama started erupting,  Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks turned up at Yale
  and asked  for the seismograph records. He came near not getting them.
  "Ham" Brooks was a Harvard product, admittedly one  of the most astute lawyers Harvard had ever turned
  out, and proud of  his Alma Mater. He therefore had no use for Yale, and had said so  publicly on occasion.
  Marley Brooks, called "Ham," would have been  designated as a dude thirty years ago. As it was, the
  newspapers called  him America’s best−dressed man. He always carried an innocent−looking  black cane.
  "But Doc Savage wants the records of the seismograph  of the Mount Ettilusamauma eruption," Ham
  explained.
  Doc Savage! That made it different, admitted the  Yale officials, who conceivably had heard of Clark Savage,
  Jr., better  known as Doc Savage, the man whom the newspapers called the "Mental  Marvel," the "Scientific
  Genius," the "Muscular Midas," the "Man of  Mystery," and other things.
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  "Doc does not wish newspaper publicity." Ham  reminded the Yale officials.
  Of course, of course. No newspaper publicity. But  some one let the cat out, and the afternoon papers carried it.
  Newspaper reporters were lying for Ham at Grand  Central Station. Those who did not know Ham by sight
  had been told to  look for a very dapper gentleman who would be accompanied by a very  remarkable pet ape
  named Chemistry.
  Ham gave them the slip. He did not have his pet ape  along, anyway. Ham had suspected some one would slip.
  Consequently he  got off at the station before Grand Central and waved down a taxi.
  Doc Savage was in his remarkable headquarters  library and laboratory on the eighty−sixth floor of the city’s
  most  impressive skyscraper when Ham entered. Doc had been working with  chemicals and wore a rubber
  smock which hid everything but the fact  that he was a giant bronze man with amazing sinews in his hands
  and  neck. He also had a pair of strange flake−gold eyes which had an almost  compelling power.
  Ham was surprised at the speed with which Doc Savage  went to work on the seismograph records. The
  bronze man used calipers  and magnifying glasses on the curves. Then he consulted various  instruments of his
  own and did some mathematical calculations.
  Ham was even more startled when he heard Doc Savage  make a small, almost inaudible trilling sound, a
  weird, exotic note  which the bronze giant made only in moments of intense mental stress,  or in surprise.
  "What’s up, Doc?" Ham demanded.
  The bronze man said absently, "The majority of  scientists have always believed it impossible for such a thing
  to  exist. Yet the behavior of that volcano shows that it does exist."
  "Eh?" Ham said. "I don’t understand."
  "Ham," the bronze giant stated, "the world does not  know about it yet, but mankind is up against something
  pretty terrible."
  "You mean that volcano?" asked the puzzled Ham.
  "Something in the heart of the earth, under that  volcano," Doc Savage explained. "The thing has lain there, its
  presence  unknown to scientists. The eruption of the volcano apparently disturbed  it, and it would appear that
  the thing has worked up toward the crater  of the volcano with the lava. In a short time it will be out of the
  volcano, unless my opinion is wrong."
  Ham rubbed his jaw. "You talk like this was  important."
  The bronze man did not answer immediately. When he  did, he spoke slowly and grimly.
  "It is more than important," he said. "It may well  be the most terrible calamity ever loosened on the human
  race."
  Ham swallowed. "But w−what is it, Doc?"
  The bronze man considered.
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  "We will call it Repel," he said. "My opinion is  that that is what the rest of the world will call it when it
  becomes  known."
  "But that does not explain what it is," Ham reminded.
  "I am going to wait until I have made a closer  examination on Fan Coral Island before venturing any exact
  description  of Repel," the bronze man said. "We will leave immediately. Get the men  together, Ham. And
  have them take plenty of fighting equipment."
  "Fighting�"
  "Supermachine pistols and mercy bullets, gas and gas  masks," Doc directed. "And the rest of the stuff we
  usually take."
  Two hours later Doc Savage’s huge tri−motored  amphibian plane was in the air, headed for San Francisco.
  The ship was  streamlined, and could easily hop the Pacific on one fuel load. Doc  mapped the course�San
  Francisco to Hawaii to Tahiti to Fan Coral Island.
  With Doc Savage in the plane was Ham and his other  four assistants. These were Colonel John "Renny"
  Renwick, an engineer;  Major Thomas J. "Long Tom" Roberts, electrical wizard; William Harper  "Johnny"
  Littlejohn, archaeologist and geologist; and Lieutenant  Colonel Andrew Blodgett "Monk" Mayfair, a chemist,
  who had his pet pig,  Habeas Corpus, with him.
  All five assistants were curious about the reason  for their hurried flight to Fan Coral Island, and particularly
  curious  about the reason for taking so many weapons.
  Ham asked, "Are you figuring we’ll have some  trouble, Doc?"
  "We have got to keep the thing coming out of that  volcano from falling into the wrong hands," Doc Savage
  said quietly.
  "Is it that bad?"
  "It would be almost impossible to estimate the  terrible possibilities of Repel," the bronze man stated.
  He ran the plane’s motors with the throttles wide  open.
  THE next development that followed the strange  eruption of Ethel’s Mama occurred in Shanghai, China.
  Shanghai boasts  of a newspaper printed in English.
  A man sat in a Shanghai bar and read this newspaper.  He was a lean and fit−looking fellow. And he was very
  interested in the  accounts of Ethel’s Mama. He also watched the bar.
  Soon another lean and fit−looking man drifted into  the bar and ordered a drink. The two men were very much
  alike in build  and face. But the new arrival had hair which was white on top, but  black at the temples. He also
  had a square of adhesive tape stuck over  the back of his right hand and another on the palm.
  The first man joined the second. They had recently  met, their casual remarks revealed. After a while the first
  man  suggested trying a second bar which he knew about. The other agreed,  and they left.
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  The man who had been reading the paper steered the  course into a deserted street. He stopped.
  "Listen," he said, "you are Snowball Eagan, a  newspaper writer, aren’t you?"
  "That’s right," agreed the man with the white scalp  lock and the taped right hand. "But what�"
  "And you’re headed for Fan Coral Island, to cover  the eruption of Ethel’s Mama, aren’t you?" asked the
  second.
  "That’s right."
  "We’re about the same build."
  "So what?"
  "If I was to dye my hair white on top and put a  piece of tape on my right hand I’d look like you."
  "Listen here," snapped newspaperman "Snowball"  Eagan, "what are you driving at? Who are you, anyway?
  You haven’t told  me your name, and I saw you duck when you saw a cop coming."
  "I’m one of the most dangerous international  criminals alive," the other man said calmly. "The Shanghai
  police are  watching every road, steamship, railroad and airplane leaving Shanghai.  I cannot get out of the
  city. My pal, Bert, got out. He was lucky. He  is now on Fan Coral Island, and I’ve got to get there. The only
  way of  getting there that I can see is to take your place. You newspapermen  have a plane chartered which is
  leaving to−night for Fan Coral Island.  The other newspapermen don’t know you very well, and I could easily
  get  by as you."
  Snowball Eagan, the newshawk, exploded, "But what is  there on Fan Coral Island for a crook like you?"
  "If that volcano has coughed up what I think it has,  it will make a guy like me just about able to run things in
  this  world," the international criminal said grimly.
  "You’re crazy to tell me this," snapped Snowball  Eagan, "because I’m not going to change places with you!
  You can’t  bribe me!"
  "I wasn’t going to bribe you," the other said.
  With which he whipped up a knife and cut the  unfortunate journalist’s throat as neatly as could be.
  The newspaper plane left Shanghai that night and  carried the fake Snowball Eagan.
  Counting Doc Savage’s group, that made two parties  interested in what Ethel’s Mama was coughing up. And
  both were headed  for the spot by plane.
  The false Snowball Eagan, having the shorter  distance to go, arrived first.
  The world did not know when Doc Savage arrived. He  brought his big plane in at night, planted it in a little
  cove on the  opposite side of the island, and he and his five men did not make their  presence known. They did
  not want to attract a lot of attention because  Doc Savage disliked newspaper notoriety.
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  5
  
  ON the day following the arrival of Doc Savage’s  plane on Fan Coral Island, a very tall and wonderfully
  bony man walked  down the street in Fan Coral City and had a narrow escape.
  A chunk of lava the size of a football came sizzling  down from the sky. It exploded with a loud report on the
  sidewalk  beside the bony gentleman. The latter jumped into the nearest door with  the alacrity of a rabbit
  which had been shot at.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" the bony man gasped. "A  comminatory indubitably examplifying perrorative
  incidentation."
  A newspaper writer in a near−by store overheard this  and grabbed excitedly at an arm of a companion writer.
  "Did you hear  that?"
  "Yes," said the other writer. "And I could hear it  again and still now know what he said."
  This other writer was lean and fit−looking enough to  fill the public conception of a tiger hunter. There were
  two other  remarkable things about him: His hair was black at the temples and  white on top, exactly reversing
  the usual order. A two−inch square of  white adhesive tape was stuck on the back of his right hand and
  another  square on the palm. He had introduced himself as Snowball Eagan from  Shanghai, and some of the
  other newshawks had heard of him.
  The first writer said, "Nobody ever understands that  tall drink of water unless they’ve got a late dictionary
  and plenty of  time to look up the words."
  "You know him?" asked Snowball Eagan.
  "No. But there can’t be any mistake. He uses the  words and looks the part. He’s William Harper Littlejohn."
  Snowball Eagan patted the piece of adhesive tape on  the back of his right hand gently. "So what?"
  "Good night! Don’t you know? Littlejohn, or Johnny,  as they call him, is one of Doc Savage’s five assistants."
  Snowball Eagan suddenly looked very interested.
  "Savage!" he exclaimed. "You mean the American they  call the man of bronze?"
  "The gentleman of mystery himself. This chap Johnny  is one of five aids who work with Doc Savage. Johnny
  is a top  archaeologist and geologist, and Savage’s other aids are all experts in  some line. But the bronze lad
  himself is better than any one of them at  his own profession."
  "That’s hokum!" sniffed Snowball Eagan.
  "Don’t kid yourself."
  "It’s just the old bushwa for publicity."
  "If you ever tried to interview the bronze man you’d  know about how he goes for publicity. Just like a fish
  goes for the  Sahara Desert."
  "A lot of gargle," said Snowball Eagan. "Watch me  interview this assistant of Doc Savage’s for a starter."
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  The two scribes walked up to the bony word user and  Snowball Eagan said, "Greetings, Professor Littlejohn.
  We are  newspapermen. Will you tell us what you are doing here? Is Doc Savage  with you? And if so, why?"
  The bony gentleman frowned. His right hand fumbled  absently at a ribbon which ran from his lapel to his
  upper coat pocket  and almost drew into view a monocle, then stuffed it back hastily.
  He said out of one side of his mouth, "Who yez mugs  t’ink yer kiddin’? Gwan! Drag yer freight ‘fore I pop
  yez one in de  feed hole!"
  With that the bony fellow shuffled off, keeping a  wary eye on the black sky and its occasional lava rock
  hailstone.
  Snowball Eagan scoffed at his companion. "An eminent  archaeologist and geologist, was he?"
  The other journalist grinned sheepishly.
  "Well�hell, everybody can make a mistake. Buy you a  drink on this."
  They had a round of Fan Coral toddy, so−called. It  was a local beverage. The newshawks had taken to
  claiming that a native  had fallen down and broken a bottle of the Toddy on the side of Ethel’s  Mama, hence
  the eruption.
  SNOWBALL EAGAN broke away after a time. He walked  around until he was sure he was alone. Then he
  turned up at a bungalow  by itself on a closely clipped lawn. He did not enter. He stood under a  window and
  whistled twice, one long and one short.
  A muffled, worried voice said from inside, "For the  love of mud! Has your disguise flopped so quick?"
  "Pipe down, Bert," Snowball Eagan said in a low  tone. "Nobody is going to find me out. I used to be a
  newspaperman, and  that makes it a cinch to put this across."
  "But what if they find the real Snowball Eagan’s  body?"
  "They won’t identify it if they do. The hair and the  right hand are gone. I burned them. My hair is dyed like
  Eagan’s. And  these patches on my hand are like those Eagan always wore over the  bullet hole in his hand that
  never healed."
  "I didn’t like the idea of killing Eagan. These  coppers here are tough babies to fool around with. You’d better
  watch  your step!"
  "What the hell! Eagan was just a newspaper bum  headed over here. I had to skip Shanghai. The cops had me
  covered  everywhere. And taking this Eagan’s place was my only sure−fire chance  of getting here. It’s a good
  thing you got out of Shanghai before they  got wise to us."
  "We’ve been over that before," the voice inside  said. "Have you decided how we’re gonna work this?"
  "That’s what I came here about," said the fake  Snowball Eagan. "As you know, I’ve been a bit doubtful. I
  haven’t been  plumb sure that volcano has coughed up what I think it has. But now I  know."
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  7
  
  "How come?"
  "Because the big time has gotten interested in it."
  "Big time? Whatcha mean?"
  "Doc Savage. I just saw one of his helpers."
  No sound came from within the bungalow for such a  long interval that Snowball Eagan leaned closer and
  said, "Well?"
  "I wonder if you’ve gone crazy?" asked the one  inside.
  "Is a crack like that necessary?"
  "Something is necessary to bring you back to your  right mind. Don’t you know this Doc Savage’s
  reputation?"
  The rascal calling himself Snowball snorted.  "Scotland Yard has a rep, too. What did it get them?"
  "The Yard is different. They’re just police. Doc  Savage is�is�isn’t quite human. He has some incredible
  scientific  disguises, from what I’ve heard. And he’s put in his life chasing  crooks around. From what I hear,
  not many of them got away."
  Snowball started breathing through his nose. He was  angry.
  "Don’t give me an argument!" he gritted.
  There was another long silence from inside. "All  right."
  There was fear in the voice inside.
  Snowball said, "We’re goin’ to work on this Doc  Savage right away. If he’s down there after the same thing
  we’re after,  we’ll have to do things about it."
  "And what do you think you’ll do?"
  "I guess Doc Savage and his gang will have to wake  up dead," Snowball Eagan growled.
  Chapter 2. THE MAN OF MIGHT
  SIX little brown tents were pitched in a row under a  huge rock on one side of Mount Ettilusamauma. The
  rock overhung and  sheltered the tents. The sea was half a mile west and two thousand feet  in the direction the
  old−time preachers claimed Hades would be found.  The top of Ettilusamauma was four miles east, seven
  thousand feet up,  and it looked as if Hades were up there instead of down below.
  Tongues of flame, some apparently at least a mile  long, went lunging up into the sky. Dust, smoke and rocks
  came whizzing  out. And the crater was boiling over in one place, where a great lava  river flowed.
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  Chapter 2. THE MAN OF MIGHT
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  This lava made a red snake down the mountainside,  passing within four hundred yards of the six little brown
  tents, then  ran into the sea. Where it entered the sea, it was making almost as  much steam as Ethel’s Mama
  was making smoke.
  Two small boats carrying motion picture cameramen  were fooling around the steam. A plane was flying up
  and down over the  lava river; another cameraman was leaning over the cockpit edge with  his movie machine.
  The tall man who used the big words, the long bag of  bones who had been nearly brained by the lava rock in
  town, came out of  the scorched jungle and approached the tents. Finding no one there he  walked toward the
  lava stream.
  Before long, he came in sight of what at first might  have been mistaken for an ape lying on its back, holding a
  smoking  cloth to its forehead. The bony man approached.
  "Hello, Monk," he said. "Where’s Doc?"
  The individual on the ground sat up. He was nearly  as broad as he was tall, his face was mostly mouth, and he
  was covered  with hair which resembled rusty shingle nails. He held the smoking  towel in first one hand, then
  the other.
  "Hyah, Johnny!" he squeaked in a voice that might  have belonged to a small child. "What’s wrong?"
  Johnny pointed a bony finger at the smoking towel.  "What’s that?"
  "Dry ice of a new kind that I invented, and which is  all that’s keepin’ me alive in this place. Brother, is it hot
  over by  that rock river! What’s wrong?"
  Johnny said, "What makes you think something is  wrong?"
  "You’re usin’ little words, professor. Something has  to happen to make you do that."
  "Two newspaper reporters recognized me in town,"  Johnny explained. "I think I fooled them. But later, while
  I was  finishing up my shopping, I saw a man trailing me. He was one of these  natives. I think I gave him the
  slip. But Doc won’t like this. He  wanted our visit here kept secret."
  "That last has been eatin’ on me," Monk announced.  "Why the secrecy? Why the hurry to get here? What’s
  up, anyhow?"
  "Why not ask Doc?"
  Monk grinned. When he did this, most of his homely  face became grim.
  "It wouldn’t do any good," he said. "Doc has a habit  of keepin’ things, or suspicions, to himself until he is
  dead sure  before he tells anybody."
  Johnny said, "I’m going to ask him myself."
  He walked in the direction of the lava river.
  "Don’t get frostbitten!" Monk squeaked.
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  Chapter 2. THE MAN OF MIGHT
  9
  
  MONK unrolled his towel to inspect his dry ice. The  diminished size of the cube�smoking because it was so
  cold instead of  so hot�caused him to groan lustily. Monk’s ordinary speaking voice was  small, but his groan
  was something like a piece being torn out of the  side of a circus tent. He lay back and replaced his cooling
  invention on his forehead.
  When the earth shook and red light washed over the  ground, he raised up on his elbow to glower at the top of
  Ethel’s Mama.  Monk was just in time to see something happen.
  The plane with the cameraman was flying over the  upper end of the lava river, near the crater’s lip. The plane
  lifted  straight upward many scores of feet. It turned end over end as it went.  There was no visible reason for
  this occurrence.
  The aircraft fluttered about regaining equilibrium.  Then it sailed around, and like a hen which had been bitten
  unexpectedly by a harmless−looking worm, it buzzed back cautiously to  investigate.
  Almost the same thing as before happened to the  plane. Something invisible seemed to knock it through the
  air. It  traveled straight backward this time.
  Monk scrambled erect, still holding his dry ice  poultice to his head.
  "Maybe Doc and the others didn’t see that!" he  grunted. "I better tell ‘em. Come on, Habeas!"
  Monk looked around, waiting.
  "Habeas!" he rapped.
  A remarkable−looking pig reluctantly left the shade  of a rock. The shote had long thin legs and ears which a
  bat would have  considered suitable for flying. He was Habeas Corpus, Monk’s pet. If  the surroundings had
  not been so hot, Monk would probably have been  training Habeas. He spent most of his spare time educating
  the pet hog.
  Monk started off. Habeas followed him a dozen paces  and stopped.
  "Habeas!" Monk squeaked. "C’mon, or I’ll tie knots  in your legs!"
  Habeas paid no attention. He seemed interested in a  clump of scrub palms.
  Monk said, "Come on, Habeas, or I’ll give you to  Ham!"
  The rusty−looking bristles on Habeas’s back began to  stand on end.
  Monk frowned at the scrub palm cluster. "What the  heck!" He started over to investigate.
  A barefooted, brown man with a big revolver came out  of the palm cluster.
  "You fella savvy stand still!" he said fiercely.
  Monk savvied. He put out his jaw. "Say, what’s the  big idea?"
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  Chapter 2. THE MAN OF MIGHT
  10
  
  The brown man wore denim pants, no shirt, and an  ugly look. He got down to business immediately.
  "You fella talk chop−chop," he said. "Why all same  fella Doc Savage come ‘longside Fan Coral?"
  Monk squeaked, "You wanta know why Doc came here?"
  "Savvy," said the other. "You bet. Me fella want  know."
  The man’s revolver had a big barrel and a big  cylinder, and the sun was just right for Monk to get a look at
  the  round, shiny noses of the cartridges. They were impressive.
  "Who sent you to ask that question?" Monk growled.
  The brown man started to answer when he saw a shadow  looming on the ground beside him. It was a big
  shadow, and it had not  been there an instant before.
  The shadow was all the brown man ever saw of the  fate that overtook him. Fate in the shape of a giant of
  bronze.
  THE big bronze fellow had come silently out of the  jungle, and he got the gun and dropped the native with
  one blow, all as  if it had been rehearsed a thousand times. His remarkable bronze  features had not changed
  expression, had in no way showed that the  ghostly silence with which he moved was at all unusual, or that
  dropping an armed native was anything out of the ordinary.
  Strangely, there was enough of the unusual about the  big bronze man to make it seem that the incredible was
  rather to be  expected from him.
  There was more about the bronze man than bigness.  The tendons on the backs of his hands resembled round
  files, and the  rest of his sinews looked as if they were made up of cables of the  wires they brace airplane
  wings with.
  He wore nothing above the belt, and his muscular  development was fabulous, yet so symmetrical that, had he
  been fully  clothed, and seen at a little distance, he would have appeared no more  Herculean than an ordinary
  man.
  Probably the most striking thing about the bronze  giant was his eyes. They were like pools of flake gold,
  always stirred  by some tiny force. They contained a weird quality, something  compelling, hypnotic.
  "Doc!" Monk exploded a relieved grunt. "How’d you  happen along just then?"
  "Coming to warn you," the bronze man said.
  "Huh?"
  "Better run for it. You saw what happened to that  plane a moment ago?"
  The bronze man’s voice was like the rest of  him�remarkable. It was a trained voice, unexcited and subdued,
  but  somehow giving the impression that it could carry for miles if  necessary.
   REPEL
  Chapter 2. THE MAN OF MIGHT
  11
  
  "I was comin’ to tell you about the plane when this  bird jumped me," Monk explained. "Say, what�"
  "Run," Doc Savage interposed quietly. "If the thing  comes this way, the ledge under which the tents are
  pitched will  probably be the safest place."
  "Thing!" 
  Monk squeaked. "What thing?" 
  But the bronze man had already whipped back into the  jungle. He reappeared immediately, carrying a large
  metal case which  seemed to contain a great deal of delicate apparatus. He had evidently  put this down while
  he crept upon Monk’s captor.
  The bronze man raised his voice. It was a crash of  volume, as if stepped up by a power amplifier.
  "Long Tom, Johnny!" he called. "Renny, Ham!"
  "Coming!" came a faint shout from the direction of  the lava stream.
  Monk scooped up the unconscious native. "Instead of  this lad askin’ me questions, he’s gonna answer some!"
  The bronze man and Monk ran through the jungle, then  worked among a legion of boulders evidently
  deposited there by Ethel’s  Mama in some past eruption. There was a stretch of brush beyond, then  the camp
  of the six little cinnamon−colored tents under the overhanging  ledge.
  Doc Savage put down the instrument box and Monk  dropped his captive.
  FOUR men appeared on one side of the campsite,  running toward the tent and the ledge. One of them was the
  gaunt  archaeologist and user of big words, Johnny. Dangling from one of his  eyes was a monocle, in reality a
  powerful magnifying glass that had  served many uses.
  The second man was the dapper lawyer, Ham, the  best−dressed man in America and one of the world’s
  cleverest lawyers.  In one hand he gripped a sword cane whose point was coated with a drug  producing
  unconsciousness.
  The third member of the group was a formidable tower  of a fellow who would weigh in excess of two
  hundred and fifty  pounds�but if he had been built in proportion to his hands, he would  have weighed in the
  neighborhood of a ton. It was doubtful if he could  have put either fist in a gallon pail. He had a long, naturally
  gloomy  face which would have been excellent stock in trade for an undertaker.
  The big−fisted man was Colonel John  Renwick�"Renny"�noted for three things: his ability as an engineer,
  his  boasted ability to knock the panel out of almost any wooden door with  either fist, and his membership in
  Doc Savage’s little group of five  aids.
  Major Thomas J. Roberts, the electrical wizard, was  the fourth man. He had the complexion of a mushroom
  and the physique,  as far as outward appearance went, of a fellow who had spent his life  in a wheelchair. He
  had collected the name of Long Tom after a  ludicrous adventure with a type of ancient cannon designated by
  that  name.
   REPEL
  Chapter 2. THE MAN OF MIGHT
  12
  
  The four were carrying more complicated−appearing  instruments.
  "We will set the apparatus up inside the shelter of  the ledge and continue to watch it," Doc Savage said.
  The bronze man bent over the instruments, adjusting  dials, knobs, watching indicator needles, and twice
  plugging in a  telephone headset to get frequency hums. Long Tom, Johnny, Ham and  Renny looked on
  curiously.
  Monk looked around, saw his pet pig, Habeas, nowhere  about, and hastily ambled outside. Monk’s apish
  physique gave him a  strange, short−legged gait which made him seem in no hurry even when  running at full
  speed.
  Doc Savage continued to watch the dials. The gold  flakes of his eyes seemed to be moving a little faster, but
  there was  nothing else about his expression to show he was excited.
  "It is undoubtedly following the lava stream down  and getting close," he said.
  It was very quiet under the ledge. Ethel’s Mama made  a rumbling now and then. One of the instruments
  hummed faintly.
  "It is very close," the bronze man said.
  Outside, Monk’s voice blared.
  "Blazes!" the homely chemist squawled. "What the  heck’s got hold of me?"
  Chapter 3. THE UNSEEN
  THE tree was small, gnarled and tough, as tropical  trees often are.
  Monk clung to the tree trunk with both arms and his  chin. The expression on his homely face showed that he
  was using all  his strength. His legs were stretched out parallel with the ground.  Something might have had
  hold of his ankles, pulling with great force.  Some medium, certainly, was doing just that. But there was
  nothing  visible!
  "Help!" Monk squealed. "Shoot the dang thing or  somethin’!"
  "Holy cow!" exploded big−fisted Renny.
  Johnny said, "I’ll be superamalgamated!"
  Long Tom and Ham looked on in astonishment.
  Monk howled, "Help, blast it!"
  Monk suddenly lost his grip. He was carried through  the air at least twenty feet before he hit the ground. End
  over end he  tumbled. A thorny shrub scratched him, and he squawled angrily.
   REPEL
  Chapter 3. THE UNSEEN
  13
  
  "Shoot the dang thing!" he bellowed. "Make it leggo  me!"
  Big−fisted Renny dug into a concealed holster under  an arm and brought out a weapon which had somewhat
  the appearance of an  oversize automatic. Renny aimed. The gun made a noise like several big  riveting
  machines going simultaneously. Renny arched his stream of  bullets so they passed all around Monk.
  Monk suddenly managed to stop rolling.
  "Keep shootin’!" the homely chemist bellowed. "You  scared the blame thing away!"
  Renny started his machine pistol again, but stopped  quickly. His sad eyes almost fell from his gloomy face.
  "Holy cow!" he boomed hollowly. "Look!"
  A tall, spindling tree between Monk and the ledge  was bending over slowly, as if depressed by an invisible
  weight. It was  leaning west. And blistered grass blades were bending as well. Great  masses of gravel and
  earth began to slide!
  "It’s coming this way!" Ham yelled.
  Doc Savage said, "Get the instruments into the back  of the recess under the ledge. Jam them against the solid
  rock, then do  the same with yourselves. Cling to the cracks in the rock."
  The bronze man sounded totally unexcited.
  The others sprang to follow the suggestion�and never  made it. Something unseen, terrific, hit them. They
  were entirely  helpless. Carried off their feet, they were driven deep into the ledge  recess.
  Renny’s head struck rock and he fell back stunned.  Tall, lean Johnny and pale Long Tom got entangled, and
  hit with enough  force to take air out of them both. Ham hit the wall of rock feet  first, and did an eerie
  thing�he staggered around on the vertical wall,  trying to keep his balance, just as he might have done on level
  ground.
  The next instant, all were blinded by a roaring  inrush of sand, dust and sticks. There was a great grinding and
  rumbling. The earth trembled. Came a tremendous crash, and it grew  abruptly gloomy under the ledge.
  Then silence fell.
  "STAY where you are for a moment," Doc Savage  advised quietly. "It may come back."
  The bronze man was against one wall, half buried in  the sand, dust and débris which had been swept into the
  ledge niche.  Cradled and protected in the muscular cordon of his arms was one of the  cases of sensitive
  apparatus. It seemed to be intact.
  The other cases had been smashed.
  The opening under the ledge was not nearly as wide  as it had been. A huge boulder had come from
  somewhere and rolled  against the aperture. Smaller boulders were stacked against it. The  tents were down.
   REPEL
  Chapter 3. THE UNSEEN
  14
  
  Suspended dust started the men coughing, sneezing.
  "Holy�kerchoo�
  cow!" Renny exploded. "Where’s that native?" 
  Doc Savage was already on his feet and looking  around, flake−gold eyes probing everywhere.
  There became audible within the little cavern under  the ledge, penetrating to all its recesses, a small, strange
  sound. The  note was predominately a trilling, but it had an eerie nature, a  quality which was ethereal. It might
  have been the progress of a tiny  wind around some cranny in the big boulder blocking the entrance.
  Doc Savage’s four aids stared at the bronze giant.  They knew that sound, had heard it many times. It was a
  characteristic  of Doc Savage, a small and unconscious thing which the bronze man did  when surprised, or
  when confronted with a new discovery or realization.
  Of the brown−skinned native who had tried to seize  Monk there was no sign.
  Monk yelled outside, "You guys all right?"
  Doc Savage moved to the boulder. There was enough  room to squeeze out. The others followed him.
  Monk, rubbing his eyes, spitting out dust, joined  them in staring in the direction of the lava stream.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" Johnny gulped.
  The patch of big boulders was directly before them.  The masses of rock had been fairly evenly distributed.
  But there was  nothing even about the way they now lay.
  A path more than a score of feet in width had been  swept almost clean of loose stone. The rocks had been
  pushed, as if by  a gigantic broom, to the sides, and in the direction of the ledge.
  "Blazes!" Monk breathed. "Think how big that thing  must be! Some of those rocks weigh tons!"
  The others were silent. What had just happened was  so fantastic, so impossible, that they could not think of
  much to say  about it.
  "What gets me," Long Tom said hollowly, "is that you  couldn’t see anything! I can’t understand that!"
  "Well, it was something that was alive," Monk  declared. "You saw how it turned me loose when Renny
  opened up with his  machine pistol. Say, where’s that native?"
  "Gone," said Ham.
  "What?"
  "He’s disappeared."
  Monk opened and shut his big mouth several times. 
  "Maybe that whatchacallit came after the native,"  the homely chemist mumbled.
   REPEL
  Chapter 3. THE UNSEEN
  15
  
  Big−fisted Renny peered about suddenly.
  "Where’s Doc?" he boomed wildly.
  THE five men stared about them, then at each other.  The bronze man was not in sight. Something pale and
  cold seemed to flow  into the faces of each man.
  "Doc!" Renny gulped. "Do you suppose�"
  The rest of it stuck in his throat, and his fists  made big blocks that might have been marble painted over with
  a brown  stain.
  "Doc!" Monk squawled.
  "In here," the bronze man said quietly from beneath  the ledge.
  The five men charged for the opening, got inside,  saw the bronze man over the instrument which he had
  saved, and looked  at each other sheepishly.
  "As jittery as a bunch of kids in a spooky  graveyard!" Renny thumped disgustedly. "What does that
  contraption  show, Doc?"
  The bronze man took a moment before answering. 
  "It is a little surprising," he said. "This is a  device to register and measure automatically the presence and
  strength  of certain invisible wave lengths of light such as the so−called infra  and cosmic rays, particularly
  those which have the property of  penetrating solids. The device went completely haywire."
  "You mean it didn’t register?"
  "It registered, but the recording lines make  absolutely no sense."
  Renny boomed, "Say, Doc, you got an inkling of  something queer here just by reading the newspapers and
  looking at that  Yale seismograph record. You came here in a hurry. Just what did you  expect to find?"
  Instead of answering that, the bronze man said, "It  might be best if we did something besides talk. Renny,
  suppose you look  around for some trace of that native who tried to make Monk tell why we  were here.
  Johnny might help you."
  Renny sighed, realizing he was not going to get any  information now. "Righto." The engineer and Johnny
  walked off.
  "Long Tom," Doc suggested, "you might look through  the stuff under the tents and see if you can find our
  capacity field  device to detect the presence of prowlers. Maybe it is intact."
  The pale−looking electrical wizard delved into one  of the collapsed tents and came up with a black box which
  had a long  coil of flexible insulated copper braid attached, as well as a headset.  The box had a profusion of
  knobs. Long Tom tested.
   REPEL
  Chapter 3. THE UNSEEN
  16
  
  "It still works," he said.
  "Bring it," Doc requested. "Monk and Ham might as  well go with us, also."
  WHEN the bronze man got into motion, it was evident  his destination was the stream of flowing lava. He
  followed the path  which had been so fantastically swept clear of boulders. Doc and his  aids saw plenty to
  interest them.
  The trail led straight to the lava stream.
  "Blast me!" Monk muttered. "What kind of a  gollawhoppus can live in melted rock?"
  "Gollawhoppus is right!" Ham agreed.
  Doc Savage turned toward the sea. The aids began to  notice queer things. In several spots, molten lava was
  splashed high on  the banks of the little valley in which the lava flowed. Fires which  this liquid hot rock had
  started had not burned far.
  "I hate to think I might be going nuts," Monk  complained. "But it looks as if that thing did a lot of jumping
  around  or something and splashed this rock out on the banks."
  Ham stopped suddenly, opened his mouth and began to  giggle. Finally he laughed loudly and violently.
  "Somethin’s goofed you!" Monk snorted.
  Ham sobered with a snort.
  "Nothing of the sort. This�this spirit out of the  hot place, or whatever it is�tried to grab you and carry you
  off,  didn’t it? It just struck me that Old Nick must be getting so anxious  for your company he couldn’t wait
  for you to turn up your toes in the  ordinary manner."
  Monk glared indignantly, but the best he could think  of was, "The place is probably so full of lawyers by now
  that there’s  no room!"
  Doc Savage stopped.
  "Long Tom," suggested the bronze man, "here is as  good a place as any to set up your capacity detector
  alarm. Stay with  it, and if any one is following us, the apparatus should register that  fact."
  Pale Long Tom nodded, moved back from the lava where  the heat was not so intense and set up his device.
  He hardly had the headset on when he shouted sharply.
  "There’s something moving around here!"
  Doc Savage got under cover so suddenly that he  seemed to vanish where he had been standing. Monk and
  Ham were only a  shade slower.
   REPEL
  Chapter 3. THE UNSEEN
  17
  
  They listened. It was hard for their ears to tell  much. The flowing lava made grisly sounds. Moreover, fires
  set by the  splashing lava were crackling. Ethel’s Mama made an occasional rumble.
  "Sure you ain’t hearin’ the lava in that  contraption?" Monk asked.
  "No," Long Tom said. "Whatever it is, is coming  closer."
  Monk produced one of the rapid−firing pistols from  an under−arm holster. The weapons had been perfected
  by Doc Savage, and  since they fired anything from gas to demolition cartridges, could do  surprising things.
  "If it’s our invisible friend, I’ll be ready for ‘im  this time!" Monk said grimly.
  A peculiar−looking creature came out of the jungle  and ambled toward the group. It resembled a member of
  the ape family,  although important anthropologists had disagreed on this. Very striking  was the what−is−it’s
  likeness to the homely chemist, Monk. Had Monk  been relieved of two hundred pounds or so, he and the ape
  would not  have to be seen in a very thick fog for there to be a case of mistaken  identity.
  "Chemistry!" Ham exploded, relieved at seeing his  pet.
  "I got a notion to shoot anyway!" Monk grumbled.
  A moment later, Monk’s pet pig, Habeas Corpus,  appeared, trailing Chemistry. The two looked as if they had
  just had a  fight. They probably had. They got along about as well as their owners.
  Long Tom said, "That’s what my apparatus located."
  Doc Savage appeared from his hiding place and walked  toward the sea, following the lava. Monk, Ham and
  their pets went with  him.
  Long Tom remained behind with the capacity detector  alarm and suspended the braided, insulated aërial of
  his device between  two small trees. It really was an aërial in substance. The whole  contrivance functioned
  somewhat on the principle of the old−time  regenerative radio receivers which howled when you brought your
  hand  near them. Doc Savage had expended a good deal of his remarkable  scientific skill on the device,
  however, and it was uncannily sensitive.
  Long Tom donned the headset and adjusted the dials  more carefully. It was very hot, even though he had a
  tree between  himself and the flowing lava. He tried fanning himself with the  tropical helmet he was wearing.
  But the capacity detector gave off  little whines each time his hand moved. Long Tom stopped fanning.
  The detector, not quite as finely refined, was  already in use around New York as a burglar alarm. Rich men
  had a wire  strung around the wall enclosing their estates, and when any one came  near the wall a bell rang.
  AFTER about ten minutes, Long Tom showed suddenly  increased interest in his apparatus. Some one was
  coming. The  feeble−looking electrical wizard got to his feet and loosened his  machine pistol.
  The weapon was charged with "mercy" bullets which  produced unconsciousness. They were chemical−filled
  capsules which did  not do much actual damage.
  When the new arrival popped into view, Long Tom  nearly dropped his weapon. It was a girl.
   REPEL
  Chapter 3. THE UNSEEN
  18
  
  A scared girl! Her eyes were big, and she breathed  rapidly. 
  "Come quickly!" she gasped. "It may get away! That  is, if it’s not dead!"
  The big eyes were blue, a nice shade. There was more  about her that was nice, too. Her nose, the shape of her
  mouth. Long  Tom had a weakness for slender girls, and this one was certainly  slender. She wore stout leather
  boots, shorts, a khaki blouse and a  khaki pith helmet. There was a leather case for a miniature camera and  a
  pair of binoculars slung over her right shoulder and a canteen over  her left.
  "Don’t stand there staring!" she snapped. "I want a  witness! Somebody to prove I saw it. I took pictures of it,
  but they  can be faked."
  "Er�I don’t�understand," Long Tom said uncertainly.
  She grabbed his arm. "It’s lying in a side canyon up  above. I saw you men through the trees and ran down
  here as soon as I  found it and took pictures."
  "Who are you?" Long Tom wanted to know.
  "Special writer. Don’t ask questions. It may move."
  Long Tom swallowed twice. "What is it?"
  The young woman looked impatient enough to shake him.
  "It is about fifty feet long, ten feet wide, and  about the same high," she said rapidly. "It’s got the most
  fantastic  kind of arms, and a horrible body. It was sort of like a mass of clear  glass when I first saw it, but it is
  getting darker, changing color."
  "Good night!" Long Tom exclaimed. "The thing that  grabbed Monk!"
  "What’s that?" asked the girl.
  "Nothing!" Long Tom snapped. "Let’s have a look at  this critter!"
  The electrical wizard looked in the direction which  Doc Savage, Monk and Ham had taken. The trio were not
  in sight. Ethel’s  Mama was making quite a rumble at the moment, and he doubted if they  could hear him
  shout. He decided he could call them later.
  He ran up the lava stream bank with the excited  young lady.
  "There’s a big palm tree on the bank of the side  canyon where the thing is lying," the girl said.
  THE big palm had lost its fronds in the heat. It was  a coconut palm. The coconuts still hung in a knot at the
  top, charred  and black, although not a frond remained. At the foot of the tree lay  one of those big palm crabs,
  the kind which have relieved many an  unwary native of a hand when he reached for a coconut. It was baked
  pink and had cracked wide when it hit the ground.
   REPEL
  Chapter 3. THE UNSEEN
  19
  
  Long Tom looked at the crab and said, "That’s just  the way I feel, Miss�Miss�" She didn’t take the hint, so
  the  electrician came out with it. "What’s your name?"
  "Alberta. Come on."
  They ran past the singed coconut, working around  several large boulders, and the girl leveled an arm. The
  leveling  gesture stretched her wrist out of her sleeve and revealed a wrist  watch and a band�the band
  mounted with some diamonds that were nearly  as big as the small wrist watch dial.
  Long Tom coughed some of the sulphurous volcanic air  out, hooked sweat out of his eyes with crooked
  forefingers, and stared.
  "Say, what kind of a gag is this?" he growled.
  There was not much of a side canyon. And there was  certainly nothing in it. Nothing unusual, at least.
  The girl gripped Long Tom’s arm. There was more  strength in her fingers than Long Tom had thought any
  woman would ever  have. It made his whole arm numb.
  "Look!" she shrilled.
  Long Tom looked.
  He saw a wave of purplish black come out of the back  of his brain and break over his eyeballs, and with it
  there was a  phenomenon as if somebody had popped one of those Australian bullwhips  over his ears. The
  ground somehow got up against the side of his face.
  "Don’t!" he heard the girl cry.
  Then the world and everything else went off  somewhere.
  Chapter 4. THE SCARED GIRL
  MONK and Ham were never together very long at any  time without practically coming to blows. That
  exciting things might be  happening around them made little difference with their quarrel. They  had been
  known to lie in a frontline trench during a bombardment and  pass the time by threatening to skin each other
  alive.
  "You awful accident of nature!" Ham was telling the  homely chemist. "You something to scare babies with!
  You’ve taken a  file and sharpened that hog’s tusks!"
  "So what of it, you shyster?" Monk sneered. "Your  Chemistry keeps devilin’ ‘im. Habeas has gotta have a
  defensive  armament."
  Ham glanced compassionately at Chemistry, who seemed  to have come off on the scarred end of his last
  brush with Habeas.
  "I’m going to take a rock and do some dental work on  that hog!" he declared.
   REPEL
  Chapter 4. THE SCARED GIRL
  20
  
  "You do and I’ll use the same rock for a major skull  operation on you!" Monk promised.
  Doc Savage had been paying no attention to the  argument. The three had approached to within a few
  hundreds yards of  the cliff which dropped sheer to the sea. It was over this cliff that  the hot lava poured and
  set up clouds of steam which actually extended  for miles into the tropical sky.
  The bronze man pointed. Monk and Ham looked, but  could discern nothing that had not been happening for
  several days.
  "Watch. It may come up again." Doc got on top of a  small rocky knob.
  Great sheets of the hot lava unexpectedly splashed  out of the creek of molten rock. This happened about a
  hundred feet  back from the cliff edge. There was absolutely no reason for it  occurring, as far as could be seen.
  "Come on, Habeas," Monk said in a small voice. "I  think me and you will hunt us a hole somewhere."
  "Afraid?" Ham snorted.
  "Not of anything I can look at," Monk said, glancing  at Ham. "But that thingamumgrabber got hold of me. I’d
  just as soon  somebody else had the pleasure next time. If you ask me, it made that  splash just now when it
  jumped out of the lava."
  Ham scoffed, "A lot of help you are going to be in  investigating!"
  "Go right ahead, feller. I’ll write a book and tell  your posterity, which you ain’t got any, thank heavens, how
  fearless  you were."
  Ham planted his sword cane on the ground, glared and  gave all signs of being willing to delay for an
  argument. He started  out by telling Monk how his ancestors had lived in trees, and probably  scrubby trees at
  that. He was getting around to detail when they both  discovered Doc Savage had gone on toward the sea.
  When they followed the bronze man, Monk and Ham kept  rather close together.
  DOC SAVAGE was positioned in a depression on the  cliff edge some distance from the spot where the lava
  stream emptied  into the sea. The little pit where he crouched, made by the weather,  was about the size of
  those the covered wagon immigrants used to dig up  to fight redskins.
  Monk and Ham strained their eyes after they joined  the bronze man. The molten rock was making a
  tremendous boiling in the  sea. The breeze was off the land, and carried most of the steam out to  sea.
  The boats carrying the motion picture cameramen�the  craft were a yawl and a cabin cruiser�looked
  surprisingly tiny at the  base of the gigantic mass of steam. The whole effect was that of a  leviathan nature
  aroused and giving an exhibition which brought home  definitely the smallness and instability of the world
  which man is  liable to accept as so great and unchanging only because it seems so to  him.
  "Brothers, this is quite a show." Monk’s small voice  had grown more tiny than usual.
  Doc Savage said, "The thing has followed the lava  stream down and is about to enter the sea. It may be
  interesting to  watch what will happen."
   REPEL
  Chapter 4. THE SCARED GIRL
  21
  
  Monk swallowed twice.
  "After the thing has been livin’ in that lava, the  sea water may be kinda cold," was all he could think of.
  They waited. The bronze man had produced a small,  powerful telescope from a trousers pocket and was
  studying the lava  flow.
  The telescope was hardly necessary to see what  happened. The lava where it went over the cliff�it was like a
  fantastic  taffy being poured out of a monstrous kettle�began to squirm and fly  apart. It was as if something
  inside it were kicking and flinging  about, some behemoth thing which did not quite show itself. It fell  into the
  sea.
  Instantly there was a vastly augmented uprush of  steam. A turmoil in the water. A threshing. The steam rolled
  and grew,  spreading until it hid whatever was happening.
  "There it goes!" Monk squawled.
  A fast−traveling swell had appeared on the sea  almost beneath them. It was such a turmoil as is made by a big
  fish  swimming close to the surface of water.
  The boil of water abruptly changed direction,  veering out to sea. It left a trail of steam behind it. It altered its
  course again, almost doubling back.
  "Hey!" Monk barked. "It’s just like a fish that’s  been hooked!"
  A cloud of water arose in the air. There must have  been tons of it. They distinctly heard the roar as it fell
  back, loud  over the express train roar of the sea boiling around the lava.
  "It jumped out!" Ham gulped.
  But it hadn’t. It was still traveling under the sea.  Back and forth, in straight lines, in snaky curves. The ridge
  of water  which it lifted was not as high.
  "It’s slowin’ down!" Monk exclaimed.
  It was. Within five minutes�its wanderings did not  take it more than half a mile from where they stood�the
  thing had  almost stopped. It did stop twice, only to move again.
  They waited.
  Monk wet his lips. "Just as if the thing was dyin’!"
  Doc Savage had not spoken. The remarkable bronze man  rarely expended words in comment.
  "There! It has stopped again." Ham pointed.
  A column of water was rising from the surface of the  sea about a quarter of a mile offshore. A thin column, it
  was not  unlike the eruption of a geyser. At its topmost point, the water was  flung to a height of nearly a
  hundred feet.
  The geyser remained where it was�four minutes, eight.
   REPEL
  Chapter 4. THE SCARED GIRL
  22
  
  Monk shook his head. "I’ll be durned if I can savvy  what kind of a critter that is."
  Doc Savage had apparently been giving all attention  to what was happening in the sea, but now he said,
  "Some one is coming.  Running."
  Monk and Ham frowned, strained their ears ahead of  cupped palms. The fact that they heard nothing did not
  surprise them.  The bronze man had an almost abnormal hearing developed by years of  scientific exercise.
  A girl came running down the lava stream toward them.
  SHE was a slender girl in boots, the same one who  had been with Johnny a few minutes before. Her blue eyes
  were wide with  emotion, and she was winded.
  Her sun helmet was dented. That side of her face was  stained a little with red.
  "The thing must have taken him!" she cried out.
  Doc Savage whipped to meet her. "Who?"
  The girl eyed the bronze giant, and for a minute  seemed to go absent−minded. But for that matter, men had
  been known to  do the same thing when they first saw Doc.
  Doc repeated, "Who?"
  "A pale−looking man!" the girl gasped. "I saw the  thing and photographed it, then ran to get him to look at it,
  so people  wouldn’t think me a liar!"
  "Pale−looking!" Monk exploded. "That’s Long Tom!"
  The girl shuddered. "We got to where I saw it, and  something jumped us! It knocked me out. I didn’t get to
  see what it  was. When I came to, the pale man was gone. So was my camera!"
  Doc Savage said, "Show us the place!"
  It was quickly evident that the girl had about run  herself out. She was slower even than Ham, who might have
  been fast,  except that he invariably went around any bushes that might damage his  immaculate clothing.
  Doc Savage picked the young woman up. He carried her  across a shoulder until she gasped, "I can’t see
  anything!"
  Doc shifted her to an erect position, which she  maintained by holding his head. She looked soft, but there was
  a  hardness about her that was almost metallic. She gave directions in a  voice which, once the rasp of
  breathlessness was gone from it, showed  culture.
  She explained what the thing had looked like when  she had first seen it. It was the same thing she had
  described to Long  Tom, a mass like glass, or transparent jelly, that was slowly taking on  color. A monstrosity
  of a shape of no known earth thing.
   REPEL
  Chapter 4. THE SCARED GIRL
  23
  
  The small party reached, finally, the big singed  palm with the pitiful cluster of blackened coconuts at its top.
  She  pointed.
  "As you can see," she said, "there is nothing here." 
  Doc Savage said, "Spread and look for Long Tom."
  FIVE minutes later Monk found Doc Savage moving  slowly back and forth through the jungle and over
  stretches of  rock�mainly over the stretches of rock. Most of the surrounding terrain  was composed of stone.
  It was a poor spot to find footprints.
  Monk looked at the ground. "You’re wasting time  here, Doc. We found where this thing dragged Long Tom
  into the lava."
  "You mean the parallel marks from where the girl  said she last saw Long Tom in the neighborhood of the
  lava?"
  "Yep. Them marks could have been made by a man’s  heels dragging. I looked close and found bits of brown
  leather scraped  off on the rough rock. Long Tom was wearing brown shoes."
  Doc Savage was silent for a time, his flake−gold  eyes traveling over the expanses of naked rock which would
  retain no  footprints.
  "Where is the girl?" he asked at last. 
  "Ham is taking care of her," Monk said.
  They hardly joined Ham and the girl before  big−fisted Renny and long, bony Johnny arrived. The pair looked
  as  though they had something on their minds.
  "Our comiciliary ambulations were ascendant!" Johnny  said. "We�"
  "This is no time for them words!" Renny boomed.  "Doc, we found that native who tried to hold Monk up. He
  did not get  away."
  Doc Savage said, half questioningly, "He was under  that huge boulder which rolled against the mouth of the
  ledge."
  Renny blinked. Johnny swallowed. "You knew that?"
  "Suspected it," Doc admitted. "He was senseless,  there was no time to get him under cover, and the rock
  came to rest  here it could have crushed him."
  "He was under it," said Johnny. "We dug him out." 
  Renny blocked and unblocked his big fists and said,  "And I suppose you know what else we learned?"
  Doc Savage said, "You mean that he was not a native,  but a white man who had dyed his skin and curled and
  dyed his hair?"
   REPEL
  Chapter 4. THE SCARED GIRL
  24
  
  Renny and Johnny swapped blank looks.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" Johnny murmured. "How  did you know that, Doc? We almost didn’t find it out
  ourselves."
  "The features, the finger nails, the coloring of the  eyes, were not those of a native, even a Polynesian," the
  bronze man  explained.
  "Wonder who he is, and what he was up to?"
  "We will see what we can learn about him," Doc  Savage said.
  Chapter 5. THE THING ON THE BOTTOM
  THE dead man had lived in the bungalow that stood  alone on the edge of Fan Coral City. He had rented it
  after landing  from a steamer five weeks before, a quiet, taciturn fellow, inclined to  be sullen. He had mixed
  not at all. No one had dreamed he was not a  native with money.
  Doc Savage, Monk and Ham entered the dead man’s  house. There was a question whether they had the legal
  right to do  this, although Doc had a paper, a kind of commission, from the  government which had a
  protectorate, so−called, over Fan Coral. The  paper had been given Doc for a past service, and was supposed
  to  entitle him to almost any kind of coöperation.
  "The place has been ransacked!" Monk declared,  staring around.
  Unless the dead man had pulled out bureau drawers,  ripped up the floor mattings, dug holes in the roof
  thatch, and emptied  all the food containers in the kitchen onto the floor, Monk’s deduction  was good.
  Doc said, "Done not more than half an hour ago." He  pointed out that a puddle of syrup was still spreading,
  and pickles  from an emptied jar were still damp.
  The bronze man did not probe into corners, turn  objects over, or otherwise act as if he were searching. But
  Monk and  Ham stood back and watched, expectant. They had seen him work before.  They had seen Doc walk
  past as many as five chessboards, crowded with  men, and when the pieces were swept off, return and place
  each not only  in its correct square, but facing just as it had been.
  Doc Savage went outside abruptly. There were three  palms in the yard, all big ones, laden with coconuts.
  More coconuts  were on the ground. A sign said:
  THESE COCONUTS PRIVATE
  KEEP AWAY!
  There were, at a conservative estimate, a couple of  million coconut trees on Fan Coral, most of them free to
  anybody who  wanted a nut. The sign was either the work of a miserly crank or it had  a purpose.
  Doc Savage began picking up and shaking coconuts. He  must have done that to at least two hundred before
  he found one that  did not gurgle. He broke it open. It had been sawed in half and  cleverly glued back together.
   REPEL
  Chapter 5. THE THING ON THE BOTTOM
  25
  
  The contents was mostly money, with a few papers.  Doc read the papers, principally the newspaper clippings
  and wanted  circulars.
  "The dead man was Bert Banner, alias Bert the Blood,  alias a lot of things," the bronze man said. "He is
  wanted for three  murders in the United States, two in Australia, and one in China. The  items about the
  Shanghai, or China, crime bear the latest date."
  "He must have been hiding out here," Ham said.
  Doc added, "He seems to have had a partner in most  of his crimes. A man named Stage Chinkins, alias some
  others. Stage got  his name because he was once a ham actor."
  "I wonder," Monk pondered aloud, "if Stage Chinkins  is around here, too?"
  DOC had asked Renny and Johnny and the girl to meet  him with Monk and Ham at the Fan Coral City
  municipal dock, and the  trio were on hand. Johnny was about to burst over something he had just  learned. He
  used small words, and whirled his monocle around a finger  by its ribbon, as he did when perturbed.
  "This young lady"�he whirled his monocle at the  girl�"is a journalist!"
  "A free−lance feature writer," the young lady  corrected. "My name is Alberta Mantle, and I came here to
  cover the  volcano for the American Journal of Geological Science."
  Johnny looked startled. "The American Journal of  Geological Science! Why didn’t you say so? That takes
  you out of the  class of ordinary reporters. You have to be a crack geologist to write  for that."
  "I am a crack geologist," the girl, announced.
  "Prove it," Johnny requested. "What are some  varieties of chalcedony?"
  "The forms of agates and onyxes," said the girl.
  "Correct."
  The young woman looked at Doc Savage rather warmly.  "I know your abhorrence of publicity. But I do not
  write stories of  sensationalism for the newspapers. I am a scientific writer. I wish you  would let me stay with
  you and work along with you until this mystery  is solved."
  Doc was silent, no expression on his remarkable  bronze features. Homely Monk waited anxiously. Monk was
  very much  susceptible to femininity. Almost any one would have been susceptible  to this young woman.
  "I think that’d be all right, Doc," Monk ventured  hopefully.
  "It probably will be," Doc said. "Yes, Miss Mantle,  you can stay with us."
  "Thank you very much," said the young lady sweetly.
  Big−fisted Renny looked somewhat dazed. It was a  rare occasion when Doc Savage had ever let an outsider
  join them.  Renny, however, was not averse to the idea.
   REPEL
  Chapter 5. THE THING ON THE BOTTOM
  26
  
  Alberta Mantle struck him as a touch that could  dress up any mystery.
  Doc Savage now approached a group of uniformed men  on the end of the wharf. They were officers off a
  cruise ship which had  put in at Fan Coral during a South Sea tour to give the passengers the  unusual privilege
  of seeing a volcano in eruption. The bronze man spoke  with the captain for some time. That individual hastily
  put out to his  ship.
  When he came back shortly it was in a roomy lifeboat  equipped with a Diesel motor.
  "You are welcome to use this as long as you wish,"  the captain said.
  Monk scratched his head. "How’d Doc manage to  promote that so sudden?"
  Ham said, "I don’t know, you missing link, but I  have a hunch Doc owns a slice of that steamship company."
  Monk did not look surprised.
  Big−fisted Renny looked at the power lifeboat.  "What’re we doin’ with this, Doc?"
  "Diving for that thing which came down into the sea  in the lava," the bronze man replied.
  "Holy cow! How about Long Tom? We gotta find him!"
  "Diving for the mystery thing," Doc said, "is  probably the quickest way of learning what did happen to Long
  Tom."
  Renny dropped his eyes to his enormous fists  soberly. Did that mean the unknown horror had taken Long
  Tom into the  sea? He did not ask. He didn’t care about hearing what the answer might  be.
  MONK and Ham were not very happily surprised to  discover they had been delegated to remain ashore, on
  the rim of the  cliff over which the stream of lava flowed into the sea.
  "Merely watch for anything that might be  interesting," Doc suggested.
  Then the bronze man eyed the young woman  thoughtfully. "You had best remain with Monk and Ham. No
  telling what  will happen when we dive after that thing."
  "But I want a close contact with what you do!"  Alberta Mantle said.
  "The boat may be destroyed, and we may be drowned. I  can assure you that might readily happen. There is a
  great deal more  danger connected with this, probably, than any of us have dreamed."
  "I am not afraid," the girl declared.
  "You will stay with Monk and Ham," Doc said with  finality.
  Monk and Ham began to look more cheerful. 
   REPEL
  Chapter 5. THE THING ON THE BOTTOM
  27
  
  Long, thin Johnny was sober. Doc Savage had  intimated there was more danger than any of them thought.
  Johnny did  not think Doc had sounded as though he were exaggerating. The bronze  man had seemed serious.
  Johnny, who was a student and inclined to meditate,  chanced to drift off to one side by himself. The others
  did not  particularly notice.
  Nor did they notice when Johnny fell to watching Doc  Savage’s hands steadily.
  The bronze man was standing where only Johnny could  see his hands. His metallic fingers were moving
  swiftly, forming  letters in the deaf−and−dumb alphabet. The bronze man and his aids had  all mastered that
  method of conversation.
  Johnny eventually went over to a sack of copra and  sat down. He sighed a number of times, wiped his
  forehead, opened and  shut his mouth. He got up finally and shuffled over to the others.
  "I’m�sick," he said weakly.
  "Huh?" Monk barked. "Maybe you been poisoned?"
  Johnny shook his head, then held it with both hands.  "No. To tell the truth, I made a silly mistake. There is a
  candy bar  Monk invented, one with a chemical in it which keeps you from going to  sleep. Monk will
  probably make a fortune selling it to truck drivers  who make long hauls. I had several bars of what I thought
  was candy in  my pocket, and ate them, but they turned out to be Monk’s stuff. It’s  made me as sick as a dog."
  "It wouldn’t if you hadn’t made a hog outta  yourself!" Monk said indignantly. "But it won’t do anything
  serious."
  "I’m sick!" Johnny groaned. "I cannot go with you.  I’m going to the hotel."
  "Renny and myself can manage the diving," Doc said  quietly.
  DOC SAVAGE and his men had come to Fan Coral Island  in one of the bronze man’s giant speed planes,
  which was anchored out  in the harbor, among a number of yachts and other airships. The didoes  of Ethel’s
  Mama had made Fan Coral Island a popular place. Doc’s plane  bore no distinguishing marks, and it had been
  mistaken for another  commercial craft.
  Doc and Renny drew alongside the plane in the  borrowed power lifeboat to get diving gear. Doc, when he
  went far from  his New York headquarters, took a remarkably complete equipment.  Everything he would
  need, as nearly as possible.
  The diving gear consisted of suits of light  waterproof fabric backing a featherweight alloy chain mail which
  would  discourage the teeth of any eels, barracudas or sharks that might want  to test their appetites with a man.
  The hoods were not metal, but globes of a  transparent composition as clear as glass and almost as tough as
  steel.  Air was taken care of by a chemical purifier. There were tiny two−way  radio sets which were effective
  over a range of a mile or so.
  Monk and Ham, watching with the girl on the cliff  rim, also had portable radio sets with which they could
  listen to the  divers, and talk to them.
   REPEL
  Chapter 5. THE THING ON THE BOTTOM
  28
  
  For weapons, Doc and Renny carried an underwater  metal−cutting torch which was Doc’s invention. These
  might have been  pistols with barrels two feet long and round metal bulbs attached to  the handles. They
  ejected a chemical gas which combined with the  elements in the water and burned with terrific heat.
  The bronze man and Renny anchored the lifeboat a  short distance from the spot where the strange geyser of
  water was  still playing above the surface. Then they stepped overboard. The  shoes, of a metal heavier than
  lead, were not bulky, and could be  disengaged by a certain foot movement, making it unnecessary to use the
  hands, perhaps sometime when the hands might have something else to do.
  There was the usual phenomenon caused by increasing  pressure as they sank. The suit mechanisms
  automatically compensated  for the pressure.
  The water was not clear, due to the proximity of the  lava. It was distinctly warm. It was dark almost at once.
  The clouds of  steam cut off the sunlight.
  Doc switched on the cutting torch, holding it behind  his back. The intense white lance from its tip showed
  illumination.
  "I’m about fifteen feet from you, I judge," Renny’s  voice said.
  Monk, from up on the cliff, cut in, "You fellers see  any sign of Long Tom yet?"
  "Give us time," Renny said.
  Doc touched coral growing up from the bottom. It was  like a tree, sharp, and would have cut through the
  fabric of an  ordinary diving suit. The metallic gloves protected the bronze man’s  hands. He went down, and it
  was like sinking into a fabulous forest on  another planet.
  Gold was suddenly all around him. Crawling, swaying  strings of aureate wonder. Some gigantic sea plant.
  When Renny touched  the streamers they melted into a fulvescent shower, and suddenly all  the water was
  filled, as if some Midas was pouring finest gold flake by  the bushel. On the bottom, huge purple sea fans
  curtsied greeting, with  cactus−like sea urchins clustered about their base.
  A blue fish, as tapered and steellike as a knife  blade, flashed away, and battalions of tiny fishes with all the
  colors  of the spectrum fled for their lives. A tiny octopus, half hidden under  a sea fan, vanished in a cloud of
  his own ink.
  "Holy cow!" Renny said wonderingly.
  DOC kept his torch going for light. There was enough  of a charge in the grip magazine to keep it going for
  more than an  hour. They worked toward their objective.
  A shadow cruised over them. Renny popped his torch  on, gasped loudly, got it off again.
  "Did you see that?" he gulped.
  "Shark," Doc Savage said without emotion.
  "I thought it was a submarine!" Renny muttered.
   REPEL
  Chapter 5. THE THING ON THE BOTTOM
  29
  
  Ham, from the clifftop, said, "Sharks won’t bother  you if you let them alone."
  "The heck they won’t!" Monk sneered. "You stop  puttin’ out bum information like that or I’ll hit you so hard
  on top of  the head that you won’t know which toe to crawl out from under!"
  Ham sneered audibly. "Listen, creation’s joke, if I  have to slap you down, they’ll�"
  "Tune out, will you!" Renny complained. "Do it on  another wave length!"
  Renny was watching the shark. The monster cruised  about in several short circles, plainly curious. The two
  men stood  perfectly still. The shark started down. As Renny had said, he did have  some of the proportions of
  a submarine.
  Doc popped on the glaring white of his torch. The  shark left for other parts with a swirl of water that shoved
  them about  in the sea growth.
  Doc said, "We had best keep close together, Renny."
  The big−fisted engineer chuckled over the two−way  radio. "I can stand a lot of company. This is the
  spookiest−lookin’  ocean I ever saw."
  The two men worked forward, both Herculean figures,  as men go. Renny’s muscles were perhaps the more
  spectacular from a  distance, but on close examination he faded alongside the sinewy  wiriness of the bronze
  man’s development.
  There were more fish, millions, almost, and several  small octopuses. One stingaree passed overhead, its white
  underside  giving it a strangely angelic aspect, trailing its long snake tail with  the deadly barb. It was a big one.
  It seemed to become easier and easier to move as the  two men went forward.
  "Hold it!" Doc said sharply.
  Renny stopped walking�and found himself still going  forward! 
  "Holy cow!" he exploded, and grabbed a sea fan. It  slid through his fingers, stripping off its purple outer
  coating,  leaving the black, tough skeleton.
  WORRIED now, Renny grabbed again, this time at  coral. It was loose in the sand, broke out, and he dropped
  it. He  stabbed his feet into a big sponge. That did not hold, either. He tried  a seaweed growth. No luck.
  "Hey, Doc!" he thumped. "Somethin’s pullin’ me!"
  The next instant the bronze man was alongside him.  Both were being carried along. Faster than before.
  "We waited too long," Doc said quietly. "And we were  a bit careless."
  Doc got hold of a growth resembling coral. It was  some variety of millepore, and did not hold. The bronze
  man speared the  nozzle of his torch into the sand. It did not hold.
   REPEL
  Chapter 5. THE THING ON THE BOTTOM
  30
  
  "The thing is suckin’ us to it!" Renny roared.
  Doc kept his torch on. They both saw a spire of  coral ahead. It leaned over the way they were being swept.
  But it  looked solid.
  Renny, struggling frantically, yelled, "I  can’t�make�it!"
  But he did. Rather, Doc Savage got hold of the coral  with one hand, and whipping out his feet, managed to
  contact Renny. The  next instant they clung to the coral. They would have lost their  torches, except for the
  lines that attached them to their belts.
  Renny stared in horror. Bits of sea growth, fishes,  sailed past, being drawn irresistibly. Sponges, lumps of
  coral, sea t  urchins, now and then a shellfish, rolled along the bottom.
  Peering upward through the transparent globe of his  helmet, Renny could see an octopus clinging to the coral
  spire above  them. It had a body about the size of one of his huge fists. The  octopus somehow depicted utter
  terror.
  "What are we gonna do, Doc?" Renny gasped.
  "We probably will not have much choice."
  "Huh?"
  "This coral is giving."
  Renny snapped his torch on, peered at the base of  the coral spire.
  "Oh, damn!" he groaned.
  The coral was giving way. Either it had grown up out  of the sand, or it was thin at the base. It was uprooting,
  not unlike a  tree. Bending over. Not as a tree would fall. More slowly. And loosened  sand curled in little
  rivers away from its base.
  "We’re going!" Renny squawled.
  The coral came loose with a distinct groaning noise.  It had one long root like a tree, and that scooped up a
  cloud of mud  and sand.
  THE rush of water carried the two men along. Renny  thought at first that the thing was sucking the water
  toward it. He  knew better now. It was simply throwing water up from the ocean  floor�the geyser which they
  had seen on the surface. It was the water  rushing in to be thrown upward that was drawing them.
  But what incredible thing could be forcing the water  upward? Renny used his flashlight. An instant later he
  saw it.
  Black! A lump! Something as shiny as black diamond,  a large chunk with no particular shape. But it had in
  the top of it a  narrow crack, or eye, and out of this poured an incredible,  indescribable something that was
  driving the water upward with an  incalculable force.
   REPEL
  Chapter 5. THE THING ON THE BOTTOM
  31
  
  Renny found himself completely baffled as to the  nature of the thing. He had other things to think of, anyway.
  He and Doc Savage were thrown helplessly toward the  surface in the rush of water. Mauled, battered,
  temporarily unable to  swim, both powerful men floated on the surface for a time.
  Their little radio sets had been damaged and were  out of commission. And they chanced to be afloat on the
  opposite side  of the geyser, so that Monk and Ham, on the cliff, could not see them.
  Chapter 6. BAD BALDWIN
  MONK and Ham waited on the cliff brink in a tension  as brittle as an icicle. The little radio sets fitted on their
  arms,  like big wrist watches. They kept their ears jammed to the tiny  speakers and their eardrums hurt from
  listening, but there was no  sound. The girl watched closely and quietly.
  "Oh, blazes!" Monk croaked hoarsely. "Doc! Doc!  Renny! What’s happened?"
  Both men’s eyes strained at the sea. But the rolling  clouds of steam had mushroomed, for the moment, over
  everything.
  Ham said something hoarse under his breath. He  couldn’t have understood it himself.
  Farther up on the slope behind the cliff, and to the  south, another man also said things. But what he said could
  be  understood. Profanity, utterly disgusted, guttery.
  "I can’t tell a damnblasted thing except they’re  goin’ after somethin’ in the water!" he snarled.
  The watcher was the man who had taken the identity  of Snowball Eagan, journalist. He ground his teeth and
  spat on the  lenses of his binoculars and wiped them off. That didn’t help.
  "With Bert croaked, they ain’t nobody to help me!"  he gritted. "Watta−ell can I do solo?"
  He scowled in the direction of Fan Coral City. His  face was a window to his thoughts. He was deciding to do
  something he  had thought about doing as a last resort. Into their case he jammed the  binoculars. The adhesive
  tape on his palm had come loose. There was no  wound, no scar of any kind, under it. He pasted it back in
  place.
  "I’ll ring in help!" Eagan growled. "Lucky I know  more about the owner of the Fifth Wind than anybody else
  around  here."
  He struck out for the harbor.
  There were yachts in Fan Coral harbor. Fan Coral was  not exactly a far corner of the world. People had been
  there before the  eruption, small yawls and sloops and ketches. Other yachts had come  since Ethel’s Mama
  had erupted. Big ones.
  The Fifth Wind stood out among the others  like the Empire State building would stand out in Podunk Falls.
  She was  two hundred feet of jewel, three masts, hollow spars, mahogany,  chromium.
   REPEL
  Chapter 6. BAD BALDWIN
  32
  
  The price of her tenders would have bought any one  of half the other yachts in the harbor. She was
  schooner−rigged, and  her sails were Egyptian silk. She was shallow enough to go where any  forty−footer
  could; centerboards, two, one on each side; and with her  new high−speed Diesels she could cruise thirty
  knots.
  There probably wasn’t a warship in the world that  could overhaul her. She carried two tubby little seaplanes
  and a  catapult. The planes were mostly engine, and they had synchronized  machine guns. The owner liked to
  gun sharks from the air, the sailors  had said.
  Nobody had questioned that. The sailors didn’t look  like the kind of fellows one started an argument with.
  For no sailor of  the Fifth Wind weighed less than two hundred pounds.
  A bum boat sculled by a brown loafer put Snowball  Eagan on the landing stage of the Fifth Wind.
  SNOWBALL EAGAN got on deck, and four sailors got in  his way. They didn’t say anything. He looked over
  his shoulder and saw  two more sailors in his way in case he wanted to go back. He grinned at  everybody.
  They didn’t grin back. They were giants.
  "I’ll talk to Cadwiller Olden," Snowball Eagan said.
  "You’d better talk to me first, maybe," said a man  who came from behind the stand of the plane catapult.
  The fellow’s ears grew up to a point, and his jaw  out to a lump. His mouth was about like any mouth without
  lips. He was  naked except for shorts. A strip of hair as wide as two fingers grew  from his belt straight up to
  his neck. His knees were knotty, his feet  big. From head to foot he was red with sunburn, and almost dripping
  with some oil he had put on for it. His height would not miss seven  feet much.
  "Kinda struck me I’d seen you before," he said. He  jerked his lump of a jaw at the sailors. "That’s why the
  reception."
  Snowball Eagan looked at the man. He looked  startled. He stepped close to the man, but not too fast.
  "You’re Buddy Baldwin," he said, so that none of the  others could hear.
  "And that," grunted Buddy Baldwin, "makes you  practically a dead man."
  Snowball Eagan kept his grin. It didn’t look as if  the foundation was any too firm.
  "You haven’t seen me, Baldwin. You’ve seen my  picture. I’m Stage Chinkins. But I’m Snowball Eagan now."
  "Buddy" Baldwin worked his shoulders under the skin,  as a man likes to do when sunburned.
  "They damn near got you in Shanghai," he said.
  "They damn near," Snowball Eagan agreed. "Only I  turned journalist."
  "What do you want?"
  "A chin with Cadwiller Olden. I got something."
   REPEL
  Chapter 6. BAD BALDWIN
  33
  
  "Talk to me first," said Buddy Baldwin.
  "The hell I will!"
  "Then over the side you go."
  "Maybe you think�Listen, this is big. It’s not your  size, Baldwin. Mind you, you’re a lot bigger guy than I
  am, but it  still ain’t your size. Cadwiller Olden might handle it."
  "What do you know about Cadwiller Olden?"
  "Nothing," Snowball Eagan said dryly. "I never will  know nothin’."
  "You been hearin’ some gossip?"
  Snowball Eagan laughed. He laughed heartily. Then he  said, "Don’t make me laugh! Cadwiller Olden is a big
  oil man from  Oklahoma."
  Buddy Baldwin grinned. "Let’s see if you’re a false  alarm." 
  The two went down a companionway which had teak  treads and chromium handrails and tramped through a
  passage dark with  mahogany, deep with silk pile carpets. There had been no ventilator  funnels on deck. The
  Fifth Wind didn’t need them. She was  air−conditioned.
  Buddy Baldwin stopped before a door. He looked at  Snowball Eagan. "You pretty well muscled?"
  "Pretty."
  "Then take off your coat and shirt. And when we go  in, suck your belly in and make your chest and arm
  muscles stick out.  Like this." Buddy Baldwin showed a rather startling set of ligaments.
  "Why?"
  "Notice our sailors?"
  "They’re a bunch of dang giants."
  "That’s the idea."
  Snowball Eagan snarled, "If there’s an idea, I don’t  see it!"
  "The chief," said Buddy Baldwin, "likes big men."
  Snowball Eagan moistened his lips. A strange  expression came on his face and stayed. "I see," he said. He
  swallowed  again.
  They went in.
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  Chapter 6. BAD BALDWIN
  34
  
  THE furniture in the room was big. Every piece must  have been specially made. But the creature who stood
  in the place made  the furniture look like doll stuff. He was about the color of a bottle  cork that had been in a
  fire. One finger was off his left hand, and  part of one ear was cut from his head. Something with an edge had
  left  a gray gristle connection between his right eye and his mouth, and the  eye did not look right. His chest
  was big enough to make his elbows  stick out when he hung his arms. His mouth was open and there was no
  tongue in it.
  He was the biggest human thing Snowball Eagan had  ever seen.
  "We want to see the chief, Nero," Buddy Baldwin said.
  The monster opened his mouth and made the best noise  he could without a tongue. He pointed at a door.
  It was a big door, large even for the dark monster,  Nero. It had a big knob which Buddy Baldwin had to take
  with both hands  to turn.
  Snowball Eagan had started to sweat, and had sunk  his head in his shoulders a little, as does a man who walks
  under  something he thinks may fall. They went in.
  There was a giant bed, giant chairs, a giant  bookcase with the smallest book in it an encyclopedia. One waded
  in the  rug. The bed had been slept in, but there was nobody in it now.
  Off to one side was a child’s crib. It was an  elaborate thing, with carvings and gilt inlays, and here and there
  rows  of pearl studding.
  When Snowball Eagan was a little closer his mouth  opened and shut, for he knew the gilt was real solid gold
  bars and the  pearls genuine. Snowball, as he called himself now, was an expert on  such things.
  Buddy Baldwin had his stomach in and his shoulders  hunched forward and his arms crooked, with all the
  muscles sticking out  all they could. Snowball Eagan did that, too, and they stopped beside  the crib.
  The crib was about four feet long. The man who  occupied it had plenty of room.
  MOST midgets have something wrong with their  appearance. Their legs are stumpy, or their bodies too long,
  or their  faces too round, or their shoulders too broad. This one was different.
  He was a little gem of a man.
  Given three feet and a hundred and twenty pounds, he  would have had a good chance of becoming a matinee
  god. His head was  not too big, his shoulders not too bulky, and his legs were small,  sinewy and perfect. His
  face had that utter handsomeness which  pen−and−ink artists give their heroes in the love story magazine
  drawings.
  He wore little bathing trunks and a little bathrobe,  smoked a little cigar in a little holder, and a toy glass on a
  rack at  the side held a toy drink in which leaned a toy swizzle stick.
  Buddy Baldwin, speaking unnaturally because he was  still trying to hold his muscles ridged out, said, "Chief,
  this bird  with me is Stage Chinkins, known right now as Snowball Eagan."
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  Chapter 6. BAD BALDWIN
  35
  
  The little gem of a man did not offer to shake  hands. He drew on his cigar and squirted the lower part of his
  crib  full of rich blue smoke.
  "What’s on your mind, Snowball Eagan?" he asked.
  He had a perfect little voice.
  Snowball Eagan coughed to get the fingers of awe  loose from his throat. He was not tough, did not bluster.
  He sounded as  if he were about to get down on his knees.
  "I think I’ve got something that will interest you,"  he said. "You have heard of Doc Savage, the man of
  bronze. Wherever you  find him, you usually find something big. Doc Savage is here in Fan  Coral. He’s
  investigating something mysterious that came out of that  volcano."
  Snowball Eagan paused. The tiny man, Cadwiller  Olden, did not speak. Eagan swallowed and went on.
  "Me and my buddy, Bert Banner, started to find out  what Doc Savage was after," he said. "We figured it must
  be big stuff,  because this bronze guy has a rep. But Bert got mashed under a big  rock. There’s somethin’
  queer about how that happened. I didn’t see it.  I only know Savage brought in Bert’s body. Maybe he killed
  Bert, but I  don’t think so, on account of I’ve heard that Savage never kills  anybody."
  He hesitated again, finished, "With Bert out, I’m  afraid of it. I thought I’d tip you off."
  Cadwiller Olden took a sip from the drink. "Do you  know just what Doc Savage is after?"
  "No."
  "Then why are you going to all this trouble?"
  "I know Savage’s rep. I needed a stake. Where Savage  is monkeying around, things get big. Anything he’s
  after would be worth  plenty of jack."
  "You are evidently not fully acquainted with this  Doc Savage’s career," said Cadwiller Olden calmly.
  "Strangely enough,  the size of a thing does not seem to gauge its importance to him. He  once spent two
  weeks working on the eyes of a blind apple peddler in  Chicago. He made the peddler see, then turned around
  and ignored an  offer of a quarter of a million to do a plastic surgery job on a rich  old guy who wanted a
  young−looking face. You cannot tell about the  bronze man."
  Snowball Eagan wet his lips again. "Well, I thought  there might be a lot of shekels rattling around in this
  somewhere. I  had a hunch."
  "Your hunches seem good," Cadwiller Olden said  quietly.
  "Eh?"
  "I’ll tell you why we’re here. Why I have my entire  organization here, working under cover. We are after the
  same thing Doc  Savage is after."
  Surprise knocked Snowball Eagan’s mouth open.
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  Chapter 6. BAD BALDWIN
  36
  
  Cadwiller Olden said, "The thing we’re after is  probably worth more dollars than you or I or Rockefeller ever
  dreamed  about."
  Chapter 7. THE SECOND BAD BALDWIN
  SNOWBALL EAGAN’S mouth stayed open. He was like a  man who had found his pocket picked. But he
  did not bluster. He bowed,  not very gracefully, but a bow.
  "I didn’t know you were already mixed in this," he  said. "I’ve always heard you were the cleverest man alive,
  and this  bears it out. You have Doc Savage covered, and I never got an inkling.  Well, that lets me out. I won’t
  try to horn in. I won’t even ask  questions. I will leave the island immediately if you prefer."
  Some of the fake Snowball Eagan’s crook  acquaintances might have swooned if they had heard that.
  Snowball Eagan  was as tough and chiseling a rascal as the Orient had seen in  generations. That he would
  meekly back off the field when he found  another crook after the same goal was startling. Or perhaps not so
  startling.
  Most of Snowball Eagan’s ilk had heard of this  strange, incredible creature, Cadwiller Olden.
  Snowball Eagan did not leave. He asked permission.
  "Can I go?" he inquired uneasily.
  Cadwiller Olden shook his head. "Would you care to  work for me on this?"
  Unadulterated delight swept Snowball Eagan.
  "D’you mean it?" he exploded. "Say, that’d really be  somethin’! Man, oh, man! I’ve tried a dozen times to
  contact your  organization, and never got to first base!"
  "Eleven times you have tried, to be exact," said the  small, gemlike man.
  "You knew about it!"
  "Every time. I have been watching you, studying your  record. Your holdup of the Melbourne Imperial Bank
  was well executed,  as was your looting of the pearl dealer’s safe in Manila."
  Snowball Eagan nearly choked.
  "I went solo on them jobs!" he gulped. "I didn’t  think a soul in the world knew I pulled ‘em!"
  "Knowing things is convenient," Cadwiller Olden  pointed out.
  Snowball Eagan had been afraid of the little man  when he came in. He was plainly more frightened now. But
  he was  overjoyed, too.
  "It’ll sure be swell, workin’ for you," he said.
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  Chapter 7. THE SECOND BAD BALDWIN
  37
  
  He did not say working with you, as might  have been expected.
  The little man got out of the crib. The dressing  gown which he put on was brocaded with gold. He went to a
  panel, and  did something to it with his hands and a safe door was abruptly  revealed. He took out a mass of
  money, done in bundles. He separated  five of those bundles, put the rest back.
  He handed the five bundles to Snowball Eagan.
  Eagan looked at the money. His eyelids rolled back  off the balls, and breath ran out of him slowly. A mark on
  each bundle  wrapper said twenty thousand dollars.
  "My organization pays off by dividend," said  Cadwiller Olden. "I am declaring you in on the last dividend. It
  is not  well for a man to be low on money, and you say you are low."
  Snowball Eagan suddenly did the last thing any one  who knew him would have expected. He got down on his
  knees and bowed  his head to the man he could have thrown a score of feet with one arm.
  "Chief," he said, "the ambition of my lifetime is  being fulfilled."
  The little gem of a man strutted slightly as he went  into the other room.
  CADWILLER OLDEN slipped off his clothes. All his  body was perfection in miniature. He began to dress.
  His garments were  exquisitely tailored.
  He began to talk. His little voice was cultured,  musical. 
  "Doc Savage must have done as I did, realized from  the newspaper and seismograph reports what was
  coming out of Ethel’s  Mama," he said. "I did not think that any one on earth but myself would  guess the
  truth. But they say this Doc Savage has a certain amount of  ability."
  He went in the other room to let the giant who had  no tongue tie his tiny necktie.
  Buddy Baldwin grinned at Snowball Eagan. "Buddy, you  got what it takes," he whispered admiringly. "That
  last touch, where  you got down on your knees, was swell. The chief ate it up!"
  Snowball Eagan did not grin back. He licked his lips  and shivered.
  "I’ve heard things about Cadwiller Olden," he said.
  "What you heard wasn’t a drop," Buddy Baldwin said,  suddenly grim. "Give that little fellow another ten
  years and he’ll  control the civilized world. And I’m not kiddin’!"
  Cadwiller Olden came back. He was in impeccable  afternoon attire, and carried a slender black cane. He
  flipped the  cane, admired it.
  "An exact duplicate, except for size, of one a  gentleman named Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks
  carries," he  said. "Quite a gentleman, Ham Brooks. We have the same tailor, although  he does not know it."
  He looked at Buddy Baldwin and Snowball Eagan.
   REPEL
  Chapter 7. THE SECOND BAD BALDWIN
  38
  
  "I have been keeping close tab on Doc Savage in a  very simple way," he said. "The bronze man is now diving
  for the thing  which came out of the volcano, the thing which can be more valuable, in  the right hands, than
  the crown of England."
  Snowball Eagan opened his mouth, apparently about to  ask just what the mysterious object was. But he
  thought better of it.  He was deathly afraid of this handsome, tiny man’s slightest whim.
  Cadwiller Olden said, "I am awaiting word from one  of my valued agents. As soon as the report is in,
  everything is set to  get Doc Savage and his assistants out of the way."
  The little man looked at Snowball Eagan.
  "Did you know we already have one of Doc Savage’s  men, a fellow they call Long Tom?" he asked.
  Snowball Eagan gulped. "No!"
  "We have," Cadwiller Olden smiled. "One of my agents  decoyed him, with a clever story, into the hands of
  my men, who seized  him. He�"
  Noise outside. The tongueless monster came in. He  made a sound startlingly like an eagle screaming, and did
  some kind of  sign talk with his hands.
  "My agent is here to report on Doc Savage,"  Cadwiller Olden said. "It is the same agent who trapped Long
  Tom."
  The girl who had told Doc Savage her name was  Alberta Mantle came in.
  "Meet Bess Baldwin," said Buddy Baldwin, "my sister.  Right now she’s Alberta Mantle, a writer on scientific
  things."
  "Geology," the girl said, and laughed.
  THE girl looked at Cadwiller Olden, and her laughter  stopped with a snap.
  "Doc Savage is not doing so well with his diving,"  she said. "He and Renny went down while I stayed on the
  cliff with Monk  and Ham and watched. Doc�"
  "They do not suspect you?" the tiny man interposed.
  "Absolutely not!"
  "Go ahead."
  "Doc and Renny got caught in the uprush of water  which the thing seems to be squirting out," the girl said.
  "They had a  very brisk few moments and were thrown high into the air."
  "Not injured, I hope," Cadwiller Olden said dryly.
  "They have very efficient diving equipment. Doc  Savage is an inventive genius."
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  Chapter 7. THE SECOND BAD BALDWIN
  39
  
  Cadwiller Olden said, "We will act immediately. Doc  Savage will not reach the floor of the sea again."
  The girl nodded. But she seemed to have something on  her mind. She nipped her lower lip with even white
  teeth.
  "You have something on your mind?" the tiny gem of a  man asked.
  "Yes," the girl said slowly, "I have."
  "What is it?"
  "I�well, darn it, I know you’re not going to like  this."
  "Out with it." Cadwiller Olden smiled slightly.
  "Well�that man�Doc Savage�listen, I never have asked  a favor. My brother and myself have been on the up
  and up. We’ve been  paid, of course. But neither of us has asked a special favor."
  "So you want to ask one now?"
  "That’s it."
  "What?"
  "Don’t kill Doc Savage!"
  The girl said it slowly and earnestly, and there was  no doubt but that she meant it.
  Cadwiller Olden put a small smile on his little face  and spun his little sword cane.
  "My intention is not to kill Doc Savage," he said.  "I admire that bronze man’s brain. It could be put to
  excellent use. I  will tell you now that I intend to take Doc Savage alive and use his  scientific knowledge, as
  soon as I can bring him around to an  understanding. In reaching that understanding, you might be of
  considerable assistance, Miss Baldwin."
  "Thank you," the young woman said tremulously.
  "That will be all."
  She left.
  Cadwiller Olden looked at Buddy Baldwin. There was  no expression in the diminutive, beautiful eyes, or on
  the small,  chiseled lips.
  "Love," Cadwiller Olden said, "is a wonderful thing."
  The shadow of a horror and fear seemed to come into  the back of Buddy Baldwin’s eyes and stay.
  Cadwiller Olden chuckled quietly.
   REPEL
  Chapter 7. THE SECOND BAD BALDWIN
  40
  
  "Doc Savage and Renny are preparing to descend," he  said. "Monk and Ham are on the clifftop, watching.
  You see, I have  excellent reports."
  Cadwiller Olden then gave some orders to Baldwin. A  little later a dozen men or so left the boat and headed
  for Fan Coral  Island. Baldwin was with them. Strangely enough, the men headed for the  spot where Monk
  and Ham were. But they took a roundabout way. They were  taking no chances on being caught.
  Chapter 8. THE CAPTIVES
  MONK held his pet pig by both big ears and yelled,  "You try to kick my hog again and I’ll grab your head
  and put it in  your left pants pocket!"
  Ham held his ape, Chemistry. A machine−gun  procession of sneezes was coming from Chemistry, and the
  animal’s eyes  were red and watering.
  "You put red pepper or something in that hog’s  hair!" Ham howled.
  "Your ape had no business looking for fleas on  Habeas!" Monk snapped.
  Renny’s voice rumbled out of the radio speaker, "If  you comics can’t lay off, cut your microphones off!"
  Ham said, "I’ll cut Monk loose from his, right next  to his chin!"
  "We’re ready to go down again," Renny said.
  At this, both Monk and Ham looked over the cliff  edge. For the moment the wind was sweeping the steam
  from the lava in  the sea away, and they could see Doc, Renny and the lifeboat.
  Doc and Renny were standing in the stern. They were  holding an anchor to which was attached a long cable
  with a large knot  every three feet or so. Conversation was being carried on by the  radios. Doc had repaired
  his and Renny’s on landing.
  "The plan is to make the anchor secure, then use the  rope to keep from being swept into the rush of water,"
  Doc Savage  explained.
  Monk demanded, "You say you didn’t get a look at the  thingamajig the last time?"
  Renny answered that. "Only a glance, through the  water. It was big, almost black, and approximately round,
  as nearly as  we could tell."
  "Black! You sure?"
  "I said so, didn’t I?" Renny demanded grouchily.
  "Oh, all right, big fists. I just thought it was  funny the thing was black now when it was transparent or
  something when  it grabbed me."
  Ham snapped, "The girl said it started to change  color, didn’t she?"
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  Chapter 8. THE CAPTIVES
  41
  
  Monk looked around. "I wonder where she went? She  said she’d be back soon."
  "She went after another camera," Ham reminded him  peevishly.
  Renny, down in the boat, grumbled, "Johnny picked a  heck of a time to accidentally dope himself. We need
  his help around  here."
  Monk asked, "You fellers think you’ll get that thing  lassoed, or whatever you’re gonna do to it, this time?"
  Renny thumped, "How should I know?"
  Renny and Doc Savage lowered the anchor carefully.  It was very heavy, and until it got overside and into the
  water, it  needed both their combined strength. They felt it land on the bottom,  then carefully strung the long
  rope overside, so that it would not  tangle.
  "Ready?" Renny asked.
  "Yes," Doc said.
  A tiny blue light in one end of the bronze man’s  portable radio glowed faintly.
  "Wait," Doc said.
  He held the instrument close to an ear and changed  the tuning knob. The next instant, his small strange,
  trilling sound,  the exotic note that had no tune, yet a quality definitely musical, was  audible.
  "Holy cow!" Renny boomed. "What is it?"
  He knew that sound always presaged something  startling.
  "Quick!" Doc rapped. "There’s�"
  "Ow−w−w−w−w!" 
  Monk squawled. 
  Doc and Renny didn’t need the radios to hear Monk’s  frenzied howl from the cliff rim.
  MONK was in the grip of three men. One had each arm,  a third his neck. How they had come up so quietly
  he couldn’t imagine.
  Monk howled again. A bit joyfully. Physical combat  was his joy. He ducked his head, managed to turn a neat
  somersault, and  landed on his back�with one man under him. That fellow made a noise  like a stepped−on cat
  and relaxed.
  Ham had been a bit more fortunate. At the first  alarm, he took one wild leap. It put him very near the cliff
  rim. But  it gave him time to unsheath his sword cane.
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  Chapter 8. THE CAPTIVES
  42
  
  Ham was the sword cane’s master. The blade seemed to  vanish, defying the eye with its speed, and did not
  become visible  again until it rested in the arm of one of three more assailants who  had rushed him.
  More men were coming out of the jungle. Almost a  dozen, all told.
  "Yeo−w−w!" 
  Monk howled. "There ain’t enough of you to give us a workout!" 
  The man Ham had stabbed sighed and lay down. The  drug on the tip of the dapper lawyer’s sword cane
  worked quickly.
  Monk suddenly rose to his feet with a bound like  that of a released spring. He spraddled his legs, began to
  whirl. The  men on his arms lost their footing and swung out like weights on a  governor. Monk ran toward the
  other assailants.
  Results were remarkable. In an instant, men were  down, howling, cursing, Monk with them. Ham’s sword
  cane dropped  another.
  Monk hit a jaw. One of the victim’s teeth flew out  and hit Monk in one eye. That fortune of war was probably
  his undoing.  It is hard for a man to wink one eye when excited. Monk blinked both of  his. Somebody grabbed
  up a fistful of grit and rubbed it in his face.  He was blinded.
  Some one came running with a bush. He shoved it at  Ham, and the dapper lawyer’s sword cane cut through
  some of the tough  hardwood, but not all. Tropical bushes are tough. Ham went down, his  sword out of
  commission.
  Buddy Baldwin and his sister came running up.
  "Don’t kill them!" Bess Baldwin gasped.
  Buddy Baldwin used the blackjack which he carried.
  The natives of the South Sea islands have a way of  carrying a pig. They tie its legs together and swing it on a
  pole, and  a man gets at each end of the pole.
  Monk didn’t think much of the means of locomotion.  He made noises about it through his nose; his lips were
  taped. He could  see Ham being carried the same way. Their little radio sets were gone.  The machine pistols,
  which there had been no time to use, were no  longer under their arms.
  A plane droned overhead. It looked to Monk like the  same plane which had been photographing the volcano
  and the lava  stream. For the last hour, though, it had not been in evidence.
  The men who carried Monk and Ham pig fashion were  not natives of this part of the world. One or two had
  an Oriental cast.  But most of them were white, Americans.
  Jungle was all about them. Swarms of multicolored  birds showered up ahead of them, and settled, squawking,
  behind them.
  Monk twisted, jiggling up and down, trying to work  ahead until he could kick the man with the front end of
  the stick. The  man behind tapped Monk’s head with a revolver barrel, discouraging  that. Monk started
   REPEL
  Chapter 8. THE CAPTIVES
  43
  
  swinging from side to side, making it as tough on  the fellows carrying him as he could.
  He stopped that abruptly. The plane noise was  closer, louder. The ship must have seen something. It was
  coming to  investigate!
  Monk watched, and an instant later blew a delighted  snort through his nose. For the plane swept low over
  them, a helmeted  head cocked over the fuselage. Then it arched up and went away.
  One of the men carrying Monk laughed harshly.
  "Don’t get pepped up, buddy," he said. "That guy is  one of us. People think there’s been a hell of a rush of
  newspapermen  and cameramen to this island, but more’n half of ‘em are our men. Our  pal up there went after
  gasoline, and now he’s back."
  That gave Monk enough to keep him quiet.
  The men were trotting. Both Monk and Ham could see  Buddy Baldwin ahead�and his sister.
  Monk all but strangled behind the tape when he saw  Bess Baldwin. It was not the first time a member of the
  feminine sex  had fooled Monk. But every blow seemed the biggest.
  The party filed down into a canyon. Monk noted that  they were taking pains to leave a plain trail. The
  cavalcade stopped.
  Monk squirmed angrily. One of the men looked back at  him.
  "Here’s where we set the trap," the fellow said.
  Monk tried to say something. The other chuckled.
  "Don’t worry," he said. "It ain’t an ordinary  ambush. You’ve heard of the new photo−electric burglar alarms,
  ain’t  you?"
  Monk had more than heard of them. As an  electrochemist, he had done experimental work in developing
  them. You  walked across a beam of invisible light, and that set off an alarm.
  The other must have read his thoughts.
  "We got the photo−electric rig off the trail, and  there ain’t nobody walked from this part of the trail to ‘em,"
  he said.  "So there ain’t a chance of Doc Savage bein’ tipped off."
  There was a noise up on the canyon side.
  "Man up there now checkin’ them over," the man said.  "They’re fixed to open a big gas container. The gas
  will roll down here  in the canyon because it’s heavier’n air, and it’ll get Savage and your  other pal."
  Monk gargled angrily.
  "You ain’t the only scientist around here," said the  man.
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  44
  
  Then the fellow paused to watch the plane. It had  come droning back and swooped almost overhead. The
  pilot seemed to be  using binoculars this time.
  Then the pilot began gesturing�his arm moved right,  then left�twice to the right, once to the left. It kept
  moving.
  "That fool will tip Savage off!" snapped the girl.
  Buddy Baldwin swore and waved his arms angrily.
  The plane went away.
  "Maybe Savage won’t barge into the canyon," some one  said doubtfully.
  "Sure he will. We’ll be farther up, on the cliff,  and he can see us."
  The man who had examined the apparatus of the trap  joined them. They went on.
  MONK kept his eyes opened and reached an absolutely  unpleasant conclusion. The trap was perfect. The
  canyon was a bleak  place, and with one glance Doc could tell that no one lurked there in  ambush. He would
  certainly walk straight into the photo−electric device  beam.
  The captors were in a hurry now, so much so that  Monk judged Doc and Renny were not far behind. They
  had had to climb  the cliff, of course.
  Anxious to delay the flight, Monk started his  swinging from side to side again. It was effective, causing the
  two who  carried him to fall down. Then one of them got a rock. Each time Monk  swung he got clouted with
  the rock. It discouraged him.
  The caravan reached the opposite end of the canyon.  From here they started up a steep slope. There was some
  jungle here,  but not much. They were in the open a good deal.
  Doc could see them from below. It would draw him on.
  Monk turned his head. He could see straight down to  the far end of the canyon.
  Doc and Renny were already in view.
  The bronze man and the big−fisted engineer were  running. Doc was carrying what seemed from that distance
  to be a box of  apparatus.
  What followed was over quickly. Doc and Renny did  not wear the transparent hoods, so the gas got them
  almost immediately.  It was not a visible gas�not visible from that distance, at least.
  Renny went down first, but before he did so he threw  back his head and a cry poured from his lips, a grisly
  scream which  raised the hair. When he fell, it was slowly, and he twisted about.
  Doc went down next, but without an outcry. Yet once  the bronze giant was on the ground, he, too, squirmed
  slowly; his giant  frame tied into a tight bundle at first, then he grew more slack,  spread out, seemed to grow
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  45
  
  larger.
  It was as if his giant body were unwinding after the  life had left it.
  Chapter 9. THE TRAPPER TRAP
  THE two Baldwins cracked orders. Monk and Ham were  rushed back down the hill to the canyon. They
  stopped just outside the  gash, and the girl opened a small knapsack she was carrying and  withdrew what
  looked like a square of blotting paper and a bottle of  blue liquid. She soaked the paper with the liquid, then
  advanced  cautiously into the canyon, watching the paper.
  It turned slightly pink.
  "The wind has blown most of the gas out!" Bess  Baldwin called.
  Monk scowled. It was some kind of litmus test for  gas, a new one on him. This gang must have somebody
  who was no  scientific slouch.
  A moment later they were surrounding Doc Savage. The  bronze man was slack, his eyes shut. Renny had
  both big hands fastened  around his own throat.
  "Doc!" Monk choked.
  The homely chemist gave a mighty flounce. It upset  his porters, and he tumbled down almost upon Doc. He
  hit the ground  heavily, clawed to get erect, and his hands dug into a soft place in  the ground.
  It was only by chance that he happened to be looking  at the place where his hands dug in. He saw something
  metallic, small  and bright. It had been freshly buried.
  Monk gave another mighty flounce�and covered the  buried object again before anybody else saw it.
  "Doc!" Monk moaned. "He’s dead!"
  The men who had carried Monk sprang upon him. They  kicked him until they felt better.
  Doc and Renny still wore the metal−over−silk diving  suits, but had discarded the transparent helmets.
  "Be careful with those diving suits," Bess Baldwin  ordered. "The chief will be interested in them."
  "Good thing they discarded the helmets," a man  muttered. "It would ‘a’ been a heck of a note if they’d been
  able to  walk right through the gas."
  They found out how to unfasten the suits, and  carefully stripped them off. They got the portable radio loose
  from  Renny’s midriff. They worked over the one around Doc’s belt. Grunted,  strained, and said things when
  their fingers lost skin and nails. The  belt was metal, locked, secure.
  "We’re gonna have to smash it," one said.
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  "Don’t," directed Bess Baldwin. "Let the radio stay  there. It won’t do him any good. And the chief will want
  all those  radios. He hasn’t anything like them."
  A man went over and picked up the case which Doc and  Renny had been carrying. That was locked, too. He
  got a rock, beat at  the lock. He made smoke sparks fly, but that was all.
  "Let it ride," said the girl. "We do not want to  ruin any of Doc Savage’s equipment. The chief wants it all.
  Savage is a  mechanical genius."
  "Let’s roll," ordered Buddy Baldwin.
  Monk saw a man looking over the ground for anything  that might have been dropped. Instantly, Monk began
  to kick and flail  and hoot through his nose.
  They knocked him over the head with a rock, as he  had expected they would. It got black.
  A MAN had his foot on Monk’s stomach and was working  it up and down, and some unconscious reflex
  caused Monk’s big lungs to  work as a bellows, pumping air in and out. As the air went in and out  it made
  hootings and gobblings, and all the men standing around slapped  their hips and held their stomachs and
  laughed.
  "Wake up, evolution!" the man was telling Monk  between titters.
  Monk opened one small eye and made it mean. The tape  was off his mouth. He showed them his teeth. He
  was still bound hand  and foot.
  "He’s absolutely and positively the funniest−lookin’  geezer I ever saw, or I hope my mother paddles me if he
  ain’t!" the man  chortled.
  The jungle glade was hot under a curtain of volcanic  smoke. A fine ash was sifting down, making all the
  jungle gray and  strange−looking. They were on the north end of the island. That end was  swamp.
  Doc and Renny lay near; Ham was beyond. Doc and  Renny were still weirdly slack. They were not tied yet.
  Monk suddenly sat up enough to get his teeth in his  tormentor’s leg. Monk’s mouth was big enough to
  accommodate a  respectable portion of leg. The man who had been stamping his stomach  threw back his head
  and honked like a goose.
  "I’ll kill ‘im!" he screamed, and scooped up a rock.
  "Lay off!" the girl said sharply.
  The man gritted, "But the chief is gonna get rid of  ‘em anyway!"
  "Wait until he gives the word!" Bess Baldwin  retorted. 
  "Listen, sister, what’s the difference if�"
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  The girl showed her argument. It was flat and blue  and probably held seven cartridges. The man lifted his lip
  off his  upper front teeth, but did not say anything more.
  Monk squinted at the girl. That man was afraid of  her.
  That meant the lady must be a pretty tough egg.
  Every one stood around as if waiting for something.  Monk wondered what, and craned his neck. He saw a
  man off to one side  with a portable radio outfit. It was a modern set of military type, but  alongside Doc’s
  little gadgets, as crude as an alarm clock beside a  lady’s wrist watch. They were waiting for something over
  the radio.
  The girl looked at Doc. She had been doing that a  lot. She punished her lower lip with small white teeth.
  "Savage should have awakened by now!" she said  anxiously. "I’m afraid he didn’t react naturally to the gas."
  "Keep your shirt on, sis," her brother said. "He’s  alive."
  Monk let out a relieved breath. He had not been sure.
  The man at the radio called, "It’s coming!" and  listened.
  He got up, eyed the prisoners, and spat.
  "The chief ain’t gonna wait until he locates that  other one, Johnny," the man said. "He says for us to take
  Monk, Ham and  this one with the big fists�chief says his name is Renny�over to the  lava stream. Some of
  the other guys will be there with that runty one,  Long Tom. All four of ‘em go into the lava stream."
  Bess Baldwin stiffened suddenly. "What about Savage?"
  "You and Buddy stick here and watch him," the man  advised. "The chief says you better not let him get
  away."
  The girl put her teeth into her lower lip, and when  she took them out, little red beads appeared. She said
  shrilly, "I’ve  got something to say, too, and I might as well do it now."
  She ran to the radio and elbowed the operator out of  her path. It was a phone outfit. She knew how it operated.
  "Chief," Bess Baldwin said into the mike, "you’ve  steered clear of killing all through your operations. You’ve
  said that  nothing stirs up trouble quite as fast. Why change your ideas now?"
  She listened. What was said to her was not lengthy.  She put the transmitter and headset down. Her face was
  blank.
  The men picked up Monk, Ham and Renny and left.
  The plane buzzed around in the sky above. Otherwise  there was silence. The volcanic dust fell quietly. Doc
  lay motionless.
  "What’d he say, sis?" Buddy Baldwin asked.
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  "He just�laughed," Bess Baldwin said hoarsely. 
  The brother dropped an arm over his sister’s  shoulder. 
  "That little toy of a man is the worst fiend who  ever lived," he said. "Don’t cross him."
  The girl nodded. There was a sound as if something  had come up fast in her throat and stopped.
  Bess Baldwin still had the gun in her hand when she  sank beside Doc Savage, groaning, "I can’t understand
  what is keeping  him senseless for so long."
  Doc’s hand had to move less than a foot to take hold  of her gun.
  THE girl said "Oh!"
  Buddy Baldwin said "Oh−h!" got both hands  over his middle and went into a squat. The gun which had hit
  him in the  stomach hippety−hopped over the ground.
  The girl looked vacantly at her hand. She did not  quite realize it was her gun which had hit Buddy. Doc’s
  throw had been  something of a blur.
  Buddy Baldwin had a gun somewhere in his clothing.  He got his hands started toward it. Then Doc took hold
  of him.
  Baldwin was big. He had learned self−defense in a  school where men had fought for their lives. And he had
  no delusions  about his ability. He knew he was up against it.
  He got his arms around Doc, then tried to rub his  bristling hair into the bronze man’s face. Doc knew that
  one. The hair  was greasy, flecked with something, some kind of powdered chemical that  would blind an
  opponent.
  Doc got his jaw around behind one of Baldwin’s ears  and rubbed nerve centers. Baldwin screeched in agony.
  Buddy Baldwin convulsed. His shirt was silk. It  tore. He got out of it, and Doc had the shirt, greasy with
  sunburn  concoction and some of the man’s red, burned hide.
  The man tried to box next. He was good at that, too.  They sparred. Their four fists seemed to become half a
  dozen fists.  There came three or four small knuckle reports, then a loud one. Buddy  Baldwin fell on his back.
  Doc rushed. He was ordinarily more cautious. But the  other had brushed his knuckles against his hair, and
  had put some of  the chemical in Doc’s eyes. Baldwin got his feet up in time.
  Doc lifted, swapped his head for his feet. The kick  had caught him where it should have disabled, or worse.
  But he landed  as easily as a cat that had jumped off a porch.
  Buddy Baldwin got up. He used his feet now. He knew  a lot about a Scandinavian boxing game conducted
  only with the feet. A  deadly art of defense.
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  Suddenly the two men were together and down. Buddy  Baldwin never did know exactly what went wrong.
  He used his fists. And  when he felt the hardness of the bronze man, a kind of unbelief came  into his eyes.
  Sticks, dirt, leaves flew. The volcanic ash was a cloud.
  The cloud settled, and Doc Savage was on Buddy  Baldwin’s back, with a hold that was something of a
  nelson, but  different in a terrible way. Buddy Baldwin’s skin pores began to leak.
  He moaned about his mother.
  The girl ran into the jungle and back. She had  gotten the gun.
  "Let him up!" Bess Baldwin said, and pointed the gun  at Doc Savage.
  Buddy Baldwin’s eyes fixed on his sister.
  "Don’t!" he croaked. "He can kill me before he dies."
  THE girl stood there. Her left arm, the one that did  not support the gun, started shaking, and the shaking came
  across her  body and down her other arm. She lowered the gun.
  "Through?" Doc Savage asked. His remarkable voice  was low, and there was not much hurry in his breathing.
  "Through," Buddy Baldwin said hollowly.
  Doc Savage released the man, but stayed a moment,  considering something. Buddy Baldwin would not have
  died had the girl  shot, not by any chance. Knowing what he had shown he did about  fighting holds, there was
  not the slightest chance that Baldwin had not  known that a shot from his sister would save him.
  The Baldwins must have known what Doc was thinking.  Buddy Baldwin said, very low, "She has never
  killed anybody."
  Doc got up, walked to the girl and took her gun. She  did not lift it.
  Bess Baldwin looked relieved when he threw it far  into the jungle without looking at it.
  The bronze man knew why she looked relieved. She did  not think he had noticed that there had been no
  bullets in the gun. She  must have taken them out when she ran into the jungle after the gun.
  An odd length of the line the Baldwins had used to  tie the other prisoners lay where it had been cast aside.
  Doc got a  length three feet long, tied one end to Buddy Baldwin’s right wrist,  ran the cord across the fellow’s
  back and tied the other end to the  other wrist. This gave enough play for Baldwin to pump his arm,  necessary
  for fast running, but not enough for him to fight.
  The two Baldwins watched the tying silently.
  "Does Cadwiller Olden know what came out of that  volcano?" Doc asked.
  The Baldwins gaped surprise. The girl dropped a  hesitant "Yes."
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  "Do you?"
  "No."
  "Keep moving," Doc said.
  The quietness of the bronze man’s voice alarmed the  Baldwins. It was something like the purring that comes
  from some  grenades before they explode. The Baldwins did exactly what they were  told.
  It was slow going over the swamp ground. Vines,  weeds, brush came to their necks. Mud at times nearly did
  the same.  Birds had settled for the night and didn’t want to be stirred up. They  made a fuss about it. The sun
  had come to rest on the horizon.
  Doc asked, "Why didn’t Cadwiller Olden tell you what  was coming out of the volcano?"
  Bess Baldwin sloughed through a puddle, kicked mud  at the jungle.
  "It must be worth a lot. Maybe Cadwiller Olden was  afraid we’d turn on him if we found out."
  She ran onto what looked like a patch of sun−baked  mud. Doc got her out before she sank beyond her knees.
  "Cadwiller Olden knows his followers would not turn  on him," Doc said. "Olden could walk the loneliest
  jungle with half a  million in small bills, and not a man who knew his record would dare  touch him."
  Wonder came into Bess Baldwin’s voice. "You seem to  know a lot about him."
  DOC did not answer that. The ground got higher, the  growth less thick. The sun seemed to be gathering
  courage for the jump  into blackness beyond the horizon. Smoke and steam over the volcano was  a
  Gargantuan monster, often red but mostly black.
  Buddy Baldwin plugged along with deep thought etched  on his red face. Sweat trickled in big jewellike drops
  down his oiled  skin. He took long, hard breaths.
  He said, finally, "Savage, how long had you been out  from under the effects of that gas, back there, before
  you jumped us?"
  "Renny and myself," Doc said, "were not gassed at  all."
  "Huh?"
  "We plugged our nostrils and used mouth filters,"  the bronze man explained. "We were nearly discovered
  when Monk  accidentally kicked dirt off one of the filters, which we had buried  when the gas was gone and
  you had started back down the mountain. But  Monk kicked dirt over it again, and no one saw."
  Buddy Baldwin groaned, "I’ll be damned!" with a rage  more at his stupidity than anything else.
  He kicked savagely through brush, stamped across  rocky stretches. The three could smell the lava and the
  volcano now.
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  Doc was following no trail apparently. Only making  in the general direction of the lava flow.
  "How do you expect to find your men this way?" Bess  Baldwin asked.
  Big Buddy Baldwin growled, simultaneously, "Say,  how’d you know there was gonna be gas in that canyon,
  anyhow?"
  Doc pointed at the sky ahead. "The answer to both  questions."
  He meant the plane. Back and forth and around and  around, the craft droned, lazy as a bee that had just
  robbed another  hive.
  Buddy Baldwin snorted, "That’s one of Cadwiller  Olden’s aviators in that crate!"
  "And he will be back to see how we are getting  along," Bess Baldwin added. "That will cook your goose."
  Doc Savage seemed remarkably undisturbed.
  Chapter 10. THE FINE HAND OF FATE
  THE Fifth Wind was after the mystery thing  which had come out of the volcano.
  Doc Savage and his two prisoners could see that as  they came nearer the lava flow. The sleek schooner was
  anchored almost  in the geyserlike uprush of water. Sheets of the falling water at times  sloshed over her decks.
  Her anchors were out fore and aft.
  Lifelines and telephone wires were over the side.  They had divers down.
  Doc glanced at the girl. "You knew they would be  there?"
  "Yes," Bess Baldwin said. "They were headed for the  spot even before we seized Monk and Ham."
  The bronze man seemed puzzled about a point.
  "Who advised Cadwiller Olden the nature of what came  out of the volcano?" he asked.
  "Cadwiller Olden is a scientific genius. I have  heard him boast that he knew more than you. If he had to be a
  scientist  to figure out what came from Ethel’s Mama, he has the ability."
  "He had to be more than a scientist," Doc said. "He  had to have enough imagination to realize that here was
  something  scientists have never dreamed existed."
  "What is it?" Bess Baldwin asked.
  Doc seemed not to hear her. She appeared about to  ask again, but the inscrutability of his metallic features
  kept her  silent.
  All watched the plane, when they had time to watch  anything except the ground they were traveling. The girl
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  was gasping,  weaving as she ran, about exhausted. Doc Savage picked her up, carried  her as he had earlier in
  the day. Buddy Baldwin’s tongue was showing in  his mouth, and he was sweating enough to leave wet
  footprints.
  He watched Doc Savage, fascinated by the fact that  the bronze giant’s breathing had not quickened much, and
  no  perspiration had appeared.
  "Damn!" Baldwin mumbled between gulps for air. "And  I thought I kept in trim."
  The plane continued to drone around aimlessly. But  the group could see the pilot leaning over the cockpit
  rim. Down on the  schooner, they were making flag signals, but the flier paid no  attention.
  The flag signal was regulation marine international  code. The girl could read it.
  "That’s strange!" Bess Baldwin gasped.
  "What is?" Doc asked.
  "That aviator is one of Cadwiller Olden’s best men,"  the girl explained after hesitating. "But there he is
  ignoring the  chief’s orders."
  "Under the circumstances, not so strange," Doc said.
  "I don’t get you?"
  "The man really in control of that plane," Doc told  her, "is one of my associates, Johnny."
  WILLIAM HARPER LITTLEJOHN, more often termed Johnny,  was in control of the plane, but there was
  some doubt how long the  status would continue. Johnny had the muzzle of a supermachine pistol  against the
  pilot’s head.
  Johnny was serious. He was using little words.
  "Get on that radio and tell your boss that you’re  all right and that everything is fine!" he ordered.
  "Tell ‘im yourself, you bonebag!" the pilot snarled.
  The flier was a man who looked as if he had grown in  the foot half of a coffin. He had the shape and color.
  Some one with a  sharp knife had once relieved him of the end of his nose.
  "Now don’t be coy," Johnny advised gently. "They’d  know my voice. Why do you think I brought you along,
  after I grabbed  you when you landed for gasoline a couple of hours ago?"
  "Squirrel fodder to you!" the man sneered.
  The accident to his nose gave his words a gander  tone.
  "You’ve been nice right along," Johnny reminded.  "You sat still while I kept an eye on what is happening
  below, and  particularly where Monk, Ham and Renny are being taken, so I can tell  Doc. Why get stubborn all
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  of a sudden?"
  "Gr−r−r!" 
  said the pilot. 
  He was hurting his eyes looking at the machine  pistol, the muzzle of which Johnny kept in his ear.
  Johnny glanced over the side. The plane was low  enough to furnish a ringside seat for what was happening on
  the ground.
  The gang with Renny, Monk and Ham was standing on  the side of the lava river, waiting.
  Another gang dragging Long Tom were coming up from  where a boat had landed them off the schooner.
  Johnny could not have perspired in an oven, or he  would have sweat now. He could see Doc, and the bronze
  man would have  to cover ground fast to get to the lava stream in time.
  The gaunt geologist frowned at the cowl of the  plane. A machine gun was mounted there, but he did not
  know if it was  in working order. There was no ammo drum in it. He poked in a pocket in  the cockpit, well
  forward, at the same time keeping his gun near the  pilot’s head.
  Johnny was actually doing the flying, but the ship  was a one−seater, and he sat side by side with his prisoner.
  The pocket held ammo drums. Agreeably surprised,  Johnny picked one out, stood erect, and reached forward
  to clip the  drum into the breech mechanism of the synchronized machine gun. The  arrangement was not the
  best in the world.
  The captive flier gave the rudder a violent kick.  The plane moved enough to throw Johnny off balance. The
  flier kicked  the machine pistol from its position. Johnny hit him over the head, but  not nearly as hard as he
  would have liked to. The pilot bent down and  took a bite at Johnny’s right leg.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" Johnny said painfully.  It was the one big word he could always think of in
  excitement.
  He hit the pilot again. The fellow squawked,  twisted, and got down in the bottom of the cockpit to protect
  himself.  Johnny thumbed at the machine pistol’s safety. He hadn’t wanted to kill  anybody, and had kept it
  there. About that time the pilot kicked him  with both feet.
  JOHNNY went flying out of the cockpit. He did not  leave the ship, but came down astride the fuselage, a
  yard or so aft of  the cockpit rim. He reached, but before he could get .the rim he slid  back toward the tail. He
  slithered around and nearly fell off. It was  worse than riding a Tibetan yak, Johnny’s worst experience in
  steeds up  to that moment.
  He was glad when the tail of the plane jabbed his  spine. He had something to hold onto. He had not lost the
  machine  pistol, but that was because it was fastened to his neck with a lanyard  in the fashion affected by
  Northwest Mounted policemen. He grabbed it.
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  The pilot popped his head out of the cockpit. He had  the fire extinguisher. He made a bull’s−eye. Johnny
  rocked in pain,  fell across the stabilizer, pawed madly, then got the bright idea of  hitting the fabric with his
  fist. For a miracle, it split. He took hold  of a strut.
  The control wires for that side were rubbing his  face. Johnny freed one hand, grabbed them, and tried to fly
  the plane.  He had no satisfying luck, but it gave the pilot an idea. He opened the  throttle, grabbed the stick,
  stamped the rudder, and the plane began to  act as if there was a hawk after it.
  Johnny saw the ground and sky and volcano at  unexpected places, then rather lost track. It could not have
  been more  than a minute later when he got flipped off in space.
  About that time, he was very glad indeed that he was  wearing the pilot’s parachute.
  Johnny grabbed his machine pistol as soon as he got  back the breath which the opening parachute had
  shocked out of him. He  fumbled in a coat pocket for a different ammo drum for the weapon, one  charged
  with explosive bullets.
  Doc had perfected the explosives; one of them might  sink a battleship, if placed carefully enough, and half a
  dozen could  do it, with practically no care at all.
  Johnny tried a shot for range. It hit in the lava  stream, and there was suddenly a gap in the lava that men
  could have  gone through if they ran fast enough. Rocks rolled around on the ground  for a hundred feet in
  every direction.
  The men who held Monk, Ham and Renny picked  themselves up and hunted for the palm trees with the
  thickest tops.
  Johnny twisted around and dug a skyscraper basement  ahead of the crowd which had Long Tom.
  There was a sewing−machine noise. Johnny looked up.  He could see a row of red dusk light across the top of
  the parachute.  About that time the plane whooped past. Its slipstream nudged the  parachute around. The pilot
  reached up leeringly and patted the iron  rump of his machine gun. Then he banked the plane up to come back.
  Johnny gathered an armful of the ‘chute shrouds on  one side and hauled them down. The ‘chute didn’t quite
  turn itself  inside out, although there were times when that looked probable. The  ground came up, and the
  plane did not get close enough in two dives to  put its bullets nearer than listening distance, and Johnny let the
  shrouds loose in time to fill the ‘chute and land much harder than he  had expected.
  "Johnny! You all right?"
  It was Doc Savage’s voice. Close. Johnny had been a  bit too busy to note where he was landing in relation to
  the bronze  man. But he was pleased. He waited long enough to think up a big word  for an answer.
  "Appropinquity enjubilating!" he shouted.
  His delight had evaporated by the time Doc arrived  with the two prisoners. Johnny looked sheepish.
  "What happened?" Doc asked.
  "I got took like a goop, right when things were in a  jam!" Johnny muttered. He rarely used slang.
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  "Nonsense," Doc said quietly. "You did excellent  work from the instant you started to follow the young lady
  here."
  Bess Baldwin jumped, scowled at Johnny, and yelled,  "He followed me?"
  "From the time you left us with the excuse of going  for a camera until you got aboard the Fifth Wind," Doc
  told her.
  "But why?" she shrilled.
  "Doc’s idea," Johnny told her.
  Bess Baldwin stared at Doc. "But how did I give  myself away?"
  "With your story about the mysterious, jellylike  monster you saw in the side canyon," Doc told her.
  "That was a lie, of course," she said. "Cadwiller  Olden made it up for me. But what was wrong with it?"
  "Plenty," Doc said. "The thing which came out of the  volcano is certainly no such a creature as you
  described."
  Johnny exploded, "Doc! You know what the thing  is?"
  Doc’s reply was, "We had better see what we can do  for our friends."
  Bullets began to come through the jungle. Some made  clean singings, but most of them zip−zapped�that was
  about the sound�from tree to tree. And the plane came down with noise  in its nose and one red eye that was a
  firing machine gun.
  THERE is one thing about a cowl−fixed machine gun on  a plane. After its bullets go marching past, you
  know you have a  moment. The plane has to turn around and come back.
  Doc used the interval to get every one into better  cover.
  Johnny told the girl, "The fact that you’re with us  doesn’t seem to make much difference to your friend up
  there."
  "Did you expect it to?"
  Savage said briskly, "Johnny, have you any ammo drum  of those smokescreen bullets for your machine
  pistol?"
  Johnny produced the drum. It was small. The machine  pistol bullets were small, not much larger than .22
  cartridges,  although they could not in any way be compared to ordinary ammunition  of that caliber.
  Johnny clipped the drum in place of the explosives,  swung the gun around and let it moan. The slugs hit the
  ground and let  loose their chemical compound which turned into black smoke. One, two,  or a dozen might
  not have done much, but a hundred or so helped out the  approaching night materially.
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  Doc changed their position.
  The plane came down, riveted the ground full of  bullets where the party had been, and went up again with the
  moan of a  baffled spook.
  "He’ll play heck hitting us in this smoke," said  Buddy Baldwin.
  The pilot must have thought likewise. He did not  come back.
  "Come on," Doc said.
  The group ran toward the lava stream. The gang there  had stopped driving rifle lead into the jungle at random.
  "They’re waiting for us," Johnny hazarded.
  They weren’t. Both of Cadwiller Olden’s gangs were  heading for the sea, dragging their prisoners, who were
  now doing all  they could to delay the flight.
  "Now that’s queer," muttered Buddy Baldwin. "The  chief gave ‘em orders to croak them prisoners. And now
  they ain’t. They  must have gotten new ones."
  THE two gangs with their prisoners must have  received their new orders by radio from the schooner, for Doc
  and  Johnny and the two Baldwins came upon radio sets of the field military  type lying where the fleeing men
  had thrown them.
  The schooner was excitement itself. The plane  catapult put its nose over the side and spat off a plane with a
  noisy  gush of smoke. It turned around, booms whirred and blocks yowled, and  the other plane was on the
  catapult in time that would have made a navy  catapult crew hide their faces. The second plane was shot into
  the air,  too.
  Both plane pilots warmed their guns. These held  demolition cartridges, and they dug holes, tore up trees and
  made it  sound like another earthquake.
  When the planes went overhead, the pilots got rid of  several bombs, most of them gas, but enough of them
  fragmentation to  make the neighborhood sound as if it had a piccolo orchestra.
  Doc’s metallic features showed no emotion about that  time, but Johnny looked as if he were glad they had
  turned loose plenty  of smoke from the machine pistol and were off to the right, where the  planes did not
  expect them to be.
  The party raced for the cliff.
  It was getting much darker, and the smoke from  Johnny’s special cartridges had drifted upward, helping it
  along.
  The planes found them, and the group had to work  their smoke cartridge trick again. Twice, rather. The first
  time the  pilots were not deceived, and things would have ended there, only a  ditch was handy. They were
  more fortunate the second try.
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  Chapter 10. THE FINE HAND OF FATE
  57
  
  "Smoke about gone!" Johnny groaned.
  "Even money," Buddy Baldwin said, "that by this time  to−morrow the great Doc Savage and his friends are
  only a bunch of  epitaphs on some tombstones!"
  Chapter 11. THE THING THAT LEFT
  ONE of the pilots upstairs thought he saw Doc’s  party up on the mountain. Both planes took themselves and
  their noise  up there.
  Sound like several coffee grinders working hard  remained. It came from the sea below the cliff. Men were
  shouting and  swearing at men who swore back at them.
  "They’ve reached the cliff!" Doc said sharply. "Stay  here! Johnny, watch these two!"
  Johnny did not want to watch anybody. He had had  enough fight to want more. But before he could object,
  the bronze man  was gone, headed for the cliff.
  The bronze man got in the open for speed, taking a  chance on the planes sighting him, which was not likely,
  as dark as it  was now.
  His speed now was prodigious, and for once there was  an expression on his face. Grimness. He had not been
  doing so well. The  desire to keep the Baldwins in hand had slowed his pursuit of the gang  with Monk, Ham
  and Renny.
  Doc had planned on Johnny in the plane keeping track  of them, advising their location, stepping in to scatter
  them if they  actually tried to throw the prisoners into the lava. But fate had set  in.
  Doc reached the cliff and looked over. It was no  smooth wall of a cliff. There were plenty of places to get
  down.
  The two gangs with their prisoners had gotten down  and were already in the fast boats with engines that
  sounded like  coffee grinders. The boats got organized and headed for the schooner.
  The tiny gem of a man, Cadwiller Olden, seemed to be  mentally ambidextrous to the extent that he could
  direct two entirely  different operations at the same time. More men aboard the boat had  been carrying on the
  diving operations as if all were peaceful.
  They were now lowering boxes overside in a sling.  Doc Savage had eyes phenomenally developed by
  scientific training,  perfectly ordinary eyes to start with, but remarkable now. He studied  the boxes.
  Suddenly, he lifted his voice.
  "Ahoy, the Fifth Wind!" he called.
  The words were thunder of a kind, and when the  echoes went to sleep, everything was silent down on the
  water. The  coffee−grinder motors had even been throttled to a pop now and then.
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  58
  
  "Do not set off any explosive near that thing on the  bottom!"
  They heard that on the schooner, and it must have  been half a mile away.
  There was an interval of silence.
  A voice called from the schooner. The words did not  carry to Doc, and big−fisted, big−voiced Renny relayed,
  probably  voluntarily.
  "They say for you to take a big running jump from  where you’re standing, Doc!" Renny thundered.
  "Setting off a blast near the thing may cause it to  wipe us all out!"
  They heard that on the schooner, too. Renny relayed  the answer.
  "Same thing as before!" he boomed. "And they say  they’re gonna separate it in pieces, as it’s in too big a
  lump now to  take aboard."
  There was no need of more shouting. The men on the  ship were going to set off the blast. The schooner
  winches were already  gnashing the anchor chains, dragging them up. Breeze and tide moved the  schooner
  slowly away from the spot where the geyser of water played  steadily above the sea.
  In the unholy red of volcanic twilight, the geyser  looked eerie, ominous.
  The two planes came droning down to hunt for Doc  Savage’s voice.
  Johnny, from nearby, said, "I figured it was all  right to come down here."
  The two Baldwins did not say anything.
  On the schooner, they dipped a flag.
  A man in a launch, with a blasting generator between  his feet, bent over briskly with the generator treadle.
  The ocean went up.
  IT was cataclysmic, that which happened. The geyser  fell back and met the sea rising, and the sea continued.
  The sea did  not reach the sky, or even the clouds, but it must have lifted all of  two hundred feet. The wave,
  when it reached the cliff, smacked almost  to the top, and tons of spray came down around Doc, Johnny and
  the two  Baldwins.
  It was impossible to see exactly what was happening.  There was a torrent of spray, of water shooting high,
  and along with  that a gurgling and roaring that might have been a score of Niagaras  flowing by spurts. It
  continued for seconds, minutes. The big noise of  the planes became small and almost lost in the watery
  bedlam.
  A second tidal wave hit the cliff. Doc Savage  grabbed Johnny as water dragged him toward the edge. Buddy
  Baldwin held  his sister with one hand, a bush with the other. The threshing and  gurgling kept on, and every
  one of them was struck with the likeness to  a fantastic monster floundering in torment.
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  Chapter 11. THE THING THAT LEFT
  59
  
  "I’ll be superamalgamated if I don’t think we’d  better back away!" Johnny gulped. "Supposin’ the thing gets
  up here, or  somethin’!"
  It took a major calamity to make Johnny slur his  words.
  Then there was a strange sound. Johnny never forgot.  It was as if the cork had been pulled out of the world,
  and the innards  had come flying out. There was a scream. Those in Paris heard such  sounds when a Big
  Bertha turned loose.
  The big moan went away, infinitely far away. It left  behind echoes that came whining back from the bosom
  of Ethel’s Mama in  succeeding peals that got rapidly weaker.
  The sea finally settled down. Mist drifted slowly  away.
  On the top of the water was floating timbers, boards  and some arms that stuck up through the foam and
  waved.
  The stern of the schooner was sticking out. The ship  had capsized, and the part that showed was reminiscent
  of a big turtle  showing its head. When it went out of sight, it was as if the turtle  had seen something that
  demanded a cautious retreat.
  Some of the coffee−grinder boat engines were still  going.
  THE boats�they were fast tenders off the  schooner�skipped around picking up the men in the water. The
  planes�they were seaplanes�dipped down and tried to land and help. One  of them stubbed its float on a wave
  and shed both its wings and the  pilot. No one seemed to care about any more shooting.
  Johnny lay on the cliff brink. He groaned and  muttered; he said words that nobody who knew him would
  have thought he  knew, words that grew in no dictionary. He was mad at his eyes because  they did not have
  enough catlike quality to penetrate the murk of the  night.
  "I can’t tell!" he moaned. "I can’t tell!"
  He meant that he couldn’t tell if Renny, Monk, Ham  and Long Tom had died.
  "Renny!" 
  Doc thundered. No answer.
  "Long Tom!"
  "Monk!"
  "Ham!"
  No answer from the boats, which had finished their  looking around, and with the remaining plane headed up
  the shore for  Fan Coral City.
  "We can head them off!" Johnny gasped.
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  Chapter 11. THE THING THAT LEFT
  60
  
  He had spoken without enough thought. The jungle was  tough going. The boats beat them.
  Two big planes were missing from Fan Coral Harbor  when they got there. Everybody had thought those
  planes had brought  newspaper correspondents and motion picture photographers. They had  borne the names
  of a world−wide news agency and a big Hollywood  concern. But sign painters can be hired almost anywhere,
  and the planes  had left in too great a hurry.
  Doc Savage found the remaining small plane used by  Cadwiller Olden’s fliers, but nobody was around.
  The bronze man went to the radio station.
  The world began to keep its eyes open for two  sea−air giants�each could lift forty passengers and a pay
  load�which  bore the name of a world−wide news agency and a great motion picture  concern.
  The pig, Habeas, and the ape, Chemistry, came  wandering furtively into Fan Coral City that night. The two
  animals  were behaving queerly. Every one noticed it. The beasts kept looking at  the eastern sky.
  It was into the eastern sky that the roaring thing  from the volcano had gone.
  Chapter 12. STRANGE STORIES
  ETHEL’S MAMA had been in the eyes of the world  rather prominently, and what had finally happened was
  somewhat in the  nature of a blinding flash which caused the newspaper−reading and  radio−listening public of
  all nations to sit back, blink its eyes�and  wonder who was crazy.
  Any number of persons on Fan Coral Island had seen  the commotion that had resulted in the sinking of the
  schooner. The  uproar of fighting could not fail to draw attention, although just what  it was all about,
  practically no one could figure.
  Doc Savage was on the island, almost every one  heard, and the remarkable man of bronze was involved in the
  affray on  the edge of the cliff. Doc Savage’s repute had reached almost every ear  on Fan Coral Island in the
  past, and people knew the things he was  involved in were likely to be big and exciting.
  But when newspapermen�the legitimate ones�went  looking for Doc Savage, they found he had disappeared,
  and along with  him his gaunt geologist aid, Johnny, as well as two other persons, a  big sunburned man and a
  pretty and capable−looking girl, neither of  whom any one recognized by name. With them had gone the two
  pets.
  Since nobody found Doc, and no one was absolutely  certain there really had been a fight, the fray did not
  appear in print  except the statement that, "reports of an affray of some kind prior to  the strange disturbance
  which wiped out the schooner have not been  corroborated."
  The phenomenon of something coming out of the sea  and whistling away through the sky was something that
  did get a lot of  publicity. It was very mysterious, and enough persons had heard it to  assure that there really
  had been such a happening.
  A number of additional scientists came to Fan Coral  Island to investigate.
   REPEL
  Chapter 12. STRANGE STORIES
  61
  
  They made a surprising discovery. Ethel’s Mama had  stopped erupting. The lava no longer flowed,
  decreasing amounts of  smoke and steam appeared, and all was getting serene.
  Several scientists mentioned that the object which  had whistled through the sky might have had a connection
  with the  cessation of the eruption. But when they were pressed for a definite  reason why, they had none.
  Divers found a disturbed place on the bottom of the  sea, where explosive might have gone off, but nothing
  else.
  The divers did bring up several bodies, and the  crabs and fish had left enough of some of them to allow
  identification.  There was some surprise when it was learned the victims had been most  noted criminals.
  What the world did not know or discuss was that the  naval forces and land police of a number of nations had
  been keeping a  sharp lookout for two big seaplanes, one bearing the name of a news  agency, the other that of
  a cinema concern.
  What even the naval and civil authorities did not  know was that probably one of the greatest collaborations in
  history  had been effected between private detective agencies all over the globe.
  The private sleuths were also looking for the  planes, for Cadwiller Olden, the amazing midget, for a fake
  Snowball  Eagan, and for four aids of Doc Savage nicknamed Monk, Ham, Renny, and  Long Tom.
  The man in charge of this collaboration of private  detective agencies knocked on the door of an eighty−sixth
  floor suite  in a New York skyscraper two weeks later.
  The door bore the name, "Clark Savage, Jr.," in  small letters. Clark Savage, Jr., was Doc Savage.
  WHEN he was seated in a large reception room  furnished with expensive leather chairs, a remarkable inlaid
  table and  an enormous safe, the chief of the private detective organization spoke.
  "I received your word that you had reached New York,  and I am here to report," he said.
  "Go ahead," Doc Savage directed.
  "Every airport and every possible landing point has  been covered as well as we could," the man said. "I get
  daily, and  often hourly, reports from the Orient, Australia, Africa, Mexico, and  almost everywhere else. We
  have watched the trains, the airways, the  automobile highways, steamships and transoceanic dirigibles. This
  has  cost you approximately half a million dollars already. It is probably  the most thorough and expensive
  detective job ever attempted. And it  hasn’t accomplished a damn thing!"
  "Nothing?"
  "Absolutely nothing!"
  "Keep at it," Doc Savage said.
  The fellow who had organized the private detective  collaboration swallowed twice. He looked incredulous.
  "It’s going to cost almost a hundred thousand  dollars a day," he said.
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  Chapter 12. STRANGE STORIES
  62
  
  "The lives of four of my friends may be at stake,"  Doc Savage said quietly. "And if that fellow Cadwiller
  Olden is not  stopped, it is going to cost the world a good deal more than a hundred  thousand a day."
  The man nodded and got to his feet. "And what about  the other thing?"
  "You wish to know if the private detectives are to  keep on watching for some trace of the thing which flew
  out of the sea  at Fan Coral Island?"
  "Exactly," Doc replied.
  The head of detectives nodded again. "There has been  only one report on that, and it was nothing but a rumor.
  A sheepherder  says he and his sheep were knocked every which way by something that  went past a mountain
  with a roaring noise. The thing seemed to come  down, then go up again."
  "That was in Wyoming," Doc said.
  "It was."
  "Keep looking," Doc directed quietly.
  The visitor stumbled out, somewhat dazed by the  presence of an individual who could spend that much
  money looking for  four friends, a midget, and something in the sky that made a moaning  noise and knocked
  things around.
  JOHNNY came into the reception room after the  visitor had gone. Johnny, who had always looked as if he
  couldn’t  possibly lose any weight, had nevertheless lost some. And he had not  used a big word since they had
  left Fan Coral Island secretly in Doc’s  big private seaplane which had been lying in a remote cove on the
  island.
  He carried a large looseleaf notebook.
  "Look here," he said wonderingly. "I’ve been going  through this notebook you handed me. It’s full of dope
  on Cadwiller  Olden."
  "We try to keep a file on all the leading crooks,"  Doc reminded.
  "I know, but this was started all of two years ago.  And it shows how, step by step, and with remarkable
  genius, Cadwiller  Olden has progressed until to−day he is probably the most dangerous  criminal alive. It
  gives lists of his known followers, and their  pictures, some of them. And look at this!"
  Johnny held the book open, disclosing a pair of  pictures.
  "Bess Baldwin and her brother!" the gaunt geologist  exclaimed. "You knew from the very instant that she
  appeared just who  she was and what she was probably up to!"
  Doc’s silence admitted that fact.
  "Another thing"�Johnny blew his nose�"since we’ve  been back, you sent the Baldwins away somewhere.
  Why, I don’t know.  What’s the idea?"
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  Chapter 12. STRANGE STORIES
  63
  
  "Cadwiller Olden," said Doc Savage, "is a clever  man. I wouldn’t put it beyond him to make an attempt to
  rescue the  Baldwins. For the present I have had them removed somewhere where even  Olden cannot find
  them. You will soon see them again."
  Johnny, curious, attempted some more questions, but  the bronze man shut up like a clam. So Johnny went
  back to the book. He  shook it. "There’s a picture and description of the Fifth Wind  here. There’s even a plan
  of her furnished by the shipyard which made  her over to suit Cadwiller Olden’s ideas. So you knew she was
  the  midget’s boat."
  "For a year," Doc said.
  "Now I begin to see why we went to Fan Coral Island  so secretly. Now I see. Sure! You were going after
  Cadwiller Olden. You  saw in the newspapers that his ship had turned up in the harbor at Fan  Coral. You
  figured he was up to something."
  "Not up to something," Doc corrected. "The  seismograph records of the initial eruption of Ethel’s Mama
  show�"
  "I never could see anything strange about those  records," Johnny interposed.
  "The earthquake record was perfectly normal," Doc  said. "But there was no earthquake on Fan Coral Island
  of any great  violence. An earthquake of the strength of the one registered in  Harvard would have shook things
  up briskly on Fan Coral Island. It was  the Fan Coral shock which was registered. The time proves that.
  "We had, therefore, a shock which was not violent,  but which registered as a violent one. That is easily
  explained. An  ordinary earthquake is usually a slippage of subterranean strata. You  stand on a platform and if
  it is jerked up and down, you still keep  your feet, but if it is jerked sidewise, you upset. Therefore the
  disturbance was a thrusting of forces rather than a slippage  disturbance."
  "Now we’re getting some place," Johnny said. "But I  still don’t see why the fact that the earth jumped up and
  down instead  of slipped was remarkable enough to send us flying halfway around the  world to Fan�"
  The singing of the telephone annunciator cut in. The  telephone was connected to a loud−speaker and
  microphone instead of the  conventional instrument. Doc clicked the switch, said, "Savage," and a  voice came
  out of the speaker.
  "This is important," it said.
  "Go ahead," Doc directed.
  "This is a private detective stationed to watch the  news dispatches handled by the bureau office of the
  Associated Press in  St. Louis," said the voice, sounding as if it were coming over a  long−distance telephone
  wire. "I think we have something here that you  should be informed about."
  "Let’s have it."
  "It is a dispatch from the small town of Bagnell, in  the Missouri Ozarks, near the Lake of the Ozarks," said
  the informant.  "The story is about a hillbilly they had to put in jail down there."
  "Get to the point," Doc requested.
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  Chapter 12. STRANGE STORIES
  64
  
  There was a brief pause, during which the telephone  loudspeaker seemed to be reproducing the crackling of
  paper.
  "I’m reading the item again," the detective said.  "It seems that this hillbilly was named Snig Johnson, and he
  was put in  jail because he went around claiming he was a reincarnation of Moses."
  "Moses?"
  "That’s what it says here in the story. It says this  Snig Johnson went down the main street of Bagnell yelling,
  ‘I stretched  out my right hand and the waters were divided, a wall unto my right  hand and unto my left, and I
  could lead the children of Israel into the  midst of the water upon the dry ground.’ The story goes on to say he
  was looking for an Israelite to lead, only they caught him before he  found one and put him in the hoosegow."
  "Thank you," Doc said.
  The bronze man broke the connection, and immediately  had the long−distance operator get him the marshal
  at Bagnell. But it  seemed "Snig" Johnson was in the county jail at a town called  Tuscumbia. Doc got
  Tuscumbia. There was some argument, and he got Snig  Johnson on the phone.
  Snig Johnson did not sound as if he thought himself  another Moses.
  "Listen, mister, they got me all wrong," he  complained. "I had maybe had a nip or two of this Ozark panther
  sweat.  I remember I was feelin’ right good. You know how it is. I figured I’d  sorta tell ‘em about it, an’
  maybe kid ‘em a little. But hell! They got  me all wrong. They think I’m bats. An’ now they got me in the
  calaboose, an’ this dang sheriff has ordered a strait−jacket from Jeff  City."
  "What gave you the idea of the water like unto a  wall on your left hand and on your right?" Doc asked.
  "It’s a fact, dang it!"
  "Tell me about it."
  "You joshin’ me, mister?"
  "Not a bit. This is very important."
  "All right. I’ve heard about you, Doc Savage. I’m a  farmer. Leastways, I raise me a tomato now an’ then,
  when them dang red  oak hills ain’t too dry or too wet. Mostly I do a business in redbone  foxhounds. I train
  pups for fellers all over Missouri. An’ I got the  best durn dogs in Missouri or Arkansas, and�"
  "We were talking about divided waters," Doc reminded.
  "Who said we wasn’t? Day ‘fore yesterday, mister, I  had Old Blow�he’s my best dog�out with some green
  pups. Old Blow is  dang good, because he’ll pile right onto them pups for runnin’ rabbits  an’ barkin’ at skunks
  an’ things. Anyhow, we come to a neck of the  lake�"
  "What lake?"
  "Quit interruptin’ me. Lake of the Ozarks. We come  to this neck of the lake, an’ I hope my foxhounds run
  rabbits forever  if there wasn’t the waters, divided as you please. I didn’t divide ‘em.  They was already
  divided, an’ Moses couldn’t ‘a’ done a better job.
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  Chapter 12. STRANGE STORIES
  65
  
  "They’re still divided, or was the next mornin’ when  I went down there to see if I was crazy. The dang lake
  has just got a  path in it where there ain’t no water, an’ no reason for there not  bein’ any, except maybe the
  heck of a wind that’s blowin’ around there."
  "What is the exact location?"
  "One mile north of my farm."
  "Thank you," Doc said.
  "Wait a minute, mister! I read somewhere that you go  around helpin’ fellers out of trouble. You talkin’ to one
  right now  that’s in some trouble."
  "We’ll see what we can do," Doc said.
  He hung up. Johnny looked excited. "We’ll head for  Lake of the Ozarks at once!" he exclaimed. Then he
  wheeled.
  THE instant he turned, Johnny’s eyes popped, and he  seemed to be having inner trouble. He choked
  explosively.
  The bad Baldwins, Buddy and his sister Bess, were  standing just inside the door.
  Johnny yelled, "How come you’re running around  loose? How much of that did you hear?"
  Buddy Baldwin said, "We were shoved in here a minute  ago by the men you have had guardin’ us, the private
  detectives. We  ain’t heard nothin’."
  Doc Savage said, "Put out your hands."
  The two Baldwins�Johnny had discovered they were  known as the "Bad Baldwins" when he read the record
  book�extended their  wrists. Doc clicked on handcuffs.
  That was another puzzler. Doc rarely used handcuffs.  He had chemical concoctions which kept prisoners
  helpless without  harming them. The potions had the advantage that only Doc could erase  their effects with
  another chemical mixture, so that if the captives’  pals rescued them, they were still nothing better than living
  mummies.
  "Stay here," Doc suggested to Johnny. "You might  entertain yourself by getting more familiar with Cadwiller
  Olden’s  record."
  Johnny nodded. But it would not be entertainment.  What he had already read about Cadwiller Olden’s
  methods had almost  curled Johnny’s hair.
  Doc Savage and the two Bad Baldwins went outside,  the Baldwins handcuffed. Johnny held the door open
  until he heard the  elevator depart with the trio, then went back and picked up the record  book.
  Johnny had ceased being surprised at the fact that  Doc had secured, long before the present trouble started, a
  complete  line on Cadwiller Olden. Doc had been battling evildoers for some time,  his methods phenomenally
   REPEL
  Chapter 12. STRANGE STORIES
  66
  
  successful, and not because of luck.
  Doc overlooked no possible angle of preparation. He  had arranged access to the fingerprint and picture files
  of police  departments all over the world, and he employed detective agencies  continually.
  A shot interrupted Johnny’s musings. He leaped to  the window. One glance out and he made a croaking
  sound of horror.
  Doc maintained a private speed elevator. It took  Johnny down to the street level almost as fast as a stone
  would have  fallen. He dived out to the street.
  Doc Savage lay on his back on the sidewalk. A pool  of scarlet leakage was growing under the bronze man’s
  head.
  The two Bad Baldwins were nowhere in view.
  Chapter 13. THE TRAIL AGAIN
  TWO fat men crawled out from under an automobile  where they had dived for refuge. They looked like
  brothers.
  "A man and a woman!" one gasped. 
  "Handcuffed!" bleated the other.
  "The man drew a gun!" 
  "The woman, too!"
  "They shot that man!"
  "It’s Doc Savage! Doc Savage is dead!"
  Johnny had seen crowds gather in a hurry, but this  time it was a record. They could not have arrived more
  swiftly if they  had been shot out of a shotgun. There was a radio police car, two  patrolmen, an ambulance,
  another police car, and a taxicab driver got  excited and ran into a lamp post.
  Officials and excited persons ran up and tried to  seize Doc Savage and help move him. One souvenir−hunting
  maniac whipped  out a penknife and would have cut a piece off the end of Doc’s necktie  if Johnny had not
  kicked him where it would discourage him the most.
  Police ran around madly, grabbing people at random  and handcuffing them, not because they thought they
  were guilty, but  because they wanted witnesses. Johnny shouted descriptions of the  Baldwins, howled orders
  to take Doc up to the skyscraper headquarters  instead of the hospital, and squawled at the mob to get back
  and give  the bronze man air.
  Six persons tried to carry Doc when two could have  done the job better. A procession of fire apparatus began
  to arrive for  no apparent reason, shaking the streets and deafening every one.
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  Chapter 13. THE TRAIL AGAIN
  67
  
  In the midst of the excitement, Doc Savage said, "If  no one minds, I’ll get up under my own power." His
  voice was weak.
  Twenty minutes later, when Johnny had chased the  last newspaper reporter out of the skyscraper reception
  room with a  chair, he slammed the door shut, panting, and eyed Doc reproachfully.
  "You shouldn’t have let those newshounds have the  story!" he said.
  "But the Baldwins escaped from me," Doc said.  "Broadcasting their pictures and descriptions will help in
  apprehending  them."
  Johnny groaned. "It’ll give all the crooks the idea  that you aren’t so hot, after all. You know very well we
  scare a lot of  weak−kneed bad actors into turning as straight as a string, just with  our reputation."
  Doc said nothing.
  Johnny took a prowl around the place as a matter of  course. The establishment consisted of a library of
  enormous size  stocked exclusively with ponderous scientific works, and a laboratory  which was probably one
  of the most fully equipped for advanced research.
  As Johnny had expected, he found a reporter who had  hidden in the laboratory to get pictures and some
  exclusive angle on  the story. The scribe made the door just ahead of Johnny’s toe. Johnny  was getting
  crochety.
  "You’re not hurt bad, you’re sure, Doc?" he demanded  anxiously.
  "I can navigate," the bronze man said.
  "Does this change things? Are we still heading for  the Ozarks?"
  "We are."
  THERE was a police dragnet out for the Bad Baldwins.  Every cop in town was looking for a slender,
  blue−eyed girl and a big  man who was sunburned.
  Two colored people, a man and a woman, attracted no  attention strolling down a Harlem street. The lady was
  bent and  white−haired, and the old fellow with her was also stooped, and as bald  as an elephant’s tusk. Both
  carried canes. The man had a white cloth  wrapped around his face in the manner of one who has a toothache.
  They shuffled up to the policeman on a corner and  asked him to recommend a good dentist. There was a sign
  in the middle  of the block:
  SAM
  SPECIALIST OF TEETH
  "I guess he’s all right," the cop said.
   REPEL
  Chapter 13. THE TRAIL AGAIN
  68
  
  The two old darkeys mounted a stairway and found  themselves in a prosperous−looking office. They seemed
  a little  confused, and the old man uneasy. A neat colored girl asked them what  could be done for them.
  "Pap’s got hisself an ache, missy," the old lady  said.
  The dentist saw them in his private room. He was a  lean, bald colored fellow who looked as if he might have
  a little wolf  in his ancestry.
  "What can I do for you?" he asked crisply.
  The old colored lady held the palm of one hand out,  opened and closed the fingers three times, then crossed
  the two longest  fingers.
  The dentist got up and closed the door.
  "All right," he said. "I half expected you would  show up here."
  "You know us?" the old lady asked.
  "Yeah, but not if I hadn’t been expecting you.  You’re the Bad Baldwins."
  The Bad Baldwins nodded. "This disguise won’t serve  forever," Buddy said. "We want to contact Cadwiller
  Olden."
  "Suppose Olden should prefer your keeping under  cover?" the other suggested.
  "We have important information for him."
  The dentist seemed to be only an intermediary, a cog  in the machine of crime which had been built by the
  tiny, evil genius,  Cadwiller Olden.
  Removing his white smock, the dentist got his street  coat and donned it, and said, "Come with me."
  His destination was a rooming house which did not  seem to do much business. He led the way to a room on
  the top floor.  Four large trunks stood around the wall. They were empty. What they had  held was assembled
  in the middle of the room. It was a compact beam  wave radio transmitter of considerable power.
  THE dentist worked with the control knobs a while,  getting the wave length.
  "We move the station occasionally," he said. "Even  if there is practically no chance of locating it with a
  direction  finder such as the Department of Commerce Inspectors use."
  Finally, after giving some of the passwords,  Cadwiller Olden’s small voice said, "Well?"
  "We got away from Doc Savage," Buddy Baldwin said.
  "I know," Cadwiller Olden chuckled. "I just heard it  broadcast in a news report. You’re sure it’s not a trick?
  Maybe Savage  let you escape."
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  "Hell, no! I think we killed him."
  "You didn’t. The news broadcast said he was still  alive."
  "Damn the luck!" Buddy Baldwin snarled. "Well,  anyway, we got hot stuff for you."
  "Yes?"
  "Doc Savage knows the location of Repel."
  "Of what?"
  "Of Repel!" Buddy Baldwin laughed grimly. "The thing  that came out of the volcano."
  "So do I."
  "You what?"
  "The location. I know it. I have known it since  yesterday."
  "I’ll be damned!"
  "Furthermore, I have almost succeeded in securing  it. It is a matter of hours."
  Buddy Baldwin exploded, "It’s in the Lake of the  Ozarks in Missouri!"
  "That is right."
  "Can you get it before Doc Savage arrives?"
  "Possibly. And when Savage does arrive, he will find  some elaborate arrangements to receive him,"
  Cadwiller Olden said  grimly.
  There was a brief and uncomfortable pause.
  "What do you want us to do?" Buddy Baldwin asked.
  "My agent will explain how you may secure a plane,"  replied Cadwiller Olden. "You will fly immediately to
  my base at Lake  of the Ozarks. The agent will mark the location of the base."
  "We’re off," grunted Buddy Baldwin. "Oh, say! What  about Doc Savage’s four friends?"
  "I have them here in the Ozarks," said Cadwiller  Olden. "I should have gotten rid of them. I have not thought
  it  advisable to use them as bait for a trap for Savage, which was my first  idea."
  "That would be dangerous," Buddy Baldwin agreed.  "Doc Savage has been hoping for that. Others have tried
  the trick  before, with the result that the bronze man used the contact to trail  down his friends and effect a
  rescue."
  Cadwiller Olden snapped, "We are already preparing  to dispose of the prisoners!"
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  Chapter 13. THE TRAIL AGAIN
  70
  
  Chapter 14. THE MASTER CROOK’S TOUCH
  TUSCUMBIA was a Missouri county seat town, built to  live in rather than to get rich in. The jail evidently
  didn’t do much  business.
  The sheriff was in his office, talking to himself  and looking at the new strait−jacket.
  "You won’t get a heck of a lot more out of Snig  Johnson," he said.
  "Why?" Doc inquired.
  "Him and a bootlegger got together through the jail  window."
  Doc went in to see Snig Johnson. Johnson was long  and hard as rails and as brown as the spots on one of his
  redbone  foxhounds.
  "Yipee!" he said. "Hell wish everything! I’m a bird,  jush a bird in a gildesh cage!"
  "I can give him some stuff that will sober him up so  quick he will think lightning struck him," Doc said.
  "Don’t wanna get shruck by nothin’," Snig Johnson  yelled amiably. "Wanna live in their shail. Like the durn
  place. Swell  shail�sha�shail�hell�calaboose."
  The sheriff said, "I think he is afraid he is going  crazy."
  "If you sheen shome waters divided, what’d you  shink?" Snig Johnson asked, not without some logic.
  "Let him alone," Doc said. "Do you know the location  of his farm?"
  "Sure. It’s down in the next county, Camden. You  stop at Linn Creek, and they can tell you."
  Doc Savage thanked the sheriff. The bronze man and  Johnny went back to their plane, which was the center
  of a group of  small boys in a cow pasture not far from town.
  The small boys had evidently had experience with an  aviator of temper, because four of them ran when they
  saw Doc and  Johnny returning. The others stuck around and popped their eyes at the  giant bronze man.
  "How many of you are going to be aviators when you  grow up?" Doc asked them pleasantly.
  Naturally, they all were. They found their tongues.
  "Pete was climbin’ all over your plane, mister," one  announced. "We told him he’d better not do that, but he
  said he wasn’t  afraid of you."
  "Who is Pete?" Doc asked idly.
  "He ran away."
   REPEL
  Chapter 14. THE MASTER CROOK’S TOUCH
  71
  
  Doc got into the plane with Johnny and took his seat  in the control compartment. Modern airliners have a
  multitude of  controls, but the instrument panels on this ship made them seem as  simple as those on an
  automobile dashboard. There were dials overhead,  on the sides, the floor, and in front where there were no
  windows.
  Doc’s flake−gold eyes drifted over them, watching  needles crawl and jiggle as the big motors warmed.
  Suddenly he whipped  into motion.
  Doc seized Johnny, lunged backward, and dived out of  the plane.
  "Run!" he thundered.
  There was something in his voice that made every one  run.
  DOC SAVAGE separated from Johnny, heading for a  patch of red oak brush on the far side of the pasture.
  He hauled out  from under his coat a sack of tan stuff which, when he pulled it over  his head, fitted snugly,
  with unexpectedly thick goggle lenses at the  eyes, and skirts long enough to hang down over the chest. It was
  a  bulletproof hood, with an arrangement of plates that protected the  skull.
  There was an odd noise, a big sound as if a giant  fruit had burst. The fleeing kids began to yell excitedly. Doc
  switched  a glance back. The plane had grown a hairy red coat of flames and shed  some of it onto the ground.
  The parts of the wings where the gas tanks  had been were split wide.
  A three−strand barbed−wire fence shut the red oak  patch off from the pasture. Doc took it with hurdling
  stride. The brush  did not furnish very effective cover above shoulder height. He kept  down.
  A motor cleared its iron throat noisily on the other  side of the red oaks. It settled down to business, sinking its
  power  into gears with a clash, and taking itself away with the velocity and  violence of a scared coyote. A
  motor cycle going away.
  Doc reached a road through the brush, a road ground  into hazel brush by the weight of wheels alone, and
  never graded. But  it was a road, and the motor cycle had taken everything but its noise  away. There was no
  other conveyance in sight.
  Doc stood on the edge of the road while a disturbed  jaybird got rid of opinions on the top branch of an
  adjacent hickory  tree. His flake−gold eyes were busy.
  "All right," the bronze man said without excitement,  "come on out."
  Three small boys came sidling out of the brush. They  had the look of fellows who had unexpectedly found
  themselves in a  melon patch with the owner, without in the least wanting to be there.
  "It was Pete," one said.
  "Pete had a motor cycle," volunteered another  hesitantly.
  Doc Savage smiled to quiet them, to loosen up their  conversation.
  "Who is Pete?" he asked.
   REPEL
  Chapter 14. THE MASTER CROOK’S TOUCH
  72
  
  They shook their heads.
  "A new kid," one said. "He come up while we was  lookin’ at the plane, and said his name was Pete."
  Doc Savage went back to the plane. Johnny was  throwing dust on the burning plane when he was not chasing
  away the  small boys, who now wanted to help. Dust would not help much.
  "The equipment cases are fireproof," Johnny  grumbled, "so not much of the stuff is liable to be harmed. But
  say,  what caused that?"
  "Chemicals which resulted in spontaneous  combustion," Doc replied. "The vibration of the motors, as soon as
  they  were started, caused an agitation which mixed the chemicals. The idea  was for a few minutes of this to
  be necessary before the gasoline would  be exploded, so that the plane would be in the air."
  "But how’d you get wise in time?"
  "We have had experience with stuff in the gas tanks  before. Monk installed a device to register any foreign
  matter in the  fuel. It has the added advantage of showing when unscrupulous airport  gasoline filling stations
  try to slip us low−grade fuel."
  "Oh! The device showed it!"
  Doc nodded and looked at the plane. He said, "As  soon as we can get the equipment boxes out, we will head
  for Snig  Johnson’s farm. It is plain that we have a tough job ahead of us. Our  enemies are already here."
  "Huh?" Johnny exploded.
  "The boy, Pete, was the midget, Cadwiller Olden,"  Doc said.
  SNIG JOHNSON’S farm consisted of a house that was  about to fall down and a barn that had. Doc and
  Johnny heard the place  long before the taxicab driver from Tuscumbia put them out at the foot  of the lane
  which was rain−gullied so badly that he refused to drive  his car up to the house.
  "Sounds like Snig’s hound dawgs is gettin’ hungry,"  the taxi driver said after he pulled under an elm tree and
  parked to  wait. The driver had a face Monk would have called a pickle−puss.
  It sounded as if all the dogs were howling steadily.
  Johnny had picked up the St. Louis newspapers in  Tuscumbia. He carried one along, and shook it in front of
  Doc in a  puzzled way as they got out of the car.
  "Look here," he said, indicating an item. "That  private detective didn’t notice the story until a day late. It was
  first published yesterday. Cadwiller Olden must have seen it before we  did."
  "That would explain how he beat us here," Doc  admitted.
  The taxi driver got out.
   REPEL
  Chapter 14. THE MASTER CROOK’S TOUCH
  73
  
  "If you fellers is goin’ fishin’, you might need  somebody to take the fish off your hooks, or somethin’," he
  suggested.
  "No, thanks," Doc told him. "You stay here."
  The driver shrugged. "I can run that there boat that  the power company keeps in a boathouse t’other side of
  Snig Johnson’s  place."
  Doc said nothing.
  "I notice you stopped at the power company an’  picked up the keys to the boat," the driver insinuated. "So I
  guess  you’re goin’ out in it. I can run it."
  Doc said, "We’ll manage."
  Doc and Johnny walked up to Snig Johnson’s house.
  The dogs were in a pen, jumping, barking, chasing  around with their noses to the ground, and sneezing. There
  were two  sorrel mules, some chickens and guineas, more guineas than chickens.  The tomato patch on the
  rocky hill did not look so good. There was no  one around.
  "Snig Johnson said the spot where the lake was  divided is a mile north. We will get this power boat and go up
  there,"  Doc said.
  "It’s lucky we managed to locate a power boat in  this part of the lake," Johnny said.
  They set out through the red oaks, following a trail  that slanted down toward the lake.
  "Those dogs were acting queer," Johnny said. "They  didn’t look gaunt, as if they were hungry."
  "Pepper," Doc said.
  "What?"
  "Pepper. Some one did not want them following a  trail. They are foxhounds, but they might be made to trail a
  man."
  Chapter 15. DEATH UNDERFOOT
  LAKE OF THE OZARKS is not a natural lake. It is the  result of a gigantic hydroelectric project, the
  damming of the Osage  River in Missouri. The dam is high. It has caused mountain valleys to  fill with water
  for many miles, creating a scenically entrancing body  of water with a shore line of considerably more than a
  thousand miles.  Yet at no point is the lake so wide that a good rifle would not send a  bullet from shore to
  shore.
  As Doc and Johnny had come in the plane earlier, the  lake from the air had resembled some squat,
  Gargantuan leafless tree of  deep blue lying flattened out on the undulating verdant vastness of the  Ozark
  Mountains.
   REPEL
  Chapter 15. DEATH UNDERFOOT
  74
  
  The power company owning the dam makes an effort to  keep the lake clear of floating snags, for this
  driftwood might be  carried past the protective booms at the dam, get into the turbines,  and cause trouble. For
  this clearing work, the concern maintains power  boats at various points. It was one of these which Doc and
  Johnny had  received permission to use. 
  The keys Doc had gotten at the powerhouse fitted the  padlock on the boathouse. The structure was unpainted,
  heavy, built on  a float which was in turn moored to piling, to take care of the rise  and fall of the water. The
  boathouse was reached by a narrow catwalk of  planks nailed to logs.
  The boat was a bit over thirty feet, a cabin  cruiser, not newly painted, but in good shape.
  Johnny switched on a flashlight. There were cobwebs  entwined back and forth across the boathouse and over
  the boat.
  "That’s a relief," Johnny said. "Nobody has been  around the boat for a few days. The spider webs prove that."
  Doc said nothing. They got aboard.
  "Tank’s full," Johnny remarked. "I’ll check her  over, then we’ll go."
  THE driver of their taxicab was using the hood of  his machine as a writing desk while he penciled a note:
  I’ve gone up the hill to pick blackberries.
  "That oughta do it if they come back," he chuckled. 
  He did not go up the hill. He went down it. And a  hundred yards put him on the bank of a creek full of water
  that was  green with depth. He scrambled down the bank.
  "I’d pipe out next time if I was you, palsy−walsy,"  a voice said apparently from a large bush. "You don’t
  know how near you  come to gettin’ a gob of lead."
  "You’d gotten a gob right back," said the other.  "Take me to Cadwiller Olden."
  The bush moved aside, becoming boughs laid carefully  over a small highspeed outboard racing shell to which
  was attached an  enormous outboard motor. The rig was probably good for better than  sixty miles an hour.
  "Chief," the taxi driver grunted. "Get me to ‘im." 
  The man produced two stubby canoe paddles, wrapped  with rags for two feet above the blades for silencing
  purposes. He was  not a particularly good paddler.
  "Take this," he directed, and handed the taxi driver  a straw hat, a casting rod and a creel.
  "Hell!" said the driver. "I can’t use one of these  things." 
  "Make a stab at it. We gotta look like fishermen." 
  They went across the lake trying to look like  fishermen. 
   REPEL
  Chapter 15. DEATH UNDERFOOT
  75
  
  "The chief’s in here," the boatman said and rowed  into a crack of a bay.
  The crack was about thirty feet wide, and the walls  almost as high. Twenty feet in, it seemed to terminate in a
  wall of  vines. That is, if one were a little distance out in the lake, it would  look like vines.
  The wall was really a curtain of green fresh stuff.  It hung from a rope stretched across the inlet. Rocks were
  tied along  the bottom of the curtain at intervals. If the supporting rope were  cut, the rocks would pull the
  curtain under the water immediately and  leave the way clear for the plane.
  The plane was not much more than a flying motor. A  big, grim pilot sat ready in the control cockpit.
  Cadwiller Olden was taking a constitutional up and  down the plane wing. His feet were sockless in dark−blue
  strap sandals  which showed his tiny toenails were painted. He wore dark−blue trousers  of some woolly stuff,
  a lighter blue checkered sport coat, a very  dark−blue sport shirt with extremely long points on the collars. His
  throat and head were bare. He wore a gold locket.
  He looked like a beautiful toy.
  "Well?" he demanded.
  "Doc Savage is headed for the boat," the taxi driver  said. "I worked it slick."
  "You were not suspected?" Cadwiller Olden demanded  anxiously.
  "Not me. I did my bit to make ‘em think the boat was  all right, too."
  Cadwiller Olden turned purple. He showed his teeth.  He had suddenly become a vicious little blue mink of a
  creature.
  "You incredible fool!" he snarled. "Don’t you  realize this Doc Savage is clever? How he managed to discover
  the  solution in the plane tank is incredible! I can’t understand how he did  it."
  The driver looked uneasy. "I can savvy it. I heard  him and that skinny guy with him talkin’. There was a
  gadget on the  instrument board that showed the specific gravity and any foreign  substance in the gasoline.
  The gasoline ran through a gadget on the  dashboard that had some litmus papers of different kinds in it and�"
  "I know how it would work!" the midget gritted.  "What did you say about that boat?"
  "I just asked ‘em if they needed a guy to go along  to run it for ‘em."
  "Idiot! Suppose they had taken you up?"
  The driver squirmed. "I figured they wouldn’t."
  "I almost wish they had!" Cadwiller Olden told him  furiously. "That boat had a torpedo type bomb fastened
  to the keel.  There is a small propeller on the nose of the bomb, and when the  forward motion of the boat
  causes this to turn over a certain number of  times, the device will explode."
  The driver, anxious to get the midget’s thoughts off  his own bad playing of his part, gulped, "But what if
  Savage gets wise  that the boat has been tampered with?"
   REPEL
  Chapter 15. DEATH UNDERFOOT
  76
  
  "He won’t," Cadwiller Olden said. "We got cobwebs  out of the woods and placed them carefully so that it
  would appear no  one had been in the boathouse for days."
  THE driver grinned widely. He was a politician of  sorts. He knew it always helped to cheer the gags which
  the boss  thought up.
  "Reckon they’ll hear the propeller on the bomb?" he  asked.
  "Not a chance. The motor of the boat will cover  that." 
  A muttering sound came across the water. 
  "They’ve started the boat’s motor," a voice called  softly. 
  Cadwiller Olden took a running jump off the plane  wing and made the shore. He had the agility of a monkey.
  The others  followed him.
  Several men were deployed along the bank, well  concealed in the brush. Their steel war−time helmets,
  automatic rifles,  gas masks, and chest bullet protectors made them resemble soldiers.
  "Ha!" said the taxi driver. "You’d think this Doc  Savage and his pal was an army."
  The look that came over Cadwiller Olden at that made  the driver wish he’d kept his mouth shut. One of the
  others noted it  also, and an instant later got the driver aside.
  "The chief is jittery, buddy," he said. "Better  watch your tongue."
  "You mean he’s scared of Savage?" the driver  whispered. 
  "Yeah, but don’t mention it to his face, if you want  to raise any grandchildren."
  The driver snorted. "I ain’t afraid of this bronze  guy."
  "That’s a sample of the reason why you’re not  runnin’ this outfit," said the other.
  The driver looked indignant. At least, he knew when  he had been called a dumb cluck.
  Cadwiller Olden had a pair of binoculars, tiny  glasses, but powerful, custom−made for himself,
  gold−trimmed. He  adjusted them on the boathouse.
  The structure was in the shadow of one bank of the  lake, and the sun was blindingly brilliant on the water,
  which made it  difficult to distinguish a great deal of detail. But the boathouse  doors were opening, it could be
  seen.
  "Sh−h−h!" 
  said Cadwiller Olden. "Don’t anybody move! This is the critical  minute. Savage will look around when he
  comes out of the boathouse." 
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  Chapter 15. DEATH UNDERFOOT
  77
  
  Every one froze.
  The sound of the boat’s motor got louder, then took  on a labored note, which indicated the clutch had been
  thrown in. The  boat came out, stern first. The bow cleared. The clutch went into  forward speed, and the
  propeller threw up a boil of water.
  "They aboard?" a man breathed.
  "Yes!" hissed Cadwiller Olden. "Sh−h−h!"
  The boat gathered speed. It scudded along close  under one bank. Its motor noise came thumping off the rocky
  bank with  the hollowness of a drum beat.
  Cadwiller Olden’s small lips moved. He seemed to be  counting. He got to fifty, and began to look expectant.
  He was not disappointed.
  There was a flash, hotter than the sunlight. The  lake split, the boat went up. It came to pieces in the air. The
  pieces  fell back. They were not very big pieces. The lake surged in to gobble  them.
  Crows and blackbirds and jays flew over the woods in  flocks, their startled outcries a plaintive bedlam.
  Cadwiller Olden strained his eyes through the  binoculars. He cursed, rubbed sweat off the lenses. His front
  teeth  began to show, ratlike, then slowly all of them. He suddenly hurled the  binoculars into the lake, jumped
  up and down and screeched gleefully.
  "Damned if we didn’t get ‘im at last!" he squawled.
  THE men stood around. They didn’t exactly look  happy. They were relieved of an enemy who had struck
  genuine terror  into the hearts of every one of them. But they had also just helped  kill one of the best known of
  living men, and that was something to  think about.
  Cadwiller Olden evidently knew how they felt. He ran  to the plane, leaped aboard, and came back with a
  gallon jug which had  evidently been filled at some Ozark hillman’s private distillery. The  men coughed and
  sputtered over the white mule.
  "Snap out of it!" Cadwiller Olden chortled. "Think  of the future!"
  "Yeah," muttered a man. "But between you and me, I’d  as soon have assassinated some one else."
  The midget master snorted.
  "We’ve got the Repel!" he reminded. "With that in  our hands, nobody can touch us! Battleships, planes, not a
  thing!"
  His men cheered a bit, heartened more by the  invisible wine of greed than by the liquid result of a mingling
  of  mash, heat and a copper worm.
  Cadwiller Olden began to give orders.
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  78
  
  "All but four of you will come�"
  He stopped. Some one was approaching. The state of  the men’s nerves was shown by the alacrity with which
  they sought  shelter behind trees and got their rifles ready.
  It was only more of the gang.
  Buddy Baldwin and his sister were with them, as well  as Snowball Eagan. The latter had changed his hair
  back to its normal  black color, and had taken the tape off his hand.
  "We heard the explosion!" Buddy Baldwin barked. "Did  it go off without a hitch?"
  "It did," Cadwiller Olden told him, with  satisfaction.
  Bess Baldwin said, "Well, he wasn’t invulnerable  after all."
  Cadwiller Olden looked at her intently.
  "You seemed to have had a crush on him. Aren’t you  sorry?"
  If the girl had any emotion, it did not show.
  "I did all my crying over spilled milk when I was a  baby," she said.
  Cadwiller Olden looked very pleased. Then he took up  the issuing of orders where he had been interrupted.
  "All but four of you will come with me," he said.  "We will get Repel out of the water. Our men have
  succeeded in putting  an alloy steel band around it so that the tragedy of Fan Coral Island  will not be
  duplicated."
  He designated four men who were not to accompany  this party.
  "You four," he said, "will go to the spot where Doc  Savage’s men are held. You will shoot them, tie rocks to
  them, and drop  them into the lake."
  The pilot of the plane was one of the four  designated for this task.
  "It’ll be a pleasure!" he gritted. "I’ll get the  silencer for my pistol out of the plane."
  He whirled, ran toward the plane.
  At best the most careful plan of mortal man is a  structure which leans on a prop that is held in place by a
  single pin.  Should this pin drop out, and it can be easily jarred, the whole  structure crashes to earth.
  This flier dislodged the pin. He jumped into a patch  of brush which any one would have expected him to go
  around. But the  man was in a hurry, or excited, or didn’t notice, and into the brush he  went. But not far.
  He stopped. His eyes popped. He cried out as if  eternity had cracked open and let him have a look at what
  future life  held for him.
  No words, that scream. Just a gargling bleat.
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  Chapter 15. DEATH UNDERFOOT
  79
  
  But Buddy Baldwin jumped forward and looked. He had  words.
  "Doc Savage!" he bawled.
  Chapter 16. CHOICE
  THE next instant Buddy Baldwin was flying head over  heels, unexpectedly wrapped up with gaunt Johnny’s
  incredibly bony arms  and legs.
  The pilot had fallen down in his fright. He was  tangled up with the brush.
  A man who had leaned his automatic rifle against a  tree sprang for it. The tree seemed, by some
  phantasmagoria, to turn  into a giant of bronze. Before the man’s brain quite accommodated the  fact that Doc
  Savage had whipped around the tree, something awful hit  him in the stomach, doubled him, and something
  more merciful on his jaw  put him to sleep.
  Before that fellow was on the ground, Doc had  reached a second man. That one had a revolver somewhere. In
  his  excitement he had forgotten just which pocket. He went out without  learning which one.
  Surprise evaporated. Three men dived in. Two were  barehanded, one had a knife. Doc watched the knife. The
  blades−man  lunged like a fencer. Doc went sidewise ten inches, crooked an elbow  akimbo. Knife and hand
  went between side and elbow.
  Doc tightened down. He pivoted. The arm got an extra  joint, and the sound was as if three glass marbles had
  been crushed  together in a palm.
  A fist hit Doc’s jaw. Another hit an ear. A man ran  and jumped against the small of his back with both feet.
  Doc went down.
  "Kill ‘em!" Cadwiller Olden squeaked.
  Buddy Baldwin got hold of Johnny’s string of a neck,  gritted, "That’s the very idea!"
  He tightened down. Immediately he got two long  fingers in his eyes. He snarled, let go, popped Johnny in the
  nose.  Johnny hit Baldwin’s Adam’s apple. The man gurgled and hacked and got  green.
  Baldwin tried to stamp on Johnny’s head. Johnny got  his leg, twisted. It was good jujutsu. Johnny had both
  legs ready when  Baldwin fell. He kicked the man into the top of a scrub oak tree.  Baldwin emitted panther
  howls as the branches gored him.
  "Kill ‘em!" Cadwiller Olden pleaded.
  Men were over Doc like hounds over a caught fox.  Arms and legs got into all positions. Every second or two
  somebody got  his clothes ripped. The fight moved about, literally a rolling ball of  men. Snowball Eagan was
  trying to get at Doc with another knife. He  stuck a pal by accident. The pal reached around, got a fistful of
  hair  and pulled it out before he saw who it was. Where the hair came out it  left a completely bald spot almost
  as large as a palm. It was an  excellent job of plucking.
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  "Your head must be rotten!" the hairpuller exploded.
  "I’ll rot you!" Snowball snarled, and shifted the  knife.
  A bronze hand came out of the mêlée and got  Snowball’s right ear. He was pulled into the pile. Then
  somebody tried  to stand on his face. A gun went off in the pile. It had a muffled  sound.
  Cadwiller Olden ran around and screamed, "Where are  those grenades? Where are those grenades?"
  Buddy Baldwin hit the ground under a tree and  groaned, "I should ‘a’ stayed on the farm!"
  He looked as if he were too dazed to know where he  was, much less what he should have done.
  WILLIAM HARPER LITTLEJOHN’S eminent associates of  his college professoring days would have been
  agog, at the very least,  to see their staid and big−word−using fellow tutor just now.
  Johnny was emitting an elephant−trumpeting noise,  racing about, striking and kicking. His long arms and
  fists made a  rock−on−a−string combination. Rarely did he have to hit a man a second  time.
  Johnny had been shot twice already. Once in chest,  once in stomach. The men didn’t seem to understand he
  had on a  bulletproof undergarment. At least, they didn’t shoot him in the face  or neck, where they would have
  gotten results.
  Johnny dropped a man, walked the length of him to  discourage his getting up, and ran to aid Doc.
  Doc needed aid then. A moment later he didn’t. A  remarkable sequence of events occurred. Snowball Eagan
  came flying out  of the pile of men. He had lost consciousness somehow. Then Doc got  upon his feet, by the
  simple expedient of grabbing a small tree trunk  and climbing up hand over hand.
  Men clung to him. Doc knocked one off. He got  another by the face with one hand and twisted. The victim
  was glad to  run backward out of the mêlée.
  Doc got a little higher. He kicked another man off.  His two knees came together, trap fashion, got a head. The
  tongue came  out of the head farther than it seemed possible. The owner got down on  hands and knees when
  he was released. Doc leaped away from the tree.
  Two men, calm souls who had kept their heads, stood  to one side with rifles, waiting for a clear target.
  Cadwiller Olden saw Doc Savage jump clear. The  midget made a whimpering noise and slashed his gaze
  over the ground all  around. There was no hole. Doc started toward him.
  Bess Baldwin ran forward with a rock and struck at  Doc’s head. It was a heavy enough rock to shatter a tub.
  Doc seemed not to see the girl.
  But he doubled, going almost to all fours. The girl  fell over his back. The weight of the rock carried her on
  over. She  smacked the ground hard.
  Both rifles banged. The bullets passed where Doc had  been.
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  Johnny saw the riflemen for the first time. He  dipped a bony hand in his clothing, brought out a fistful of
  metal  things the size of eggs, began doing something to them and slamming  them against the ground.
  They squirted out an unbelievable quantity of black  smoke.
  BY the count of fifteen, the woods for yards around  was gorged with cuttlefish black. The riflemen let fly a
  few bullets.  Then they turned and ran from the approaching smoke. They thought it  might be gas. The brush
  was thick, and the smoke caught them. It was  not gas.
  Men ran around in the smoke, cursing and swinging at  trees, bushes or other men�anything they touched.
  The smoke was the  blackest stuff they had ever seen. It had a queer odor, too. It smelled  like perfume. They
  thought it was some strange gas, and that didn’t  help their peace of mind. They dashed about more madly.
  They were not too busy to have been vastly surprised  had they been able to observe what Doc Savage and
  Johnny were doing.
  Doc was lying flat on the ground, where there was  less chance of being shot accidentally. He drew an
  aluminum case out of  a pocket. It was about the size of the cases used to carry the little  sports binoculars
  which are worn in the fashion of spectacles. In fact,  it was such a case.
  The goggles, highly complicated ocular−mechanical  gadgets, converted the invisible infra light into a visible
  form. Doc  put them on.
  The men were for the most part groping about  helplessly.
  The pilot of the plane was not in sight.
  Neither was Cadwiller Olden. But Olden’s voice rang  out an instant later.
  "Bat!" he yelled. "Bat!"
  "Over here, chief!" yelled "Bat."
  Bat was the flier. He was on the opposite side of  the smoke pall.
  "You out of that stuff?" the midget yelled.
  "Yeah. I ran for it."
  "Get to them men of Doc Savage’s! Get rid of them!  Shoot them!"
  "Right!" yelled Bat.
  Johnny had his goggles on by now. He got up, face  anxious, and started for the pilot, Bat.
  "Johnny!" Doc called.
  Johnny stopped. "Yes?"
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  "Get the midget!" Doc directed.
  Johnny whirled and leaped for the spot from which  Cadwiller Olden had yelled.
  Doc ran in the direction taken by the flier.
  Several bullets searched the spot from which Doc had  called shortly after he left.
  BAT, the flier, was losing no time. An agile  physical specimen, like all the sinister midget’s men, he was fast.
  Too, he had the good sense to make as little noise as possible, with  the result that Doc found it impossible to
  trail him by sound alone.
  The rest of the gang was making a great racket. Two  of them were fighting each other by mistake, both
  yelling bloody murder.
  Doc encountered thick brush. It delayed him. He  finally took to a tree, whipping aloft with smooth speed, and
  from the  top boughs saw Bat. The man was making for the plane, had almost  reached it. Doc had not
  expected that.
  The bronze man took long drops to the ground and  longer leaps for the plane. He heard a watery sighing, and
  knew the  concealing curtain of vines had gone down. The plane’s motor cleared  its exhaust stacks with a
  noisy backfire. The inertia starter moaned  again. The engine began turning over.
  Doc wrenched off the goggles. They were no great  help now that he was out of the smoke. The plane was
  moving, its  propellers driving a vast wind through the red oaks. It had to travel  only a few yards before it was
  clear out on the lake. Doc changed his  course.
  Blue of the lake appeared through the trees. Then  the gliding yellow of the plane wings. The craft moved fast.
  Even a  fish would hardly catch it in the water now.
  Taking the only chance, the bronze man kept his  speed. He did not have any more. He was using it all now.
  He reached  the brink of the rocky creek bank and went out into space.
  It was a prodigious leap, and he almost didn’t make  it. Doc’s leap fell short, but he had seen it would, and
  doubled  forward, arms bent and stiffened. His chest and arms smashed down on  the plane wing, and his
  metallic fists went through the fabric.
  THE plane builders had done a good job, and the  struts held. The man of bronze hung to the wing, although
  his feet  sloughed through the water.
  The pilot glared, but he could do nothing. He had to  fight to keep the plane from crashing. The craft roared
  out on the lake.
  The flier cut the gas, intending to let the plane  slow down while he finished the bronze man with a gun. Doc
  swung up on  the wing, started along it, doubled over. The pilot changed his mind  about slowing. He fed the
  big cylinders gas.
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  Fire, noise, came out of the stacks. The ship  rocked. Struggling, doing a good job, the flier held the wing up
  under  Doc’s weight. The bronze man had to drop prone to keep on the wing.
  He was clinging there when Bat got the ship off the  water.
  Bat knew his plane. The way he climbed it would have  tickled the designer. The laboring motor left a vague
  snake of smoke  behind.
  A slip, and a vertical bank, Bat tried next. Doc  managed to hold on. Bat looped, an inside loop. That was not
  as hard on  the bronze man. The centrifugal force helped.
  Bat got set for an outside loop. It was a deadly  instant. Doc could never have held on through the maneuver.
  But the  flier took a look at the torn fabric where the bronze man’s fists had  plunged through the wing�and
  changed his mind about going outside. More  of the fabric was tearing off.
  Bat stood up in the cockpit. He had a revolver, and  wore a confident look.
  Chapter 17. THE LOST REPEL
  DOC was set for that move. He had driven in the top  fabric of the plane wing and had his hand inside, a firm
  grip on the  control which ran to the aileron on the wingtip. He gave it a yank. As  a good plane should, the
  craft went over.
  Bat went back into the cockpit to fight the controls  again, too busy to do any shooting. Doc got his own wing
  down. Bat,  contrary, tried to get it up. Doc let him. Then the bronze man slid  down the wing to the fuselage.
  Out of habit, Bat had his eye on the bank indicator.  He didn’t see the bronze man’s maneuver. And when he
  missed Doc he  thought he had lost him overboard. He raised up, a happy expression on  his visage, to look
  down and watch his enemy hit the lake. The next  instant Doc was in the cockpit with him.
  The cockpit was not large enough for much action  with both of them in it. Bat concentrated on getting Doc
  out. He paid  no attention to his feet, and none at all to the control stick. The  stick got jammed forward. The
  rudder was at center. The throttle was  wide open.
  The plane went into its outside loop.
  When it pulled over at the bottom, the fabric  popped, came off the left wing like the skin off a banana. The
  plane  started for its end at three hundred, three fifty, then four hundred  miles an hour. And it did not have far
  to go.
  Bat, by that time, was in a condition where he had  only a hazy idea about what was happening. He had lost
  his gun to Doc  Savage. He was almost limp; his parachute pack, which he had not had  time to strap on, was
  screwed around over one ear.
  Doc got the parachute pack just before the roar of  air swept it overboard. He did not look out. Sound had told
  him what  had happened. He twisted into the ‘chute. The pack harness was tight.
  He held Bat with both arms and both legs and managed  to roll out of the cockpit. The tail assemblage
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  walloped them, then  they were clear.
  It is a fact surprising to a layman that a plane can  dive much faster than a human body will fall. The plane, its
  bad wing  giving it a twist, left them behind.
  Doc got hold of the ripcord and yanked. Bat screamed  when the pilot came out of the ‘chute pack. He would
  probably never  scream again like that as long as he lived, for he had revived enough  to be sure that the bronze
  giant would not be able to hold him.
  He was wrong.
  When they were swinging, with the shore of the  lake�they could land on earth or water, as they chose, by
  slipping air  from one side of the ‘chute�Doc reached up with his right hand and  grasped all Bat’s hair that the
  hand would accommodate. Bat wore his  hair conveniently long. Doc tested. Bat shrieked. The hair held.
  Doc tilted forward, swinging his legs and body back  where Bat could not grab them. Then he let the man
  hang, supporting him  by the fistful of hair. Bat’s scalp rose with rubbery elasticity, and  he screamed so hard
  in terror that his shrieks became only a snarl of  air out of his throat.
  "Quiet!" Doc said.
  Bat shut up. He probably couldn’t have told why.
  "The hair starts coming out after a while," Doc told  him grimly. "After about so much of it is gone, you are
  going to be  somewhat embarrassed."
  This was truth, except for the matter of time, which  Doc had no intention of mentioning. As strongly as Bat’s
  hair was  rooted, it would probably stay with him to a ripe age.
  But Bat had no brave ideas on the subject. He did  what any other normal rogue would have done.
  "Please!" he croaked. "I’ll do anything you say!"
  "WHERE are my four men?" Doc asked.
  Bat leveled an arm eagerly. "There!"
  The plane made a big splash in the lake. When the  water ran back there was not a vestige of the craft afloat. It
  was  almost a minute before oil came to the top.
  "There!" Bat croaked.
  The spot seemed to be a log cabin about a quarter of  a mile from the lake shore. As a protective caution
  against fires, a  clearing had been opened up around the cabin.
  Three men were standing in the clearing, ogling the  descending parachute. They had rifles, and were holding
  them as if they  wanted to shoot, but didn’t think the moment quite right.
  "My men are in that cabin?" Doc asked.
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  "They are!" Bat croaked.
  He wasn’t lying. No man would be likely to, in his  position.
  What happened next puzzled Bat vastly. He was hauled  up. Naturally, he grabbed the bronze man with all his
  strength. They  whirled around and around.
  Bat found a gun in his hand�his and the bronze man’s  hand, rather. The gun began to explode. It was Bat’s
  weapon, which Doc  had taken in the plane. It went off six times. It only held six  cartridges.
  Doc became as limp as death in the parachute  harness. His arms and legs hung down, dangling.
  "You’ve just shot me," the bronze man said. "And if  you act as if you haven’t, you are certainly going to wish
  you had  wings."
  They swung slowly downward, while Bat thought that  over, trying to figure it out.
  Doc’s eyes were open�the men around the cabin could  not see open eyes from that distance.
  The bronze man could see the spot where the Repel  lay. Only the water was not parted. Two boats, power
  cruisers, were  anchored at the spot, and divers were over the side. They seemed to be  hauling something to
  the surface.
  Two huge planes were anchored near by. They were  giant craft that could fly the seas.
  "Huh!" Bat exploded.
  He had figured it out. Doc had pulled a trick to  make the men around the cabin think that he, Bat, had shot the
  bronze  man.
  Bat was glad enough to let it go at that. He even  put the empty gun, which he still held, into Doc’s pocket,
  being very  careful that the act was not visible from the cabin.
  They landed painfully in a blackberry patch.
  THE men in the clearing at the cabin were in a  dilemma. 
  "Bat shot Savage!" one explained needlessly. "We  better go help him. He may be hurt."
  "Chief said stay here with them prisoners," another  warned.
  "But Bat�"
  "Hell with Bat!"
  They remained.
  Before long the men heard noise in the brush, and  remarked that here Bat came. But when the necessary
  amount of time had  elapsed, Bat did not walk out. Instead, there was silence. Then his  voice.
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  "A little help, you guys!"
  It was Bat’s voice, but queer and croaking, as if  something had happened to him.
  The men ran into the brush to help their comrade. 
  Doc Savage whipped into the clearing from the  opposite side. He had spent a good many hundreds of hours
  over the  course of life from childhood perfecting his command of voice imitation  and ventriloquism. He
  angled into the cabin.
  It had two rooms, one big, one small. The prisoners  were in the small room. Doc Savage stopped in the door,
  and instead of  looking joyful, he registered stark shock, disappointment.
  There were only two prisoners.
  Monk and Ham. Ropes bound them, sponges were taped  in their mouths, and each had a big rock tied to his
  feet. A rock that  would sink a body deep in the lake.
  Doc wrenched out the sponges. His cabled bronze  fingers went to work on the ropes, and the strands began to
  snap, those  that were not easily untied.
  "Where are the other two?" he asked quietly.
  "Renny and Long Tom?" Monk had been gagged so long  that his voice sounded queer. "They are at the other
  place."
  "What other place?"
  "I don’t know where it is," Monk groaned. "Judging  from the amount of flying the planes did to get here, the
  hide−out is  between two and three thousand miles away."
  "You are sure Renny and Long Tom are not here?"
  "Positive." Monk groaned. "They brought me and Ham  along in case they might need us for a dicker, or for
  bait. They kept  Renny and Long Tom in reserve." Then he added, as an afterthought: "Is  Habeas all right?"
  Doc assured both Ham and Monk that their respective  pets were at his headquarters building, being taken
  care of by one of  the elevator boys. Monk appeared greatly relieved. He was about to say  something else
  when Ham broke in with, "The guards are coming back!"
  THE guards stood outside and grumbled for a while.  The fact that they had not found Bat seemed to bother
  them, and to be  puzzling as well.
  Doc gave Monk and Ham time to windmill their arms  and do squatting exercise, then whispered, "Ready?"
  inquiringly.
  "Boy, am I!" Monk gritted in anticipation.
  Doc tensed his vocal cords and made Bat’s voice ring  through the house.
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  "Where in blazes are you guys?" Bat’s voice said.
  With profanity, and perfectly natural curiosity, the  men outside came charging in. They were not ready for
  anything, and the  odds were even, anyway. There was a great deal of noise for a very  brief period. And then it
  was all over.
  Monk and Ham found rope enough to tie their  prisoners. Doc went for Bat; he had left the flier, knocked
  unconscious, near a tree. When two of the captives came to, Monk made  an elaborate business of tying the
  big rocks to their feet, and so  ferocious was the homely chemist’s expression that the pair became  satisfyingly
  convinced they were to be consigned to the lake without  more ado.
  "You just can’t repress the beast in you, can you?"  Ham sneered at Monk.
  "Right now I’m gonna let the beast prowl," Monk  grinned. 
  Doc rapped, "There is a lot to do. Find Johnny. And  try to get that Repel away from them."
  "Have they got it?" Ham exploded.
  "By now, yes."
  The bronze man set a fast pace through the woods,  the other two having trouble keeping up until the stiffness
  shook out  of their joints.
  Droning of plane motors started out on the lake. Two  ships, but more than two motors. The big craft. They
  were coming down  the lake. Over their symphony, men shouted.
  "Listen," Doc requested.
  The group halted, listened�and heard Cadwiller  Olden’s small, piping yells. The sound set them off like a
  starting gun.
  Doc left Monk and Ham behind, and when they caught  up with him, the bronze man was poised on the shore
  of the lake. Monk  stared.
  "Of all the breaks!" he groaned.
  Many heads were in the water, far down the lake, and  well out, moving toward the planes, which had slowed.
  One head was  huge, bullet−shaped, and dark.
  "That’s the big dummy, Nero," Monk said. "He’s a  holy terror. Every man in the gang is afraid of him. They
  say he used  to be a cannibal, and ain’t reformed. He worships that little devil."
  The little devil was swimming abreast of the huge  creature who had no tongue. Buddy Baldwin and his sister
  were along.
  The planes picked them up, ignoring the bullets  which Monk and Ham were dropping around the craft with
  rifles which  they had picked up in the cabin. With a great bellowing of huge motors,  the ships took the air.
  One seemed much heavier than the other. It ran  almost a mile before it got off loggily.
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  "The Repel is aboard that ship," Doc Savage said  quietly.
  Not until the two big planes had gone some distance  did Doc speak again.
  "We had better find Johnny," he said.
  JOHNNY looked as if he had been through a great  deal. He still wore part of his pants, and one shoe. It
  would be months  before his bruises went away.
  He was guarding several prisoners.
  "It was that big black dummy," he said sheepishly.  "I caught Cadwiller Olden and was carrying him back
  when the dummy  jumped me."
  He stopped, and thought about what had happened.
  "I never saw anything like that mute," he said  finally, and shivered.
  Ham snapped, "What happened?"
  Johnny looked at the ground, the sky, and felt of  his hurts, and did not wince.
  "I’d like to lie about it," he said. "I ran."
  Ham had a sharp tongue. He opened his mouth to use  it. Then he must have thought of something,
  undoubtedly the giant black  fiend.
  "I’d have done the same thing," Ham said.
  Monk grinned, and for one of the rare times in his  life agreed with a statement which Ham had made.
  "Me, too," he said.
  Johnny, relieved and wanting to change the subject,  said, "It’s tough the nifty we pulled on them at the start
  of this  didn’t finish the whole thing up. You see, they had planted taxi  drivers in the little towns around here,
  and we hired one. Doc inquired  around town before we hired the driver, and learned he was a stranger.  So
  that gave us a hunch he was one of the gang."
  Johnny sighed.
  "We pretended to leave the driver and walk to the  boathouse," he said. "Then we ducked back, and watched
  the driver go  across the lake with another fellow, very furtively. We knew, then,  that he was one of the gang.
  So we went back and looked the boat over  very thoroughly.
  "Doc found the bomb under the hull. He backed the  boat out, headed it down the lake, and dived into the
  water through a  hole we had chopped in the hull on the side where they couldn’t see it.  When the boat blew
  up, we weren’t aboard."
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  The gaunt geologist shook his head. "We had a time  crossing that lake, swimming. I thought sure they’d see
  us, even if we  did run up to where it was narrower. But they didn’t, and we ran back,  and were nicely set to
  overhear them when we had bad luck and they  found us. That set off the fireworks."
  MONK had fallen to staring at Johnny. The homely  chemist’s mouth was wide open, a remarkable cavity.
  Doc Savage said quietly, "They got away with Repel."
  Ham started, and an expression of grimness came over  his features.
  "That is going to be bad," he said after a time.
  Doc nodded. "It is."
  Something in the bronze man’s tone, the seriousness  of it, made Johnny shiver involuntarily.
  "Maybe," he ventured hesitantly, "the heavily laden  plane will crash with it."
  Then, at homely Monk, who was still favoring him  with an agog stare, "What’s the matter with you?"
  "You," Monk breathed.
  "What’s the matter with me?"
  "You’re using small words!" Monk gasped wonderingly.  "You’ve finally turned human!"
  "A prepollency of eventuation," Johnny explained.
  "Aw, heck!" Monk said.
  Chapter 18. TERROR
  THE time�two weeks later. The place�the lofty  headquarters of Doc Savage in New York City. The state of
  the public’s  peace of mind�tranquil. The masses did not yet have a suspicion of what  was coming.
  Perhaps a score of men did know. They were  scientists, men from Europe as well as the United States. An
  eminent  aggregation, they had assembled hastily in New York at a call from a  man they all knew, Doc
  Savage.
  A number of them had been instrumental in fashioning  the remarkable individual which the man of bronze
  had become. They had  helped teach him, imparting their own knowledge until his trained brain  had absorbed
  all that they knew, and had gone on into the realms of new  research.
  They had just finished a number of days of intense  discussion, these men, and they had gathered in the
  skyscraper  reception room to report to the man who had asked their help.
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  A renowned specialist in electrochemistry as applied  to astronomy, from Vienna, served as spokesman.
  "In you alone hope lies," he said without  preliminary oratory. "You have studied with us, and we know the
  extent  of your ability and knowledge; or, rather, we know that it is beyond  ours. We appreciate the fact that
  you appealed to us, and are touched  by it, and warmed, for it shows that you have not become overconfident
  of your own ability, in spite of what we know to be true, that you are  infinitely more advanced than any of us,
  your old teachers."
  Doc remained expressionless, but kept his gaze on  the inlaid table. He was touched deeply, for these elderly
  men were  masters, scientists whose names and work would be known to posterity  for centuries. And they
  were men who did not�he would have been less  embarrassed if they did�use what in street lingo is
  designated as the  old "soft soap."
  "Then you believe there is no immediate protection  against Repel?" he asked.
  The spokesman shrugged. "Have we anything in science  that is not affected by gravity?"
  "No substance," Doc agreed.
  "Gravity is a force which draws substance toward the  earth," said the other. "As yet the nature of gravity is
  not definitely  settled by science."
  Doc nodded. "True."
  "The force thrown out by Repel is undoubtedly the  direct opposite of gravity," the elderly scientist continued.
  "It is a  force hitherto unknown to science. Instead of attracting, as does  gravity, Repel forces away."
  THERE was silence in the lofty room. Traffic noise  came faintly, from the street.
  "What the source of the force of Repel is, we do not  know," the scholar went on. "We designate the substance
  by the name  assigned to it by those unscrupulous men who now have it in their  possession. They call it Repel.
  That is as good a name as any.
  "Repel is, undoubtedly, some new substance. I,  personally, lean to the belief that it is a concentration of
  electrons,  or of the composites of electrons, so acting upon each other that the  hitherto known laws of
  electricity and force are unbalanced."
  "That is my own conclusion," Doc agreed quietly.
  The old scientist leaned back and seemed to delve  into his memory.
  "A theory was once advanced that gravity is the  pulling force of a deposit of some substance in the
  approximate center  of the earth," he said. "The scientist who advanced that idea was no  fool. He performed a
  great number of experiments which tended to prove  his theory."
  Doc said, "If my recollection is correct, the  scientist you mentioned ventured that concentrations of these
  electron  composites occurring in the universe had drawn, each one for itself,  the masses of atoms which go to
  make up the planets. In other words,  the sun, the moon and the stars exist because such concentrations
  occurred, and that accounts for the pull of gravity. On planets where  gravity is less, it is simply because there
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  is less of what we might  call the gravity metal."
  "Exactly. Repel might possibly be another such  substance, or element, having an effect exactly opposite of
  gravity,  forcing things away instead of drawing them."
  Another scientist spoke up.
  "It is my understanding as you explained it," he  told Doc, "that this Repel seemed to be encased in a shell of
  metallic  stone impervious to it?"
  "Exactly," Doc replied. "The case had cracked open  over a tiny strip, and the force was escaping through this
  crack.  Myself and my associate, Major Renwick, got close enough to observe  this crack. It was hardly wider
  than a pencil. Yet an incredible amount  of force was escaping. Imagine what this power, unbridled in
  unscrupulous hands, will do."
  The grave countenances of the listeners indicated  they had thought about that point.
  There was more discussion, growing more technical in  nature, but it all added up to the same thing. Repel had
  them baffled.
  Eventually they departed, to pool their knowledge in  study and experiments.
  "Any day," Doc warned them, "this fantastic midget  may start his work. And it will not be pleasant to
  witness."
  DOC SAVAGE, when the scientists had gone, started  for the laboratory where he himself was experimenting.
  Ham and Johnny  were in the library which lay between the reception room and the  laboratory. Monk had his
  homely face in a huge dictionary.
  "A propellency of eventuation," he muttered. "A  propellency�"
  "P−r−e−p−o−l−l−e−n−c−y," Johnny corrected  absentmindedly.
  "Huh?" Monk shuffled leaves. "Well, heck! Why  couldn’t you have just said, ‘the force of circumstances’?"
  Johnny looked up, puzzled. "When?"
  "When you tried to explain why you used little words  for once!"
  Doc paused at the mail desk. There were  approximately twenty cables, twice as many telegrams. He opened
  them.  Negative reports, all. No trace of Cadwiller Olden and his men�and  Renny and Long Tom.
  There was a telegram from the chief of a private  detective agency in St. Louis. A crooked dick who had
  furnished  Cadwiller Olden with the report of the presence of Repel in the Lake of  the Ozarks had been found.
  He was being spirited to New York, for Doc  to deal with himself.
  There was a report from Doc’s upstate "criminal  curing" institution, which said:
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  92
  
  THE RAW MATERIAL RECEIVED HAS GONE THROUGH THE  PROCESS OF MANUFACTURE
  VERY SATISFACTORILY
  The crooked detective from St. Louis would probably  go through the institution.
  Doc went on into the laboratory and began to work.
  It was not more than three or four minutes later  when the laboratory’s high windows darkened slowly, and the
  bronze man,  glancing out, noted black clouds crawling in from the sea.
  He stood at the window for a while. It was almost  like an omen, the coming of those clouds.
  And when he turned on the lights, he did it several  times, slowly and thoughtfully, switching them on and off.
  It was not often that he became so meditative.
  At almost the same time that the man of bronze was  meditating, trouble was occurring on Long Island Sound.
  Trouble the  bronze man had known would come. And when it came, it struck with a  force that was appalling.
  Chapter 19. THE COMING OF REPEL
  THE liner went aground on Montauk Point, Long  Island, On Monday. It was due to dock in New York that
  evening. A  horror−stricken, incoherent passenger appeared at a farmhouse with the  first word.
  Not as many had died as might have. The captain was  raving, unbalanced temporarily. But the first mate
  explained that the  ship had been shoved off her course by something invisible. She had  been carried along on
  a great tidal wave, and finally deposited, high  and dry, on the sandy, uninhabited marshland of outer Long
  Island.
  Then the men with the guns had come aboard. With the  fantastic guns. They were not shaped as ordinary
  guns, although they  had somewhat the shape. And they did not send bullets.
  The guns shot force! Men had been knocked  down, carried backward, thrown high into the air.
  The raiders had gone away, satisfied, with the two  million in earmarked gold in the strongroom.
  Doc Savage and his men were at the spot an hour  after the frightened passenger reached the telephone. There
  was not  much they could do but look�and pick up one idle remark that explained  a lot.
  "There wasn’t a thing in sight," explained the shaky  first mate, "except a little plane flying off on the seaward
  side."
  The bronze man’s little group conferred on the way  back to New York.
  "That’s the first," Monk said. "There’ll be plenty  more."
  "The plane carried the larger Repel ‘gun,’" Doc  decided aloud.
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  He was flying. He had secured a new speedplane, one  which carried more bombs and machine guns, and was
  faster than anything  he had ever designed.
  "Them guys used the stuff in guns of some kind,"  Monk muttered. "I savvy how they would do that. The
  trigger pulls a  gate open and lets the force out. But one thing buffaloes me."
  "What?" Doc queried.
  "Why ain’t there no recoil? For every force  operating in one direction there must be an equal and opposite
  force."
  "That," Doc explained, "is the accepted law of  forces. But Repel is force, or the source of force of a new  kind.
  That problem can best be answered with a question."
  "What question?"
  "Did you ever think of an equal and opposing force  for the force of gravity?"
  Monk sat and thought about that until the bronze man  put the plane down in front of the big hangar�it was
  disguised as a  warehouse�which he maintained on the Hudson water front, and which  connected with his
  skyscraper headquarters by an underground pneumatic  tube with cars in it which men could ride.
  "I’m getting a headache," Monk summarized his  thinking.
  THE Bank of the People was robbed the next morning,  just after opening for business. There was nothing to
  it�from the  robbers’ point of view. They simply drove up in a car and turned their  Repel cannon on the bank.
  Desks fell across the rooms. Tellers and customers  fell after them. One of the guards tried to walk around to
  the end of  the room and managed, unfortunately, to walk up near the ceiling. About  that time the bandits
  turned off the Repel. The guard fell and  fractured his skull, dying that same day.
  The raiders did not get much, comparatively. A  little under a hundred thousand.
  The Security was next, then the Universal Trust, the  Drivers and Workers, and the House of Goldberg.
  A police patrol car chased the bandits as they left  the House of Goldberg with forty−odd thousand dollars.
  But the car  suddenly stopped and began to fall backward up the street. It hit a  building with about the same
  force as if it had dropped from the top of  a skyscraper.
  Every banking house in the city closed down, locked  its money in the vaults, and stationed guards with
  machine guns.
  They could have saved themselves the effort. That  was the end of the bank robbing for the day.
  The raiders went to work on the jewelry stores. They  got four stores before the jewelry establishments all
  closed up.
  An armored truck, a department store, and the stock  vaults of a company which stamped gold watch cases
  followed.
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  The raiders were seen. Plenty of times. But their  cars were armored. Once they came to a barricade of
  sandbags which had  been placed conveniently across a street. The cops behind the barricade  thought they had
  them. Then the cops and their barricade fell almost a  quarter of a mile down the street.
  Doc Savage no longer went to the scenes of the  crimes. There were too many, and nothing to be
  accomplished, anyway.
  The bronze man went to the management of the  skyscraper in which he had his headquarters. He owned
  enough of the  concern’s assets to get what he wanted done. Attendants began to make  the rounds of the
  offices, and tenants started moving out.
  "We go, too," Doc told his aids.
  "But danged if I’m gonna let a little guy no bigger  than a peanut run me outta here!" Monk yelled.
  "Let the missing link stay," Ham suggested.
  Acting as if he did it because he never complied  with any of Ham’s suggestions, Monk left the building with
  them.
  The dirigible mooring mast on top of the skyscraper  fell off two hours later. The whole building leaned and
  groaned, and  blocks of masonry dropped�went sailing across town, rather.
  "I’ll be superamalgamated!" Johnny gulped.
  "Cadwiller Olden tried to destroy the building,  hoping we would be in it," Doc said. "The structure is
  probably the  strongest of its size in existence, or it would have gone down."
  Monk pointed. "There’s where the Repel came from!"
  He was indicating a plane. A large, fast craft, it  droned about, unafraid. Doc and the others watched it. They
  could hear  the plane’s motor.
  They noticed something abruptly. Monk remarked upon  it.
  "They’re signaling," he said.
  The others heard it. Three short bursts from the  plane’s motor. Then a longer one.
  Doc Savage said nothing. But, strangely, his small,  fantastic noise which he made in moments of mental
  stress, but which  the others had not heard in days, came into existence. It ran heartily  through its exotic scale
  which was definitely musical, yet without a  tune.
  The men stared, wondering what had caused the sound.  The bronze man did not explain.
  THE newspapers carried the next development on their  front pages.
  SURRENDER OF DOC SAVAGE
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  95
  
  DEMANDED BY REPEL MASTERS!
  MAYOR SAYS WILL REFUSE!
  All the journals had it. The letter had come to each  through the mail. Directions to Doc had been included:
  The man of bronze will understand the power of  Repel, and what it can do to the buildings in the large cities
  of the  United States if he refuses.
  Doc Savage will appear alone in an open power boat  in the Atlantic Ocean five miles south of Long Beach,
  Long Island, one  half hour before dusk to−night.
  When Savage surrenders, we guarantee to destroy no  more buildings and take no more lives.
  "They didn’t say anything about taking no more  money," Monk growled, reading this.
  "It’s ridiculous, of course!" Johnny snapped.
  They separated, a bit later, each to assigned tasks,  Monk to consult with military officials about planting
  antiaircraft  guns about the city, Ham to meet with the police officials to afford  what help he could, and
  Johnny to make a talk over a radio  network�using small words�to explain what Repel was, to allay the
  horror which the mystery of the thing had created. This talk was  supposed to decrease public fear. He
  doubted if it would.
  They were to meet in Monk’s penthouse laboratory  down near Wall Street, Doc with them.
  Doc Savage, however, did not appear.
  Chapter 20. SURRENDER
  THE small boat had one quality: It was fast. But the  designer had not put enough flare at the bow, with the
  result that  spray came aboard by the bucketful, and it was necessary to keep a  canvas cover over the motor.
  The boat had never been intended for the  open sea, anyway.
  Doc Savage was wet from head to foot, and because it  was more comfortable thus, had stripped to trousers.
  He consulted the  tachometer, and judged the location of the boat by the distance to the  hazy shore.
  He was about five miles off Long Beach, Long Island,  and it was about an hour until the time which the
  nautical almanac gave  as the sunset hour.
  He waited. The boat had no covering. His wet  trousers clung to him. All told, the most cursory glance would
  show  that he carried no weapon on his person or in the boat.
  Clouds were overhead.
  A plane came dropping out of them, motors idling. It  had the silence of a ghost. Not until it was less than five
  hundred  feet from the sea did the motors pick up, and the plane made a large,  cautious circle. The sea was
  clear. The plane came in for a landing.
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  It taxied close alongside. Men climbed out on its  wings. Buddy Baldwin was one of them. They looked into
  the boat and at  Doc Savage. Then they climbed back into the plane’s cabin.
  "You may have a big bomb under that boat!" Buddy  Baldwin yelled. "Jump overboard and swim to the
  plane!"
  Doc jumped overboard and swam. He reached the  plane, climbed aboard while scared men stood back from
  him behind  pistols. When they had overcome some of their fear they searched him.  They found nothing.
  "I can’t understand this," Cadwiller Olden said.
  He came out from the rear of the cabin, where he had  been concealed, watching. He scowled at Doc Savage,
  a tiny statuesque  figure, immaculately dressed as ever.
  "What’s the catch?" he demanded.
  "No catch," Doc said quietly.
  "You’re not kidding me!" the midget snarled. "You  didn’t give yourself up so quickly without a reason. I
  expected it to  take weeks!"
  "And many lives!" Doc added grimly. "Did it not  occur to you that it might be my desire to save as many
  lives as  possible?"
  "A lot of things occur to me!" Cadwiller Olden  grated.
  The little man said nothing more until the plane was  in the air. He stood back, and his big bodyguard, Nero,
  came and stood  behind him, eying Doc Savage with a strange, fierce intentness.
  Once, the bestial Nero made his strange croaking  noise and formed characters with his fingers. It must have
  been a  deaf−and−dumb sign language of his own, for Doc had never seen it  before.
  "He’ll tear you limb from limb, Nero," Cadwiller  Olden told the big dummy�not a dummy entirely,
  evidently, for he could  hear.
  Nero made savage motions with his fingers.
  Cadwiller Olden shrugged. "All right, Nero. You can  have him first, when we get ready. It will be something
  to watch, you  two together."
  Then the midget glared fiercely at the man of bronze.
  "I still think there’s a trick!" he barked. "Do you  want to see your two men whom I still hold before you die?"
  Doc Savage showed no expression. It was not exactly  easy; for this was the first time he had been sure that
  Renny and Long  Tom were still alive�if they were.
  "No," Doc said.
  "In that case," Cadwiller Olden leered, "I’ll let  them see you. They’ll get a kick out of watching you and Nero
  together."
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  Huge Nero made a crowlike sound.
  THE plane flew out over the Atlantic Ocean for some  hours and alighted alongside a rusty old steamer which
  had CABLE LAYER  emblazoned on its hull. The craft, which looked perfectly legitimate,  was anchored over
  the route taken by an ocean cable.
  A boom hoisted the plane aboard. The wings were  removed. They seemed to be of a quick demountable type.
  Big, special  hatches opened in the decks, and within twenty minutes the plane was  out of sight.
  Cadwiller Olden, Nero, and a dozen men with guns in  their hands escorted Doc Savage to the living quarters
  of the ship.  There was a large crew aboard.
  Bess Baldwin met them. She was made up, wore a  modish evening gown, and looked more entrancing than
  usual.
  "You have more lives than a cat," she told Doc  Savage quietly.
  The bronze man looked at her and seemed not to see  her.
  The midget chuckled.
  "We’ll get this over with as soon as possible," he  said. "Nero, what’ll it be? Knives?"
  The monster made croakings and finger movements. 
  "You’re a fool," Cadwiller Olden said. "But you can  take him on bare−handed, if you wish."
  Buddy Baldwin chuckled, then interposed, "Chief, if  I might make a suggestion. The boys would like this.
  Why not wait until  some of the planes get in? They had to fly a roundabout course in case  some one tried to
  follow them."
  Cadwiller Olden considered that. It seemed to please  him.
  "All right," he agreed.
  The men held Doc Savage in a cabin that was as  palatially furnished as anything the finest ocean liner had to
  offer�but for the fact that the furniture was all of tiny size, to fit  Cadwilier Olden.
  The midget himself seemed nervous. He walked up and  down, and frequently drew out the blade of his little
  sword cane to  inspect it. He held it where Doc Savage could get a glimpse of it.
  "An exact duplicate of the one carried by Brigadier  General Theodore Marley Brooks, is it not?" he asked.
  It was. Doc said so.
  The midget chuckled grimly. "If Nero is not the man  he thinks he is, I do think I shall try this out on you."
  Doc said nothing.
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  "There is one difference between this cane and  Ham’s," Cadwiller Olden remarked. "This one is coated with
  a  fer−de−lance extract that is usually pretty fatal."
  PLANES arrived, one at a time, and were hauled  aboard and stowed below decks. The amount of shouting in
  greeting was  about in proportion to the amount of loot each ship brought. It must  have been considerable.
  Cadwiller Olden reminded grimly, "Only the  beginning. Only the beginning."
  The midget was becoming more impatient, and when  some twenty minutes elapsed and no more planes came,
  he gave it up.
  "The fools should have made better time!" he  snapped. "Let them miss it. Get moving, you!"
  "Where?" Doc asked.
  "We are going below to get your two men."
  So his aids were still alive! The bronze man’s face  was a mask as he was led down a corridor, down a
  companionway, and  stopped deep in the hold before an iron door with a barred aperture.  Renny’s huge fists
  were fastened around the bars. He had bent them a  little, an incredible feat of strength.
  "You two will get shot at once if you make a false  move!" Cadwiller Olden warned.
  Renny and Long Tom came out when the door was  unlocked and opened. They were herded in the
  procession. They were  thin, haggard, but alive enough. They looked around, and the same  expression came
  over both their faces. They were ready to fight for it  now.
  "Take it easy," Doc said quietly. "These men are  armed, all of them."
  The procession went back the way it had come. On the  upper deck, the course veered to what was apparently
  the crew’s dining  room. Tables and chairs had been cleared out.
  Nero, huge and ugly, tramped closed behind Doc  Savage, as if hungry. Doc was not bound, had not been
  bound at any time.
  Buddy Baldwin was beside the men who had guns. He  lined them up, telling each exactly where to stand.
  They were in a  line, close together, not unlike a firing squad. There was no need of  men at the other end of
  the room. The door was barred.
  "You can cover the door from here," Buddy Baldwin  warned. "Stay right where you are."
  "Good work, Baldwin," Cadwiller Olden chuckled.
  Bess Baldwin stood near the door.
  "What are the rules?" she asked gayly.
  Doc Savage said, "I do not think there are any  rules," and turned and broke Nero’s jaw with his right fist.
  Simultaneously, Renny and Long Tom went into action.
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  Buddy Baldwin threw himself at one end of the men he  had lined up so carefully.
  Bess Baldwin turned off the lights.
  Chapter 21. THE END OF TRICKERY  TRAIL
  HAD lightning hit in the cabin at that instant,  results would hardly have been as satisfying. Nero fell down.
  The  rifleman whom Buddy Baldwin hit did likewise. And it was suddenly so  dark, foe could not tell foe.
  Doc reached the door an instant later. Men were  trying to come in. He got under them, upset some, trampled
  others.
  "This way!" he said sharply.
  He touched Bess Baldwin as she whipped past him.
  "Good work!" he said.
  Long Tom got out, then Buddy Baldwin. There was no  Renny, but there was a procession of loud reports
  such as big fists  might make.
  "Renny!" Doc rapped imperatively.
  "Holy cow!" Renny boomed, surging out the door. "I’d  kinda like to stay in there in the dark with them guys.
  I was sure  enjoying myself!"
  "Fists won’t do this job," Doc advised.
  The bronze man contacted one of the gang in the  darkness, found a gun, and ran down the passage. He used
  the weapon to  shoot out the lights farther on. They left plenty of excitement behind,  and it was spreading.
  "This way!" The bronze man made a turn. "The radio  shack!"
  The radio operator on duty heard them coming. But he  only saw Buddy Baldwin, and while he was
  demanding to know what was  wrong, Doc came up behind him, took his neck, and he never did learn  what
  was wrong.
  The radio installation was very good. Few liners had  its equal. Doc worked with knobs, switches. He put the
  carrier wave on  a certain wave length, switched to CW, and weighted the sending key  down. The set now
  sent a steady howl into the ether waves.
  A bullet or two came along the deck.
  "They’re coming closer," Long Tom announced.
  "We only have the ammunition in my gun and the one  sis has!" Buddy Baldwin groaned. "Savage, I thought
  you were going to  bring weapons with you when you came?"
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  Doc answered that with a question.
  "Where are the gold bars they took out of the vaults  of the Bank of the People?"
  "We can reach them," Baldwin grunted, "but I don’t  see what good gold bars will do us now."
  A flurry of lead arrived. Renny howled loudly, then  more softly, "Leg! Can walk!"
  "Show us those gold bars," Doc directed.
  They were not hard to locate. The loot was stacked  on the second deck, aft, in a bare room. There was a
  surprising  quantity of the stuff. The bullion was piled out, each bar separately,  where it made the best show.
  Most of the gold was marked with the sign  of the bank. Doc located the Bank of the People loot.
  He picked up a heavy bar, ran to the door, saw the  corridor was empty, and waited. A man appeared at the far
  end of the  hall. He saw Doc, lifted a rifle.
  The bronze man did something with pressure on three  sides of the heavy bar simultaneously. Then he threw it
  down the  corridor and jumped back.
  The rifleman’s bullet came into the gold room. It  was followed immediately by much of the corridor, in
  pieces of various  sizes.
  The noise was so loud that Doc and his group almost  stopped hearing things.
  THE others probably shouted, but Renny’s howling  voice alone had power to register on stunned eardrums.
  "Holy cow!" the big−fisted engineer bawled. "I’ve  heard gold was power, but that’s the first demonstration!"
  Doc, working swiftly, got the others over to the  side.
  "Going to open a hole in the hull," he explained.
  It was quite a hole the gold bar made in that part  of the ship. They picked themselves up.
  "But we never dreamed them wasn’t gold bars!" Buddy  Baldwin yelled.
  "They are carefully made," Doc told him. "The cases  are thick, and the explosive itself heavy."
  "When did you plant them?" Long Tom asked.
  "More than a week ago," Doc told him. "Almost every  large bank in the city substituted them for their
  bullion. It was just  a chance. Banks were logical game when the looting started. These bombs  are arranged to
  blow up after twenty−four hours, by themselves. That  was not my idea, incidentally, but the police insisted
  upon it. Come  on."
  The sea, black with night, squirmed below the  opening in the hull.
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  "Is the launch moored astern?" Doc asked. "The one  they use for a crash boat in case one of the planes has an
  accident in  landing?"
  "Yes," said Buddy Baldwin. "That seems to be my one  useful contribution thus far."
  "The information you have furnished me from time to  time while pretending to be a member of the gang still,
  has helped a  lot," Doc assured him. "Especially the plane signal, the three short  blasts and the long one from
  the plane motor over New York�the signal  agreed upon to indicate it was safe for me to become a hostage, in
  case  they tried that. The signal indicated they did not intend to kill me  immediately."
  Long Tom asked, "Can everybody swim?"
  Everybody apparently could, for they all jumped, Doc  pausing, however, to hurl another of the gold brick
  bombs down the  corridor. It fell through the floor, and exploded deep in the ship  somewhere.
  The excitement was enough to occupy the gang until  Doc and his party reached the launch. It was not large
  enough to be  welcomed joyfully as a vessel some hundreds of miles offshore. But it  was handy enough at the
  moment. Renny had a knife and cut the painter.
  They had drifted a hundred yards before bullets  started arriving. Buddy Baldwin started the motor. Those on
  the ship  turned a searchlight on them. The launch had a powerful searchlight of  its own for locating crashed
  planes at night, and they turned this back  at the ship. The shooting as a whole was not very effective. The
  bronze  man’s band would not have been hit, even if they had not all crowded  down behind the motor.
  "They’ll follow us!" Bess Baldwin cried.
  She was wrong, and they were all quite astounded  when they were not followed, and when they finally lost
  all trace of  the lights of the ship.
  Four hours later a plane could be heard overhead.  The pilot was flying low and giving a series of short signals
  by racing  his motor. Doc turned on the launch searchlight and blinked it. The  plane landed.
  Monk, Ham and Johnny were aboard.
  "I sent them a note at Monk’s laboratory," Doc  explained. "They were to get the plane and fly to the first
  steady CW  radio signal using the direction finder."
  MONK, Ham and Johnny cleared up the puzzle of the  ship which had not followed the escaping prisoners.
  "Blazes, didn’t you know?" Monk yelled. "The hooker  sank. They sent out an S O S."
  "That last bomb you threw," Buddy Baldwin told Doc.
  Renny emitted a rumble.
  "I don’t believe it," he decided. "It’s some trick."
  He came nearer believing it the next morning, when  they saw the floating wreckage and picked up a few men
  who were  clinging to it.
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  Cadwiller Olden, the terribly remarkable little man,  had gone silently to his roomful of doll furniture, they
  said, and no  one had seen him thereafter. Undoubtedly he had perished with Nero, his  huge bodyguard.
  Monk pondered for several days before he figured  something out.
  "I’ve got it," he did say finally. "Cadwiller Olden  was a psychological case. He was so small he got sensitive
  as heck  about it, so he got himself all fired up with the idea of becoming a  very big shot over ordinary−sized
  people. He took the quickest way of  getting power: robbery. It turned out to be the worst."
  "It usually does," Buddy Baldwin agreed thoughtfully.
  Doc and his party got some of the Repel, but the  larger quantity had gone down with the ship. From what
  they did  get�from the Repel weapons of men they captured, largely�Doc Savage  learned a great deal.
  His theory as to its nature, and that of the other  scientists, had been approximately correct, as nearly as he
  could tell.
  Doc never was sure�because Repel lost its strength!  It simply dissipated itself, gave up its force, and was
  through in the  course of time.
  The criminals who had been rescued from a watery  grave were consigned to Doc’s unique "college" for
  remaking. Monk and  Ham took them up, and evidently had a roughhouse on the way back,  judging from their
  appearance.
  They refused to discuss the newest difference, but  it was noted that Monk dated up entrancing Bess Baldwin
  that evening,  and Ham did not try to cut in, which was unusual for Ham. They had  evidently settled that on
  the way back.
  Monk thus got around to asking the young lady  something that had been bothering him. Bess herself broke
  the ice.
  "When I think that myself and my brother belonged to  that gang I am utterly horrified," she said earnestly.
  Monk was no diplomat.
  "Listen, when did you get around to changing your  mind?" he asked.
  "Didn’t you know?" Bess Baldwin showed surprise.  "When Doc Savage got us the first time, he put myself
  and my brother  through his college."
  "Oh!" said Monk.
  The "Oh!" explained a lot. It had suddenly come to  Monk that the "escape" of the Baldwins from Doc Savage
  had been a piece  of clever faking.
  THE END
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SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Vault2.0.-.Fiction-and-audiobooks/Books/R/Robeson, Kenneth/056 Repel.pdf