THE PHANTOM MO-GWEI
The low stone room, in which Doc Savage and his men stood, was lighted by a crude, chimneyless copper lamp. During the first thumping uproar of shots, Doc extinguished the lamp with a wave of his hand that stirred a breeze.
Ham and the others started a simultaneous charge for the door.
“Wait!” Doc’s powerful voice commanded.
“But the girl——”
“It may be a trick. Long Tom, stand by your radio!”
Obediently, the electrical expert found his apparatus in the darkness, switched the circuit on, and clamped the receivers to his ears.
Doc Savage did not quit the house immediately. Instead, he whipped to the chamber which held his own equipment. Using a flashlight which played a white, cordlike beam, he extracted several devices from boxes and bags, and stowed them within his garments.
He did not depart by door or window. Leaping upward, he accomplished the extremely difficult feat of grasping a ceiling beam with one hand and clinging to it, while his corded, metallic fist drove a series of terrific blows against the roof. Sun-baked mud and rocks were loosened. Doc opened an aperture large enough to pass his mighty frame. Enemies might be watching the doors.
Gliding lightly across the rooftop, Doc came to the edge and dropped to the rutted dirt street. From many parts of the village, excited howls came. Men had been aroused by the shots. Being of a fighting race not at all loath to join a fray for the pure love of a scrap, they popped into the streets with weapons in hand.
From among these sounds, Doc picked certain significant scufflings and low commands. He advanced, making no more noise than the darkness itself.
He distinguished several men. All were Tibetans. They were fellows whom Doc had never glimpsed before; this he realized when he was very close to them.
Shrops and Mo-Gwei were not among them.
Three of them held Rae Stanley. Another had thrust a wad of felt, torn from a mumdah, between the young woman’s jaws, and was industriously tying it in place.
Beside them stood a coffin-shaped wooden box. The lid of this was open, apparently to receive the girl.
Rae kicked at them, tried to strike them with her fists.
An evil-faced Tibetan bounced around with the girl’s revolver. It was evidently this weapon which had been fired, for two of the men were nursing minor bullet wounds.
“Kwi sheeay!” hissed the man with the gun. “Hurry up!”
Rae Stanley managed to spit out the gag by flailing her head.
“Help!” she screamed.
The shriek rang in Doc’s ears, conveying genuine horror. It told him what he had been waiting to ascertain—this was not play acting.
“Mao!” grated the Asiatic with the gun. “Cat!” He prepared to knock the young woman senseless.
Instead of bringing the gun against the girl’s temple, however, the Asiatic’s arm was all but jerked from his body as a corded bronze hand seized it. The gun flew away, clattering against a stone house.
The man shrieked. The other Tibetans howled and sprang into the fray. They dropped Rae Stanley to have their hands free.
“Doc Savage!” the young woman gasped.
She leaped erect and closed with the nearest Tibetan, swinging her fists and kicking.
* * * *
The Tibetans had nerve, and they piled into the combat with the greatest of confidence. Doc was one man against several.
“This will be simple!” howled a brown man.
Doc’s fingers drifted out and seemed barely to flick the fellow’s cheek. An astounding thing happened. Lids closed over the man’s glittering eyes. His jaw sagged. He seemed to go to sleep on his feet.
He fell over slowly, and crashed his full length on the ground.
An instant later, Doc’s finger tips touched the skin of another Tibetan, and that individual also gave an excellent imitation of going to sleep in the midst of the fight.
A third moon-faced villain met an identical fate.
Confidence seeped out of the yelling Tibetans, and horrified surprise took its place. The manner in which their fellows dropped at the bronze man’s mere touch, smacked of black magic.
Only two of the gang were now on their feet. This pair sought to flee. But they might have been sluggish yak calves striving to escape a mountain leopard. Doc was upon them instantly.
One Tibetan collapsed from the fantastic magic in Doc’s touch.
A great bronze beam of an arm gathered in the second runner. The fellow screeched and struck, but the blows only bruised his knuckles on the metallic man’s muscles. His yelling became one long peal of terror. He felt as if he were imprisoned in a nest of steel girders.
“Dang hsin!” he screamed. “Be careful! You will crush my bones!”
“Ease the pressure with many words, rapidly spoken,” Doc advised in the flowery native tongue.
“What kind of words?” wailed the prisoner.
“Words giving the name of your master and his whereabouts,” Doc directed.
Pretty Rae Stanley came close.
“That’s it—make him talk!” she gasped. “He’s one of Mo-Gwei’s men. He may be able to lead us to Mo-Gwei!”
The Tibetan apparently did not fancy the idea of telling tales on his sinister master, Mo-Gwei. He threw back his head and voiced one of the most ear-splitting screams Doc had ever heard.
That sound covered the oncoming of disaster. Through it, even Doc’s super-sensitive ears failed to detect the approach of a man.
A rifle barrel levered downward in the darkness. It struck Doc’s head, and the bronze giant dropped his captive and sagged prone.
* * * *
Fully a dozen other Tibetans charged out of the night. They bristled with guns. Two of them grasped the girl and held her tightly.
The fellow who had struck Doc raised his rifle for a second blow.
“Listen to his skull burst!” he grated, and struck.
His rifle barrel struck the hard ground, for Doc was magically not there when it fell. The barrel broke free of the stock, with a crunching of rending mechanism and splintering wood.
The Tibetan moaned, probably more from grief over the mishap to his rifle than regret because Doc had escaped. Rifles were scarce and costly in Tibet.
“Chung feng!” he bellowed. “Charge! Seize the bronze devil!”
That, however, proved an impossible deed. Doc Savage, mighty man of bronze, had obviously been but slightly stunned by the rifle blow. He had drifted like a bat into the surrounding night.
“Pursue him not,” commanded the straw boss of the gang. “We have the fair flower, which is all we were ordered to get.”
Rae Stanley was now gagged, dumped in the coffin of a box, and the lid fastened. Four men shouldered the receptacle.
Other men lifted the thugs who had succumbed to Doc’s fantastic touch. From their grunted opinions of their comrades’ ability, it was apparent that all belonged to the same gang. The late arrivals had been posted in the background.
“One would think you were worms in a chicken coop,” growled the leader.
“The bronze man has devil-magic in his hands,” groaned the man whom Doc had started to question.
Indeed, this man was the only one of the first party to seize the young woman who was now conscious.
“How did he overcome you, O inefficient one?”
“I do not know,” replied the other. “At his touch, my companions went to sleep.”
“Kwai hsie!” snapped the man in charge. “Hurry up! Let us remove ourselves from this accursed spot!”
The party hurried off, bearing the coffin-box holding the girl, and carrying their unconscious and injured fellows.
* * * *
A Tibetan citizen thrust his head out of a door and yelled a p’al-skad equivalent of “What’s going on here?”
His answer was a shot. But the curious one held his ground. He carried a gun, a monstrosity of a thing with a hewed stock and a crude, octagonal-bored barrel. This weapon was accompanied by a pitchforklike supporting stick.
The Tibetan dispensed with the rest. Planting his weapon against the side of a door, he struck a match and applied it to a bit of tinder which protruded from a small breech hole—in the fashion of ancient cannons. There was time enough between the application of the flame and the explosion to permit taking an aim.
The blunderbuss filled the street full of smoke and deafening noise. The bullet, a hand-hammered lump of lead, missed its target at least fifty feet.
The men bearing the coffin-shaped box swore their best p’al-skad oaths.
“We are followers of Mo-Gwei!” howled their chief.
At this, the fellow with the portable cannon whirled and fled, terrified. Mere mention of the name of Mo-Gwei had been sufficient to puncture his balloon of courage. As he ran, he bellowed the alarm.
“Men of Mo-Gwei, the devil-faced one!” he broadcast. “They number a thousand! And the blue meteor is coming!”
This last was stark exaggeration, induced by the fellow’s fear of Mo-Gwei.
Such was the awe in which the mysterious master of the blue meteor was held, that Tibetans disappeared from the streets. Crannies and doorways seemed to absorb them in the fashion that drought-ridden earth soaks up the first drops of rain.
The Mo-Gwei henchmen advanced rapidly, making for the edge of the settlement.
“It is well,” said the man in charge. “We shall leave the village without difficulty. Then we will hurry with the fair flower to Mo-Gwei, master of masters, who wears the mask of Bron, the half-king of hell.”
Jolting about in the coffinlike box, Rae Stanley wondered why Doc was making no attempt to rescue her. She did not believe the bronze man had been wounded. And after the terrific effort which Doc had made at freeing her, it did not seem reasonable that he would give up.
Suddenly, her heart leaped.
To her ears came a note like a gigantic bullfiddle. The sound—one short roar—was deafening. Men screeched. Rae sustained minor bruises as her prison box was dropped from the bearers’ shoulders.
Three Tibetans were down. They were not moving; but a close observer might have noted that their breath was coming freely.
They were victims of the mercy bullets with which Doc’s men had charged their small, super-firing machine pistols. It was these weapons which had made the bullfiddle roarings.
Monk came charging out of the night. Disdaining the use of his rapid-firer, he clutched with hairy hands for a foe.
“An ape!” bawled the prospective victim. He managed to evade Monk and fled, calling upon his ancestors to forgive his numerous sins.
Monk veered left and collared another man. He lifted the fellow without apparent difficulty, and slammed him among his companions.
Renny, monster fists sledging tremendous blows, bounded in from the side. Ham trailed him, his sword cane unsheathed and making sounds not unlike a plucked banjo string.
Johnny, an animated skeleton, and Long Tom, his pale face a gray blur in the night, trailed into the scrap. Their guns emitted deafening hoots, and more Tibetans caved down.
The attack was too sudden, too violent, for the men of Mo-Gwei. They retreated wildly.
* * * *
Monk and the others followed the frightened Tibetans. The tiny machine guns continued to moan. But, strangely enough, all of the shots seemed to miss.
No more Tibetans were dropping.
The unearthly roaring of the weapons, a sound totally new to the ears of the round-faced Asiatics, brought great fear, however. They raced down a gloomy alley of a street, intent on getting away from the fearsome little guns.
After covering a hundred yards, their leader awakened to the fact that they had slightly outdistanced the pursuit.
“Lih ding!” he barked. “Halt! We dare not run away in this fashion. Mo-Gwei’s hand falls heavily upon cowards!”
The others came to a stop. Now that the first surprise was over, they realized they feared Mo-Gwei more than the amazing guns wielded by Doc’s aides. They unlimbered their own pistols and rifles and opened fire.
Powder flame flushed the street a gory red. Sounds of the shots rolled over the town and came bouncing back from the near-by hills in chains of echoes.
Doc’s aides returned only scattering shots. None of the bullets hit human targets. The rapid-firers did not blast out their appalling noise.
“They have exhausted the ammunition for their strange guns!” shouted a Tibetan. “Charge them before they can reload!”
The stocky men rushed, firing recklessly. Resistance melted away magically in front of them.
“They flee!” howled a moon-faced man delightedly.
“They are dogs who lose courage after one loud bark!” screeched another.
It was noticeable, however, that the men of Mo-Gwei refrained from pursuing Doc’s five aides, whose retreat was so surprising, considering their fierce attack.
The Tibetans ran to the coffinlike box. The ropes were still about it. One man started to undo these, intending to learn if their captive was still inside.
Shoving his comrade aside, another fellow grasped the end of the box and lifted. He grunted under the weight.
“It is heavy; hence the fair flower is still within,” he stated.
The men shouldered the coffin box, gathered up the victims of conflict—they numbered quite a few by now—and quitted the confines of Tonyi in great haste.
* * * *
“This one’s small wisdom fails to fathom why our unworthy attackers fled so hastily,” puzzled a Tibetan when the last house was left behind.
“Cowards have white skins, occasionally,” he was reminded.
They mounted a narrow, rutted road. The going here was difficult, and there was much complaining about the weight of the unconscious men.
“What manner of magic brought senselessness at the bronze man’s touch?” muttered a man.
“That is truly a mystery,” said another. “They seem only to sleep, yet they cannot be awakened.”
“Stuff thy mouths with mumdah felt!” snapped the leader. “Such an act would bring on silence, which is much to be desired.”
After this, there was a general conserving of breath for the climb. They came at last to a thicket of larch trees.
Here waited an arabas. Upon this cumbersome two-wheeled cart, the coffin-shaped box was lashed. Clambering upon the wheels, which were nearly six feet high, the Tibetans piled their strangely unconscious comrades atop the case.
The arabas was drawn by five horses—three at the wheel and two in tandem.
A Tibetan loaded the bloused upper portion of his robe with small rocks, then mounted the arabas. The vehicle set off at a great pace, the charioteer employing his supply of rocks to keep his five horses in fast motion.
Here in the open country, there was ample moonlight to disclose the trail.
The driver glanced frequently at his sleeping cohorts.
“Strange, this sleep which has gripped them,” he mumbled.