The Man of Bronze (5 page)

He was short, but perfectly formed, with a smooth yellow skin, and a seeming plumpness that probably meant great muscular development. His nose was curving, slightly hooked, his lips full, his chin not particularly large. A man of a strange race.

The ends of his fingers were dyed a brilliant scarlet.

Doc did not reveal himself at once, but watched curiously.

The stocky, golden-skinned man seemed very puzzled, as indeed he had reason to be, for what he sought was not there. He muttered disgustedly in some strange clucking language.

Doc, when he heard the words, held back even longer. He was astounded. He had never expected to hear a man speaking that language as though it were his native tongue. For it was the lingo of a lost civilization!

The stocky man showed signs of giving up his search. He lit one more match, putting his box away as though he didn’t intend to ignite more. Then he stiffened.

Into the soaking night had permeated a low, mellow, trilling sound like the song of some exotic bird. It seemed to emanate from underfoot, overhead, to the sides, everywhere—and nowhere. The stocky man was bewildered. The sound was startling, but not awesome.

Doc was telling his men to beware. There might be more of the enemy about than this one fellow.

The stocky man half turned, searching the darkness. He took a step toward a big, double-barreled elephant rifle that leaned against a pile of scrap wood near him. It was of huge caliber, that rifle, fitted with telescopic sights. The man’s hand started to close over the gun. And Doc had him! Doc’s leap was more expert even than the lunge of a jungle prowler, for the victim gave not even a single bleat before he was pinned, helpless in arms that banded him like steel, and a hand that cut off his wind as though his throat had been poured full of lead.

SWIFTLY, the others came up. They had found no one else about.

“I’d be glad to hold him for you!” Monk suggested hopefully to Doc. His furry fingers opened and shut.

Doc shook his head and released the prisoner. The man instantly started to run. But Doc’s hand, floating out with incredible speed, stopped the man with a snap that made his teeth pop together like clapped hands.

“Why did you shoot at us?” Doc demanded in English.

The stocky man spewed clucking gutturals, highly excited.

Doc looked swiftly aside, at Johnny.

The gaunt archaeologist, who knew a great deal about ancient races, was scratching his head with thick fingers. He took off the glasses with the magnifying lens on the left side, then nervously put them back on again.

“It’s incredible!” he muttered. “The language that fellow speaks—I think it is ancient Mayan. The lingo of the tribe that built the great pyramids at Chichen Itza, then vanished. I probably know as much about that language as anybody on earth. Wait a minute, and I’ll think of a few words.”

But Doc was not waiting. To the squat man, he spoke in ancient Mayan! Slowly, halting, having difficulty with the syllables, it was true, but he spoke understandably.

And the squat man, more excited than ever, spouted more gutturals.

Doc asked a question.

The man made a stubborn answer.

“He won’t talk,” Doc complained. “All he will say is a lot of stuff about having to kill me to save his people from something he calls the Red Death!”

A
STOUNDED silence gripped the group.

“You mean!” Johnny muttered, blinking through his glasses, “You mean this fellow really speaks the tongue of ancient Maya?”

Doc nodded. “He sure does.”

“It’s fantastic!” Johnny grumbled. “Those people vanished hundreds of years ago. At least, all those that comprised the highest civilization did. A few ignorant peons were probably left. Even those survive to this day. But as for the higher-class Mayan”—he made a gesture of something disappearing—“
Poof!
Nobody knows for sure what became of them.”

“They were a wonderful people,” Doc said thoughtfully. “They had a civilization that probably surpassed ancient Egypt.”

“Ask him why he paints his fingers red?” Monk requested, unfazed by talk of lost civilizations.

Doc put the query in the tongue-flapping Mayan tongue. The stocky man gave a surly answer. “He says he’s one of the warrior sect,” Doc translated. “Only members of the warrior sect sport red finger tips.”

“Well, I’ll be dag-gone!” Monk snorted.

“He won’t talk any more,” Doc advised. Then he added grimly: “We’ll take him down to the office, and see if he won’t change his mind?”

Searching the prisoner, Doc dug up a remarkable knife. It had a blade of obsidian, a darksome, glasslike volcanic rock, and the edge rivaled a razor in cutting qualities. The handle was simply a leather thong wrapped around and around the upper end of the obsidian shaft.

This knife Doc appropriated. He picked up the prisoner’s double-barreled elephant rifle. The marvelous weapon was manufactured by the Webley & Scott firm, of England.

Monk eagerly took charge of the captive, booting him ungently out to the street and to their taxi.

Swishing downtown through the rain, Doc, speaking through the taxi window, tried again to persuade the stocky prisoner to talk.

The fellow disclosed only one fact—and Doc had already guessed that.

“He says he’s really a Mayan!” Doc translated for the others.

“Tell him I’ll pull his ears off an’ feed ‘em to him if he don’t come clean!” Monk suggested.

Doc, anxious himself to note the effect of torture threats on the Mayan, repeated Monk’s remarks.

The Mayan shrugged, clucked in his native tongue.

“He says,” Doc explained, “that the trees in his country are full of them like you, only smaller. He means monkeys.”

Ham let out a howl of laughter at that, and Monk subsided.

RAIN was threshing down less vigorously when they pulled up before the gleaming office building that spiked up nearly a hundred stories. Entering, they rode the elevator to the eighty-sixth floor.

The Mayan again refused to talk.

“If we just had some truth serum!” suggested Long Tom, running pale fingers through his blond, Nordic hair.

Renny held up a monster fist. “This is all the truth serum we need! I’ll show you how it works!”

Big, with sloping mountains of gristle for shoulders, and long kegs of bone and tendon for arms, Renny slid over to the library door. His fist came up.

Wham!
Completely through the stout panel Renny’s fist pistoned. it seemed more than bone and tendon could stand. But when Renny drew his knuckles Out of the wreckage and blew off the splinters, they were unmarked.

Renny, having demonstrated what he could do, came back and towered threateningly over their captive.

“Talk to him in that gobble he calls a language, Doc! Tell him he’s in for the same thing that door got if he don’t tell us whether your father was murdered, and if he was, who did it. And we want to know why he tried to shoot us.”

The prisoner only sat in stoical silence. He was scared—but determined to suffer any violence rather than talk.

“Wait, Renny,” Doc suggested. “Let’s try something more subtle.”

“For instance?” Renny inquired.

“Hypnotism,” said Doc. “If this man is of a savage race, his mind is probably susceptible to hypnotic influence. It’s no secret that many savages hypnotize themselves to such an extent that they think they see their pagan gods come and talk to them.”

Positioned directly before the stocky Mayan, Doc began to exert the power of his amazing golden eyes. They seemed to turn into shifting, gleaning piles of the flaked yellow metal, holding the prisoner’s gaze inexorably, exerting a compelling, authoritative influence.

For a minute the squat Mayan was quiet, except for his bulging eyes. He swayed a little in his chair. Then, with a piercing yell in his native tongue, the prisoner lunged backward out of his chair.

The Mayan’s plunge carried him toward Renny. But the big-fisted giant had been watching Doc so intently he must have been a little hypnotized himself. He was slow breaking the spell. Reaching for the Mayan, he missed.

Straight to the window, the squat Mayan sped. A wild jump, and he shot head-first through it—to his death!

AWED silence was in the room for a while.

“He realized he was going to be made to talk,” Ham clipped, whipping his waspish frame over to the window to look callously down. “So he killed himself.”

“Wonder what can be behind all this!” Long Tom puzzled, absently inspecting his unhealthy-looking features as reflected by the polished table top.

“Let’s see if the message my father left written on the window won’t help,” Doc suggested.

They followed Doc to the library in a group. “Important papers back of the red brick,” read the message in invisible ink which could only be detected by ultraviolet light. They were all curious to know where the papers were, anxious to see that they were intact. Above all, they wanted to know the nature of these “important papers.”

Doc had the box which manufactured ultraviolet rays, under his arm. On into the laboratory, he led the cavalcade.

Every one noticed instantly that the laboratory floor was of brick, with a rubber matting scattered here and there.

Monk looked like he understood, then his jaw fell. “Huh!”

The floor bricks were
all
red!

Doc plugged the ultraviolet apparatus into a light socket. He switched off the laboratory lights. Deliberately, he played the black-light rays across the brick floor. The darkness was intense.

And suddenly one brick was shining with an unholy red luminance. The brick was the lid of a secret little cavity in the floor, and the elder Savage had treated it with some substance that had the property of glowing red under the black-light beams.

From the secret cavity, Doc lifted a packet of papers wrapped securely in an oilskin cloth that looked like a fragment of slicker. Ham clicked on the lights. They gathered around, eagerly waiting.

Doc opened the papers. They were very official looking, replete with gaudy seals. And they were printed in Spanish.

One at a time, as he finished glancing over them, Doc passed the papers to Ham. The astute lawyer studied them with great interest. At last Doc was completely through the papers. He looked at Ham.

“These papers are a concession from the government of Hidalgo,” Ham declared. “They give to you several hundred square miles of land in Hidalgo, providing you pay the government of Hidalgo one hundred thousand dollars yearly and one fifth of everything you remove from this land. And the concession holds for a period of ninety-nine years.”

Doc nodded. “Notice something else, Ham! Those papers are made out to me.
Me
, mind you! Yet they were executed twenty years ago. I was only a kid then.”

“You know what I think?” Ham demanded.

“Same thing I do, I’ll bet!” Doc replied. “These papers are the title to the legacy my father left me. The legacy is something he discovered twenty years ago.”

“But what is the legacy?” Monk wanted to know. Doc shrugged. “I haven’t the slightest idea, brothers. But you can bet it’s something well worth while. My father was never mixed up in piker deals. I have heard him treat a million-dollar transaction as casually as though he were buying a cigar.”

Pausing, Doc looked steadily at each of his men in turn. The flaky gold of his eyes shimmered strange lights. He seemed to read the thoughts of each.

“I’m going after this heritage my father left,” he said at length. “I don’t need to ask—you fellows are with me!”

“And how!” grinned Renny. And the others echoed his sentiment.

PLANTING the papers securely in a chamois money belt about his powerful waist, Doc walked back into the library, thence into the other room.

“Did the Mayan race hang out in Hidalgo?” Renny asked abruptly, eying his enormous fist.

Johnny, fiddling with his glasses that had the magnifying lens, took it upon himself to answer.

“The Mayans were scattered over a large part of Central America,” he said. “But the Itzans, the clan whose dialect our late prisoner spoke, were situated in Yucatan during the height of their civilization. However, the republic of Hidalgo is not far away, being situated among the rugged mountains farther inland.”

“I’m betting this Mayan and Doc’s heritage are tied up somewhere,” declared Long Tom, the electrical wizard.

Doc stood facing the window. With his back to the light, his strong bronze face was not sharply outlined except when he turned slightly to the right or left to speak. Then the light play seemed to accentuate its remarkable qualities of character.

“The thing for us to do now is corner the man who was giving the Mayan orders,” he said slowly.

“Huh—you think there’s more of your enemies?” Renny demanded.

“The Mayan showed no signs of understanding the English language,” Doc elaborated. “Whoever left the warning in this room wrote it in English, and was educated enough to understand the ultraviolet apparatus. That man was in the building when the shot was fired, because the elevator operator said no one came in between the time we left and got back. Yes, brothers, I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet.”

Doc went over to the double-barreled elephant rifle which had been in possession of the Mayan. He inspected the manufacturer’s number. He grasped the telephone.

“Get me the firearms manufacturing firm of Webley & Scott, Birmingham, England.” he told the phone operator “Yes, of course—England! Where the Prince of Wales lives.”

To his friends, Doc explained: “Perhaps the firm that made the rifle will know to whom they sold it.”

“Somebody will cuss over in England when he’s called out of bed by long-distance phone from America,” Renny chuckled.

“You forget the five hours’ time difference,” clipped waspish Ham. “It is now early morning in England! They’ll just be getting up.”

Doc was facing the window again, apparently lost in thought. Actually, while standing there a moment before, he had felt vaguely that something was out of place about the window.

Then he got it! The mortar at one end of the granite slab which formed the window sill was fresher than on the other side. The strip of mortar was no wider than a pencil mark, yet Doc noticed it. He leaned out the window.