THE WHITE-HAIRED GIRL’S CALL
The fleeing gang were not yet out of the narrow street when Monk came banging down the stairs with ungainly leaps. Renny and Ham were close at his heels.
“Doc!” Monk called anxiously. He used his flashlight.
The luminance danced along the front of a building just in time to disclose Doc’s bronze form as he dropped from the deep sill of a rather high window. His spring to that haven had taken him clear of the storm of steel from the silent mystery weapon.
Monk played his light on the body of the slain man. “That ghost gun is a devilish thing, whatever it is!”
Renny and Ham flung in pursuit of their late attackers.
“Better let ’em go!” Doc suggested.
The two stopped. Renny boomed: “But we might be able to tail ’em to their hide-out!”
“Long Tom will do that!”
“Huh! I thought he was makin’ a spiel at a banquet of scientists to-night!”
“I phoned him,” Doc explained. “Then I left orders on the office window for him to tag after us, hang around this vicinity, and trail any suspicious brown gentlemen. He was not to take part in any fighting, unless necessary.”
“What about Johnny?”
“He was to remain at the office and relay Long Tom’s messages to us.”
A few blocks away, car motors began roaring loudly. The noise sank away in the distance.
“They must have had cars waiting,” Monk said in his small voice. “I hope Long Tom can tail ’em.”
Doc made a brief examination of the slain man’s clothing. He found a few half and quarter lira coins, some nickel ten and twenty-paras pieces, but no American money. There was a package of Arabian cigarettes, mutilated by one of the steel projectiles.
He found nothing which would identify the man.
“Did you get a look at the mystery weapon?” Ham queried in a hopeful voice.
“Too dark,” Doc told him. “Come on! We’ll get to a telephone and wait for some word from Long Tom.”
They walked rapidly eastward, keeping close to building fronts to avoid as much of the rain as they could. Four blocks, five, and they found an all-night drug store. Telephone booths stood in the rear like a row of sentinels. Doc entered one and dialed the number of his headquarters.
Johnny answered almost instantly. “No word yet, Doc.”
Johnny had a precise, classroom manner about his speech. This came, no doubt, from the interval he had spent as head of the natural science research department of one of the nation’s most famous universities.
Doc held the wire.
Renny, leaning against the phone-booth door, tapped his big fists together thoughtfully. He was wondering how the swarthy men who had attacked them in the street had trailed them to the spot. Going to the boathouse, Doc had ridden the taxi running board.
Renny knew it was almost impossible that any one could have followed them without being observed by the bronze man.
He put his bafflement into words. “How’d those brown babies locate us, Doc?”
“Followed us from the office.”
“Huh!” Renny’s fists gave an extra loud bang. “You saw ’em.”
“Right!”
“Holy cow! How’d you know they wouldn’t cut down on us when we came out of the boathouse? They had a swell chance at us there!”
“We kept in a compact group, you’ll recall. They couldn’t have fired upon us without danger of hitting Mohallet.”
“You think they didn’t want to harm Mohallet?”
“It’s certain they didn’t. He is one of them—possibly their chief!”
* * * *
Monk and Ham, trading scowls like two unfriendly tomcats, shouldered up to the booth to hear the conversation.
Wonder rode Renny’s puritanical face. “Mohallet was in with the Arab gang!” he gulped. “How’d you figure that?”
“Remember anything about the planking of that pier where we had our first scuffle with the outfit?” Doc countered.
The homely Monk answered that. “Sure! It was greasy!”
“Exactly,” Doc told them. “On the rug in the office, I sprinkled some chemical which turns yellow when it comes in contact with grease, even in minute quantities. Mohallet’s footprints became the same shade of yellow as our own. In other words, he had been walking around on a greasy surface, just as we had.”
“Then he was on the pier!” Renny grunted. “I wonder if he was the bird who fired on you with that noiseless weapon?”
“It’s possible.”
Ham twirled his sword cane slowly. “I see now that you were just playing with those fellows, Doc. What was the idea?”
“I’m very curious to know what they’re up to. And we might learn some interesting facts if we could get a line on that white-haired girl.”
“Yeah!” agreed the homely Monk, who always had an eye for a pretty girl. “She’d sure be worth talkin’ to!”
Doc spoke into the telephone to make sure he was still connected with Johnny. The skyscraper office had a second phone. Long Tom’s call would come in over that, to be instantly relayed by Johnny.
“These birds may try to swipe the sub, now that they know where it is!” Renny boomed softly.
“They won’t get far. There are burglar alarms all over the boathouse, wired to the office.” Doc kept the phone receiver to his ear. “And even if they got to the Helldiver, they couldn’t take her to sea. Essential parts of the mechanism are missing. Mohallet was not submarine expert enough to notice that.”
“I wonder if Mohallet’s story about being the agent of a Prince Abdul Rajab was a lie?” Ham pondered.
“No telling.”
Johnny’s precise scholastic voice came abruptly from the phone.
“Long Tom just called,” he said rapidly. “He saw enough to prove that bird Mohallet is the leader of the gang.”
“Where are they?” Doc demanded.
“Watching your office here.”
“What?”
“Long Tom is calling from a corner cigar stand two blocks away. He says the whole crew is sauntering up and down out in front! Apparently they’re waiting—for crying out loud!”
The last was a loud gasp of surprise. Silence followed.
“Johnny!” Doc called sharply.
Some seconds later, Johnny gulped: “You’d better blow right up here, Doc! I can’t make heads or tails of what she’s saying!”
“What who’s saying?”
“A white-haired girl who just walked in! By George—she’s a peach for looks!”
Echoing Johnny’s words came ugly sounds. Men cackled in shrill Arabic. Guns crashed. A feminine voice cried out loudly; it sounded more angry than afraid.
A loud snap, and the uproar came to a sudden end. The phone had gone out of commission.
* * * *
Doc pitched out of the phone booth, rapping: “The office!” He gained the street. No taxis were in sight. This was a poor district; the dwellers were users of the subway more than cabs. He headed for his office.
His men trailed him. They were in good condition, probably able to hold their own with the average sprinter. But by the time they had crossed the street, Doc had negotiated a goodly portion of the next block. He was faster than his men.
They pushed on, the bronze man’s vastly superior speed increasing his lead in amazing fashion.
Doc sighted a taxi at a stand, but ignored it. By the time he could enter the machine and get the driver awake to the urgency of matters, he would save no time.
The hour was not late. Near the center of Manhattan pedestrians with raincoats and umbrellas still were plentiful. Entering that district, Doc took to the center of thoroughfares. His remarkable appearance, the amazing speed with which he traveled, attracted pop-eyed stares.
Twice, gaping drivers let their cars bang into other machines.
There were no swarthy men visible before the skyscraper. A single roving glance of Doc’s golden eyes told him that. He was not surprised.
The sounds he had heard over the phone had been the brown fellows attacking the office.
Doc used the side entrance, through his private garage. From there, a high-speed elevator of special construction carried him upward. The lift was one which operated at a far swifter pace than even the fast express cages; the mechanism was of Doc’s designing.
He popped out in the eighty-sixth-floor corridor.
The office door gaped open. It was badly torn about the lock. Burned powder smell soaked the air. A brassy litter of empty automatic cartridges freckled the floor.
There was no sound.
Doc sloped through the door, saw bullet pocks in walls and furniture, and leaped for the library. No one was there. Nor was anybody in the laboratory with its fabulous assortment of scientific apparatus.
He glided back, noting the door between office and library was dotted with bullet marks. The panel was of heavy armor-plate steel. The lead had done nothing but batter off paint.
Going out into the corridor, Doc pressed an urgent thumb on one of the elevator call buttons. He waited thirty seconds, a minute. There was no response.
With an ear pressed to the sliding metal doors, he could hear, from the chimneylike elevator shafts extending hundreds of feet downward, excited yells.
Doc ran to his private lift. It sank so swiftly that his feet completely left the floor. For fully sixty floors, he literally fell through space. Then came the slow, wrenching shock of the halt.
This private lift of Doc’s operated from an individual battery-generator system in a room adjoining the basement garage. Because of this, it was independent of the power leads which fed the other elevators.
Doc investigated the electric main which supplied the great bank of skyscraper cages. He found the big switch open. He closed it.
He was in the lobby when cages, stalled above, began arriving. Johnny and Long Tom got out of the first.
* * * *
Johnny was a six-foot bag of bones. His coat hung on his bony shoulders as on a crosspiece of wood. He wore spectacles, the left lens of which was of remarkable thickness. Actually, this lens was a powerful magnifier. Johnny had virtually lost the use of his left eye in the Great War, and, needing a magnifier in his profession as archæologist and geologist, carried it there for convenience.
Long Tom seemed, at first glance, the weakling of this strange group of trouble hunters. His complexion was somewhat pale, unhealthy. His hair and eyes were colorless. He was slender, and looked fragile.
Long Tom’s unusually bulbous forehead hinted at his mental caliber. His command of electricity was little short of wizardry.
Johnny held his glasses on as he bounced out of the elevator.
“They got the girl!” he barked. “When we tried to follow, they jerked the power switch and stalled the elevators!”
Long Tom made angry gestures with his pale hands. “I trailed ’em up and got out at the floor about the office. Tried to jump the gang from the rear! There was too many of ’em!”
Johnny removed his glasses entirely—he had no real necessity for them, since his right eye was perfectly normal.
“The brown whelps made the attack for the sole purpose of grabbing that white-haired girl,” he declared.
“Did she have time to talk to you?” Doc questioned.
“A little.” Johnny shrugged his lathy shoulders. “But, bless me, Doc—I couldn’t understand a word she said!”
Small, thoughtful lights flickered in Doc’s golden eyes. Johnny had been unable to understand the white-haired girl. That was unusual. Only two or three living men possessed a greater command of languages, ancient and modern, than Johnny. He could, for instance, read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics as readily as the average individual peruses a popular novel.
Johnny studied Doc. “It’s a bad break that you didn’t get to talk to her!”
Johnny was no egoist. He knew very well that Doc Savage’s command of languages was greater than his own vast knowledge. In fact, not a little of his own learning had come from his association with this amazing man of bronze.
This same state of affairs applied to Long Tom and the others. Long Tom’s command of electricity, great as it was, could not equal Doc’s fund of electrical lore. Renny and his engineering, Monk and his chemistry, Ham and his law—the bronze man excelled each in his line.
Came a commotion at the lobby entrance. Renny and Monk, giants both, charged inside. Ham, sword came tucked under an arm, trailed them.
Monk eyed Doc and groaned: “So we’re too late, huh?”
“That,” Doc told him, “remains to be seen!”
* * * *
They took the high-speed elevator to the eighty-sixth floor. Previously the terrific speed of the cage had no pronounced effect on Doc, due to his almost incredible strength. But his five aids were slammed to their knees by the force of the start.
A wide grin wrinkled Monk’s homely face in the lift. Riding this superspeed car was one of his diversions. He never failed to get a kick out of it. When Doc first had the thing installed, Monk had nearly worn it out joyriding.
Ham, fiddling with his sword cane, scowled blackly at Monk. He did that on principle. Ham disliked anything which entertained Monk.
Johnny polished the magnifying lens in his spectacles as they entered the office.
“That girl—the language she spoke!” he grumbled. “It puzzles me. From her manner as she ran into the office, I think she had come to tell us something. But I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it!”
“Say, was she really good-lookin’?” Monk asked hopefully. “The only squint I got at her was in the dark.”
“She was exquisite!” Johnny declared fervently.
A blissful smile wreathed Monk’s pleasantly ugly face. He squinted at the dapper Ham. “It’s too bad you got a wife and thirteen children, you overdressed shyster!”
Ham purpled indignantly. Monk had recently acquired a terrible habit—terrible from Ham’s viewpoint—of telling every personable young lady they met that Ham had a wife and thirteen half-witted children. The truth was that Ham had neither wife nor offspring.
“You’d better hope the white-haired girl is from Zamboanga!” Ham told Monk nastily.
“Yeah?” Monk was puzzled. “Why?”
“The monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga!” Ham jeered. “She won’t be too surprised when she sees you!”
Doc ignored this mild squabble. It was always going on, anyway. He hurried to the great laboratory, was gone only a moment, and came back with a device which resembled a hand garden sprayer.
His five aids eyed the object. They knew what it meant, having seen it used before. They stepped out into the corridor. Their gaze sought the tiled floor.
On the floor was a film of colorless fluid not unlike pale, sticky molasses. It was hardly noticeable.
This was a peculiar chemical mixture of Doc’s own concoction. Ordinarily, it was without odor. Doc kept it there at all times.
The sprayer held another chemical. This, when mingled with even a tiny quantity of the first mixture, produced a powerful and striking odor.
The pale stuff before the door stuck to the shoe soles of any one walking through it. Tracks, unnoticeable to the naked eye, would be left for some time. When a mist from the sprayer touched these, the distinctive odor was produced.
Descending to the lobby, Doc proceeded to trail the white-haired girl’s captors. He did not use the sprayer steadily, but at intervals of a rod or so, like a hound on a fast scent.
The tracks led eastward. Wayfarers, amazed at the sight of a giant metallic figure of a man engaged in the apparently senseless procedure of spraying the sidewalk, stared in wonder. Some even started to tag along curiously. They were seen left behind, for Doc moved swiftly.
* * * *
The trail entered a side street. It crossed Park Avenue, went on toward the East River, and threaded a sector of gloomy, squalid tenements.
“Funny they didn’t take to their cars!” boomed the big-voiced Renny.
“Probably afraid we had the license numbers!” suggested the bespectacled Johnny.
Long Tom, the pale electrical wizard, advanced another theory. “Maybe they put the girl in a car and sent her off!”
Since they were trailing entirely by odor, there was nothing to tell them whether the girl was still with the group they were following. But Doc, putting a query to the clerk in a tobacco shop which they passed, clarified that particular point.
The clerk had seen the group of swarthy men, and the white-haired girl was still with them. He had not realized she was a captive, but had been stricken by her exquisite beauty.
The way became darker, more deserted. Odors from a distant fish market mingled with the peculiar scent they were following. The rain drooled from low clouds. Out on the river, there was steamlike fog. Boats squawked whistles at each other.
The trail ended abruptly.
“Holy cow!” Renny rumbled. “We’re sunk!”
The spot, where the strange odor they were following became no longer evident, was near the doorless, windowless side of a storage warehouse.
Doc, whose olfactory organs were developed far beyond those of his companions, kept the sprayer going for some moments. At the same time, he bent close to the none-too-clean walk.
“They entered one or more cars here,” he announced.
He examined the street. The asphalt, washed clean by the intermittent rain, retained no definite tire prints that could be followed.
They stood at the curb, a grimly silent cluster. As Renny had said, it looked as if they were sunk.
A car drove past. It was an old touring car, very large. The curtains were up. The driver was the only occupant. He glanced at Doc and his group, and fell to staring.
Suddenly the man halted his machine, then backed it up. He leaned out.
He was pudgy, with big ears, small chin, and eyes so watery that they seemingly had been held out in the slow rain. His collar was soiled, and so wrinkled that it might have been a rolled handkerchief tied around his neck.
“Good evening!” he said nervously. “Were you—looking for somebody?”
“Several dark-skinned men—and a white-haired girl,” Doc told him.
“That’s the party who forced me to haul them away!” gulped the weak-looking man.