THE TRICK
Sunset found Monk still groaning. Now, however, his laments had to do with yaks in general, and their riding qualities in particular.
“I’ve traveled in lots of ways,” he howled, “but this takes the cake by a long stretch. Such a gait!”
Monk evidently meant the peculiar manner in which a yak in motion seems to trot with its front legs and amble with the rear legs.
The fact that attractive Rae Stanley had shown a marked preference for Ham’s company through the entire afternoon, did not tend to soothe Monk’s temper.
Rae now glanced about.
High mountains jutted up about them. These were absolutely bare of vegetation, and an uninviting brownish-red in hue, not unlike the peaks of Arizona.
“That’s strange,” she remarked. “Or maybe it’s not strange, either.”
“What are you talking about?” Ham asked her.
“My father listened to all the legends he could dig up concerning the blue meteor,” the young woman replied. “The general consensus seemed to be that the meteor struck in mountains such as these.”
“We’ve been going steadily northward,” Ham agreed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we were in the region where the infernal thing hit.”
Ham might have been surprised, however, had he known that they were now in the vicinity of the pueblolike village to which Doc Savage had been carried in the coffin-shaped box.
Doc had told no one of the existence of the Village of the Mad Ones. In fact, he had spoken no word concerning his encounter with Mo-Gwei, or with Professor Elmont Stanley.
They were still on the trail of Shrops and Saturday Loo. The sticky chemical, of course, had long since worn off the shoes of those they followed. But it was a simple matter for Doc to follow a trail such as was being made by Shrops and his party.
Doc Savage was ranging ahead of the others, picking out the trail.
They were not heading directly for the Village of the Mad Ones, but circling around it.
Doc appeared suddenly in the twilight. He approached Monk.
“How about playing bait in a little trap?” he asked, his voice so low that none of the others heard it.
“Huh?” Monk grunted.
“It’s dangerous,” Doc said frankly.
“Count on me!” Monk grinned. “What d’you want me to do?”
“Just drop behind the party,” Doc told him. “And don’t take chances. By that, I mean don’t do anything reckless.”
“You know me,” Monk chuckled.
“Sure,” Doc told him dryly. “That’s why I’m warning you not to get reckless.”
Doc now moved forward until he came alongside Long Tom, the electrical wizard.
“Can you keep tuned in steadily on your portable radio receiver?” Doc queried.
“Easily,” Long Tom replied.
By way of demonstration, he removed his bulky fur cap—they were all wearing Tibetan garb, which was best fitted to these high altitudes—and donned a radio headset. The outfit was compact, and he was able to draw his fur cap on over it.
Long Tom switched on the receiving side of the portable outfit.
“All set,” he advised Doc.
Doc Savage nodded. He visited other members of the party, but the words which he addressed to them had only to do with their comfort.
A few minutes later, the bronze man went on ahead, and the oncoming night swallowed him.
* * * *
“Ridin’ this yak is like sittin’ on a hump of hair!” Monk complained.
Monk was referring to the manner in which yaks walk with heads held low, making it seem to the rider that his steed has no head.
“Giddap!” grunted Monk, and booted his yak in the ribs.
The yak promptly came to a complete stop.
Monk had known the animal would do this, having learned something of yak temperament during the afternoon ride. The creatures balked when tired or angry.
The rest of the caravan drew ahead, mounting a small hill.
There was a sly delight on Monk’s pleasantly ugly features. Doc had said there would be danger, and when the bronze man mentioned danger, he usually meant extreme peril. Monk, however, was unworried. This was the sort of thing he thrived upon.
He was quite happy, although not possessed of the slightest idea of what was due to happen.
Getting off his yak, he made a show of trying to get it in motion. A rope was tied to a ring in the animal’s nose. Monk pulled on this. The yak’s nose stretched, rubberlike, a surprising distance.
“I’ll walk,” Monk growled, and threw down the rope.
The remainder of the cavalcade had topped the hill and become lost to sight. Monk strode after them. Looking around within a few seconds, however, he saw his balky yak following closely after him.
“The life of adventure!” he complained, and went back to have another try at riding the Tibetan version of a charger.
He snapped to an abrupt halt. Two squat, tobacco-colored men had appeared, one on either side of the trail. They held efficient automatic rifles, and these were trained on Monk.
“Silence is a food on which men thrive—under certain conditions,” one murmured softly.
Monk understood the long-winded command for silence, and the gentle tones did not fool him. He elevated his furry hands.
The stocky fellows stepped close and removed Monk’s weapons in a cautious manner, as if he were some ferocious beast which they were afraid of prodding into activity.
Monk recognized them. They were some of the swart gentry who had seized himself and Ham in South America, weeks before.
“Shrops’s gang!” he grunted.
“Silence, big monkey!” ordered a rifleman.
“Shrops left you two behind to watch the trail, huh?” Monk ruminated.
One of the rifles cocked with a distinct click.
Monk hastily subsided, remembering Doc’s admonition to avoid recklessness. Doc, of course, had foreseen this, had guessed exactly what would happen.
One of the dark men smirked.
“We talked the situation over, out there among the rocks,” he said. “We have decided to take you to the all-wise Shrops.”
“He’ll be the all-to-pieces Shrops, if I ever get my hands on ’im!” Monk promised.
Inwardly, the hirsute chemist was elated. He understood now how Doc had forseen this. Doc’s sharp gaze had detected these guards left behind by Shrops, and the bronze man had overheard their decision to take any prisoners, they might catch, to Shrops, alive.
“It is to be regretted that we could not capture more than one of you,” said one of the two captors. “You see, to secure your release, Doc Savage will have to eliminate the most-awful Mo-Gwei.”
“Doc will wring your necks!” Monk growled.
“To cook a chicken, it is first necessary to catch it,” chuckled the Asiatic. “Ni chü bà! Be off! Walk ahead of us.”
Monk complied with the command, making an effort to seem worried.
Doc, he realized, was somewhere out there in the darkness. The bronze man would follow Monk and his captors to Shrops and Saturday Loo.
Monk could hear Renny’s deep voice rumbling beyond the hilltop as he moved off the trail. Distance made the cavernous tones unintelligible.
* * * *
Renny was saying, “It looks like things are starting to happen at last.”
Attractive Rae Stanley, who had failed to notice anything peculiar in recent developments, turned her head.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Long Tom, the electrical magician, held up a hand in the murk.
“Quiet, please,” he requested.
For some moments, he listened intently to what was coming over the portable radio.
“Shrops’s men have seized Monk,” he announced. “Doc is trailing them, believing he will be led to Shrops.”
“Oh!” gasped Rae Stanley.
The young woman was astounded that so much had taken place almost under her nose, without catching her notice.
“Was Monk hurt?” Ham demanded.
The anxiety in the carefully dressed lawyer’s voice was in marked contrast to the tone which he used to address Monk when they were face to face.
“Monk is O. K.,” Long Tom replied.
“But how are you learning all of that?” Rae Stanley asked.
“Doc has a portable radio transmitter and receiver with him,” the pallid electrical expert told her.
“But I didn’t notice it!”
“Did you notice this one?” Long Tom asked, and threw open his robe. Secured to a webbing belt which encircled his chest were three compact, flat cases.
“No—I hadn’t noticed!” said Rae, surprised.
“Transmitter, receiver and current supply,” Long Tom told her, indicating each of the dimunitive containers in succession. “Doc’s outfit is like this. They’re not efficient over any great distance, but they serve us to keep in contact with each other.”
“What’re we to do?” Renny boomed.
“Doc says leave the trail and head due west,” Long Tom announced. “That’s the direction Monk’s captors are taking.”
The party hastily followed this suggestion.
Night had descended in its entirety, and a brilliant moon and diamond-fleck stars had alleviated the murk somewhat. It was not going to be a bad night for traveling.
The group moved slowly, letting the sure-footed yaks pick their way.
“I hope poor Monk makes it all right!” Ham groaned.
* * * *
Monk, at the moment, was hardly as worried as Ham over his prospects. He was keeping up a conversation which seemed rambling and inane, but which was actually calculated to draw morsels of information from his unwelcome hosts.
“You fellows are pretty smart,” he said flatteringly. “I’ll bet some of you managed to get yourselves hired by Professor Elmont Stanley when he made up his caravan to go in search of the blue meteor.”
Monk, who did not know that Doc had located Professor Stanley, was trying to learn the whereabouts of the meteor expert.
“We have never seen Professor Stanley,” replied one of the brown men in answer to Monk’s query.
“Huh?” Monk ejaculated.
“At no time have we seen him.”
“But I thought you guys had him a prisoner?”
Both of the homely chemist’s captors laughed harshly.
“All wise men know that dangers which exist only in thought are as terrible as those which exist in reality,” one of the pair explained long-windedly. “We fooled the girl.”
“You mean Shrops lied to her about having her dad?”
“Thy small brain has grasped the truth, hairy one.”
Monk ignored this insult while he considered what he had learned.
“Is Mo-Gwei holding Professor Stanley?” the chemist demanded.
The Tibetans did not answer immediately.
“We know not,” they replied at last. “But there are rumors of a hairless white man of great learning who has surrendered his brain to the blue meteor.”
“That would be Stanley!” Monk shuddered. “You say the blue meteor has got him? Do you mean that Mo-Gwei has been usin’ Stanley as a subject for experiments?”
“The information you wish is not in our brains,” answered the other.
“You don’t know, eh? For the love of mud! Weren’t you members of Mo-Gwei’s gang before you sided in with Shrops and Saturday Loo?”
“Mo-Gwei’s men know not their master, nor do they know much of his movements, or affairs.”
“Did you guys have much trouble makin’ off with a piece of the blue meteor?”
“We were clever,” said the Tibetan proudly. “We escaped with the blue meteor and with the cure for its effects, before we were discovered.”
Monk made his voice elaborately casual. The pair were talking much more freely than he had expected. He had visions of learning exactly what the hideous blue meteor was.
“Is it heavy to carry, this blue meteor?” he asked.
“Men do not carry it,” retorted the dark man. “It is hauled upon yaks, except at times, when it——”
“Would thou like to lose thy tongue, fool?” snarled the other captor. “This hairy one is sucking information from you as a yak calf draws sustenance from its mother.”
Monk learned no more.
* * * *
They worked down into a deep canyon and crossed a rapidly-running stream. A peculiar point about the rivulet was the fact that anchor ice had formed on the bottom, although the water itself was moving too fast to freeze.
Wading the stream was a slippery process. They climbed on upward.
Monk kept his ears attuned in an effort to catch some sound which would indicate Doc Savage was trailing them. He heard absolutely nothing. Contrarily enough, this did not worry Monk. He knew Doc’s ability. Indeed, had he heard any sound, he would have reflected that Doc must be slipping.
“Lih ding!” rapped a voice. “Halt!”
Monk’s captors came to a stop.
“Would thou shake down the mountains with thy voice?” growled one of the pair. “Not so loud!”
Men materialized out of the darkness. Some of these Monk recollected having seen in Antofagasta, Chile. Others were strangers. But obviously all were Shrops’s men.
“We have a hairy morsel for the all-wise Shrops,” said one of Monk’s captors, giving the furry chemist a prod with a rifle barrel.
“Let us hope it soothes his temper,” muttered a sentry.
“Is he not at peace with himself?”
“He is in a great rage.”
“Why?”
“Saturday Loo has disappeared.”
Monk, listening to this with great interest, put in, “Saturday Loo probably went over to Mo-Gwei’s side.”
A moon-faced thug promptly kicked Monk in the middle. The kick, thanks probably to long practice at booting yaks, was hard and painful.
Monk lost his temper. With a backslap of a huge, hirsute paw, he knocked the kicker head over heels.
A man lunged in, swinging a rifle. With a bewildering speed, Monk grasped the weapon, twisted it from the man, and dropped the former owner with a swing of the barrel.
To Monk’s ears came a low sound. It was a note which seemed strangely to fit the bleak, towering mountain surroundings with their bitter cold and snow and ice.
It might have been some chill wind from the fastnesses of the Himalayas, that sound. It was a low trilling which drifted lazily up and down the musical scale, then slowly sank into complete nothingness.
Monk recognized it as the sound of Doc Savage. He stopped struggling. The trilling meant Doc was warning him not to get himself killed.
“What was that?” asked a Tibetan in a quavering voice.
“A wind, O fool,” grunted a comrade. “Come! Let us take this hairy one to the all-wise Shrops.”