THE WHITE-HAIRED GIRL
Doc studied the sword. The edge was thin, hollow ground like a razor. Back of the cutting edge were grooves resembling the corrugations in a file. These held the poison.
“What do you want with the submarine?” he asked.
“That, bronze man, is our affair!”
Doc had expected some such answer. “If I refuse to take you to it, what then?”
The man tapped the sword. “This! You will die suddenly!”
“That does not leave me much choice,” Doc said dryly. “Shall I drive you to the boathouse? It is not far.”
“We will walk, saiyid! We do not know the city, and you might drive us to a station of the police.”
They got out of the limousine. One man slapped hands over Doc’s clothing, fingering pocket contents through the cloth. When he found nothing large enough to be a weapon, he seemed satisfied.
“Imshi!” he grunted. “Go on!”
They strode westward toward the Hudson River water front, setting a leisurely pace which would not attract attention.
In the gloomy street where the holdup had occurred, there was at no time a sign of the man who had given the Arabs their orders—the chap hidden in the box. He had kept under cover.
They walked through a section of garment shops, the streets almost deserted. The way sloped downward. The asphalt had been rutted by wheels of heavy trucks, and rain residue lay like pools of molten lead in the chug-holes.
Body smells of the four Arabs reeked faintly. They were in need of a bath. Here, where the way was darker, the shabby streets empty of life, they kept their long-barreled pistols in hand.
“Wallah!” hissed one of the four. “Is it much farther?”
“Not much.” Doc pointed. “There!” A row of covered piers was before them. The buildings might have been gigantic match boxes, with slightly arched tops. Here and there was a wharf which was not covered.
Down the wide water-front street, a sign on the front of a pier warehouse read:
HIDALGO TRADING CO.
Perhaps two hundred feet nearer was an uncovered pier crowded with crates, moving cranes, and tool sheds.
Doc made directly for this pier. They entered the litter of boxes and machinery, worked outward through an alley between high stacks of oil drums. The floor planks were very greasy, oil-soaked.
It was very dark. The men found it impossible to see each other. Two guns were kept pressed to Doc’s back.
Quickening his pace slightly, Doc drew away from the muzzles.
“Imshi ’ala mah!” gritted a man. “Go more slowly!”
An instant later, the guns again shoved against cloth.
“Go on!” grunted an Arab, when there was no movement.
No answer.
The man cursed, dug a match out, and whipped it alight on his trousers.
“Wallah!” he wailed.
Instead of Doc’s back, their guns were gouging a burlap-covered bale of rope.
* * * *
The four brown men cackled Arabic profanity in chorus.
“Son of a dumb camel!” snarled one who had brought up the rear. “You let him trick you! He slipped away in the darkness! There is no submarine here—e-e-o-oww!”
His words turned into the squawl of a cat with its tail under a chair rocker.
There had been no perceptible sound, but bronze hands had suddenly trapped the speaker’s elbows from behind. The Arab’s yell rose to a piping bleat of agony; he felt as if he had lost his arms at the elbows. Pain caused his hands to splay open. His gun bounced across the oil-saturated wharf planks.
He felt a terrific wrench at his back. Cloth tore; leather straps snapped. The poisoned sword came away from his spine, sheath and all.
The man was lifted, hurled forward. He was not flung head first, but sidewise. He struck two of his companions. All three piled against the baled rope.
The swarthy fellow with the match jumped aside. The movement extinguished his match. He flourished his pistol, but did not shoot. He was not too excited to realize the shot sound would draw the police. Wildly, he clutched for his sword.
Great steel jaws seemed to clamp his ankles. He was lifted as lightly as if he had been a rabbit. He swung head downward. His whole body was carried up and down with a tamping motion, causing his head to bang the solid planks. He became limp as a punctured inner tube.
The trio piled against the rope bale untangled themselves and sought to arise. Then the blackness above them seemed to rain huge bronze fists. Metallic fingers touched various parts of their persons, seeking nerve centers, leaving numb paralysis and excruciating hurt.
“Mercy of Allah!” a man croaked. “He is not human!”
The three found themselves without pistols. With rippings and snappings, the swords were torn from place. The weapons sailed away to drop into the near-by river.
One sought to flee, plunging blindly through the stacked boxes and machinery. He covered a score of yards, and began to entertain visions of safety. Then he was snatched up. A great arm banded his chest, tightened.
Air went out of the Arab’s lungs with a sound as of water pouring from an upset bucket. His ribs ground together.
“O Allah, I am dying!” he gurgled.
He was mistaken. His ribs did not break, although one or two cracked. Doc Savage, possessing a profound knowledge of human anatomy, knew about how much pressure they would stand.
Doc carried his victim back to the other three. The one who had been dropped on his head was flippering his hands nervelessly with returning consciousness. The remaining two were too dazed for flight.
Roughly, Doc slammed them against the mound of rope bales. Then he waited for them to recover.
* * * *
At first, the quartet showed more fight. Doc drove out bronze hands, open, and cuffed them back. The men shrank against the rope, shivering. They squirmed on the greasy boards.
They peered at the metallic giant as if he were some incredible Titan from another existence. They numbered four, and they were fighting men. Yet their best efforts had seemed puny, childlike. He was something new in their experience, this big man of bronze.
Doc produced a tiny flashlight. He gave the lense a twist, causing the beam to widen to a fat funnel, and placed it on the wharf boards. The glow sprayed over the four prisoners, and back-splashed on Doc himself.
The Arabs continued to stare at Doc. One by one, their gaze rested upon his strange golden eyes—stayed there.
“Wallah!” one repeated his earlier declaration. “He is not human!”
Doc did not change expression. His lips did not move. He was waiting, knowing that the more the men thought of the recent fight, the more frightened they would become.
Abruptly, the surrounding night seemed to give birth to an eerie sound. The note was trilling, mellow, low, like the song of some strange jungle bird, or the noise of wind filtering through a naked, cold jungle forest. It was melodious, but rose and fell without tune. It was not a whistle, and neither did it seem a product of vocal cords.
The swarthy men squirmed and rolled their glances over the adjacent darkness. It seemed to come from everywhere, that sound. They looked at Doc, at his motionless lips, at the sinews that were like alloy steel bars on his neck.
Probably not one of the four realized Doc was making the weird note. They had no way of knowing that the sound was part of this mighty bronze man—a small, unconscious thing which he did in moments of utter concentration. It came when Doc was thinking, or when danger threatened; sometimes it precoursed a plan of sudden action. Just now, it meant merely that the bronze man was pondering what possible motive the Arabs could have for wanting the under-the-polar-ice submarine.
Noting the fright which his tiny, unconscious trilling sound had caused, Doc decided to make his questioning as ghostly and fantastic as possible. These men, superstitious by nature, would be unusually susceptible to that sort of thing.
A hollow, unearthly voice, apparently coming from the darkness overhead, demanded: “Why do you seek the submarine?”
The four brown fellows gave tremendous starts. They shrank back; their eyes popped. It was evident they had never before encountered ventriloquism—at least, never the voice-throwing art handled with the uncanny facility which Doc possessed.
They did not answer the question.
“What use do you intend to make of the underseas boat?” the voice repeated.
The swarthy quartet still made no reply. But their fear grew. Watching them closely, Doc became quite certain he could scare them into talking freely, given a little time. Like most barbaric people, they were easily terrified by something they did not understand.
The questioning, however, came to a sudden end.
There was a singular e-e-eek! of a noise. A vicious, brief combination of squeak and whistle. The ripping sound of it was almost against Doc’s left ear.
A round hole—it might have been made by a bullet—opened in the rope bale before his eyes.
The bronze man whipped backward out of the flash glow. The best of gun silencers permitted some noise, he knew. There had been no such sound behind him. Yet the missile which had embedded in the rope had come with the velocity of a rifle slug.
His strange golden eyes roved alertly. He was puzzled. The mysterious weapon which had hurled that missile was something new in his experience.
* * * *
E-e-eek! The short, ugly bleat was well to the right this time. It was the sound of some sort of slug passing through the air. The thing glanced off a lifting crane with a loud clang, and moaned away in the night, not unlike a ricocheting bullet.
“Wallah!” gulped an Arab. They scrambled to their feet. Elation was on their faces.
Doc Savage threw his voice at a bulking crate some yards away, ordering: “Ihda! Be quiet!”
The dark-skinned quartet sank back to crouching positions. Simultaneously, another of the bizarre projectiles squeaked past, and sank deep into the big crate. It had been directed at Doc’s voice.
Gliding backward, Doc encountered more neatly stacked oil drums. He climbed silently atop them. There was a feline stealth and quiet about his movements. He even put his weight only on the rims of the barrels, lest the metal heads boom, drum fashion, under his great weight.
He worked almost to the other side of the wharf, then veered shoreward. Over ropes, big-linked chain, shipping crates, machinery, he made almost no sound. A bystander a few feet away would have been ignorant of his passage.
Not having heard the bronze giant depart, the four Arabs crouched immobile, afraid to flee.
Near the shore end of the wharf, Doc paused briefly to listen. His hearing was in keeping with his other remarkable faculties—his aural organs had been developed from childhood by a system of intensive exercise, part of a two-hour routine which he took daily.
Keen as his hearing was, he had detected no sound to show from whence the mystery missiles had come. But they must have emanated from this vicinity.
He caught movement. The scrape of cloth against rusty iron. He whipped silently for the sound, gliding over the greasy wood.
Out at the river end of the wharf, there were grunts, curses, and the rattle of running feet. The four Arabs had gotten up nerve enough to take flight.
At that noise, the skulker in front of Doc stirred about, then headed shoreward. The grease squished softly under feet.
Doc lunged. His metallic hands, sensitive for all of their indurate strength, encountered cloth. They gathered in great fistfuls of the fabric and the yielding flesh beneath.
There was a gasp, a low bleat. A fist pecked twice at Doc’s face. The tensile cushions of his cheek muscles absorbed the blows. Releasing his grip and clutching again with incredible speed, he captured his victim’s hands. They were weaponless.
There was a telltale slenderness about the hands.
Doc moved to the right, where the beam of a distant street light glanced through the piled merchandise. Remaining in the shadows himself, he shoved his captive out into the dingy glow.
* * * *
He had rather expected what he saw. But the amazing beauty and exotic appearance of the girl all but caused him to loosen his grip. The slenderness of her hands had betrayed her sex.
She had white hair—the whitest hair Doc had ever seen upon a human being. It was unshorn, slightly wavy, a dazzling wealth of it like loose snow.
She came almost to Doc’s shoulder, which made her very tall for a woman. Her features were regular, magnificent in their cameo perfection. There was color in her exquisite lips, in her entrancing eyes; but other than that, her face was pale. It was a paleness of terror.
Her garb was unique, as astounding as her strange white hair and gorgeous beauty. She wore full, ankle-length pantaloons, after the Moslem fashion. Her blouse was of silk. Strange little slippers, silk-brocaded, shod her small feet.
Doc glanced at her wrists. They were ringed with narrow purple marks. She had, he decided, been tied recently with ropes.
She rocked her head back, and screamed. Her voice held a tearing fear.
Her words—three of them repeated over and over—were of a tongue Doc had never before heard. He failed to understand them, yet they had a vague familiarity.
He tried Arabic on her. “T’al, ta’al, la takun khauf! Come, come, don’t be frightened!”
She answered him with another yowl—the same three strange words.
He mulled the words over, trying to place them in his memory, that he might address her in her own dialect.
Suddenly, he flung her away. There had come a rush of feet in the murk to one side. He sought to whirl, got half around. Then the equivalent of two lions seemed to hit him.
For one of the few times in his life, Doc was knocked down. The men who sprang upon him had the strength of monsters. His assailants were not the Arabs—all four of those could hardly have matched one of the pair who now held him. They swung fists which landed with the awful force of iron mauls.
The white-haired girl ran away in the night.
Faintly, over the sounds of his own fight, Doc could hear the four Arabs. They, too, were fleeing the vicinity of the pier.
Doc found the neck of one of his foes, reasoned there must be a jaw immediately above it, and let fly a fist. The report as it landed was slightly less loud than a shot. The wharf planks whined as an enormous form fell down upon them.
The second attacker stumbled over his toppled companion. Apparently he stooped and felt of me prone, senseless hulk.
“Holy cow!” The fellow’s voice had the booming quality of a big animal roaring in a cave. “Did this guy kayo you, Monk?”
No answer from the fallen one.
“Pinch him and see if he’s playing possum,” Doc suggested dryly.