The others stared at Squint. They could see he was frightened.
"That big bronze devil who gimme such a lot of trouble!" Squint muttered. "Kar says we gotta get him like we did Jerome Coffern! The bronze devil’s name is Doc Savage. Kar is plenty mad because I let Doc Savage get on my trail. He says it’s the worst thing that coulda happened."
"One guy can’t give us much trouble!" sneered the thicknecked thug.
"You wouldn’t be so cocky if you’d seen this bronze man work!" Squint whined. "He ain’t human! He moves quieker’n a tiger! He popped off my four pals just like you was snappin’ your fingers."
"Baloney!" snorted the burly one. "Lead me to ‘im! I ain’t never seen the man I couldn’t lick."
Squint passed a hand over his forehead.
"Beat it, all of you," he directed. "Go to wherever you live an’ stay there. Kar knows where to get hold of each of you. I told him. Wait for orders from him, or from me."
As they started leaving, Squint added an afterthought.
"Remember, Kar has got guys besides you an’ me workin’ for him. I dunno myself who they are. But he’s got more. And if one of you squawks to the cops, he’s sure to be bumped off."
Then the villainous assemblage melted away. None of them would squeal.
Squint remained behind. When left alone, he went to the secret phone.
"I carried out your orders, boss," he told Kar.
Suddenly there impinged upon the ears of Squint a weird, soft, trilling sound, like the song of a mysterious jungle bird. It was a note without equal anywhere else in the universe, melodious, but possessing no definite tune. It had a unique quality of emanating from everywhere, as though the very air in the shabby room was giving birth to it.
The trilling sound struck terror into Squint’s evil soul. He whirled, not knowing what he would see.
An awful scream tore through his teeth.
For the rickety window had lifted noiselessly. Equally without sound, the shabby curtain had moved aside.
There, poised like some huge bronze bird of vengeance upon the window sill, was Squint’s doom.
"Doc Savage!" the rodent of a man wailed. Convulsively, Squint clutched for the revolver he had secured aboard the pirate ship.
Doc’s powerful bronze hands seized a table. The table drove across the room as though impelled from a cannon mouth.
Striking Squint squarely, it smashed his worthless life out against the wall. The man’s body fell to the floor amid the table wreckage.
Doc Savage glided to the secret phone. The receiver came to his ear. He listened.
From his lips wafted the weird trilling sound that was part of Doc — the tiny, unconscious thing which he did in moments of absolute concentration. The strange note seemed to saturate and set singing all the air in the room.
Over that secret phone line cracked what sounded like a gulp of terror and rage. Then the receiver banged up at the other end.
It would probably be a long time before the evil Kar forgot that eerie, trilling sound! It was a thing to haunt the slumber hours!
Chapter 5.. JEROME COFFERN’S FRIEND
DOC SAVAGE replaced the receiver of the secret phone. He closed the hidden panel. Silently, he quitted the room as he had entered — through the window. He made his way to the street.
The crowd had thinned. Squint’s scream had not been heard. Doc did not go near his roadster, although his sharp eyes detected no sign of Kar’s men watching the machine.
Doc strode eastward. He reached the edge of Central Park — that rectangle of beautiful lawns and shrubbery two and a half miles long and half a mile wide which is New York’s breathing place. Neat apartment buildings towered along the park.
An old woman held out, hopefully, a bundle of the late newspapers. She was almost blind. Her clothing was shabby. She looked hungry. Doc stopped and took one of the papers.
He looked at the old woman’s eyes. His expert diagnosis told him their ailment could be cured by a few great specialists. He wrote a name and address on a corner of the paper, added his own name, and tore this off and gave it to the crone. The name was that of a specialist who could cure her ailment, but whose fee was a small fortune. But at sight of Doc’s name scrawled on the note, the specialist would gladly cure the woman for nothing.
Doc added a bill he took from a pocket. For a long time after he had gone, the old, nearly blind woman stared at the bill, holding it almost against her eyes. Then she burst into tears. It was more money than she had ever expected to see.
The little incident had no bearing on Doc’s troubles with Kar, except that Doc wanted the paper to see what had been published concerning Jerome Coffern’s weird death — which proved to be nothing he did not already know.
It was such a thing as Doc did often. It was part of his creed, the thing to which his life was devoted — remedying the misfortunes of others.
It was a strange thing for a man to do who had just dealt cold and terrible justice to five murderers. But Doc Savage was a strange man, judged by the look-out-for-yourself-and-nobody-else code of a greedy civilization.
Doc turned into one of the largest apartment houses on that side of Central Park. He rode an elevator to the twentieth floor.
Here Jerome Coffern had lived alone in a modest three-room apartment which was filled almost entirely with scientific books.
The locked door quickly yielded to Doc’s expert wielding of a small hook which he made by bending the tongue of his belt buckle. He entered. He paused just inside the door, bronze face grim.
His golden eyes noted a number of things.
Jerome Coffern thought a great deal of his books, and he had a habit of arranging them just a certain distance from the rear wall of the bookcase. Yet they had a different arrangement now.
He kept chemicals on his library table, also arranged in a certain fashion. Doc knew the arrangement well. To one who didn’t know Coffern, they might look orderly now. But they were not in the right order!
The apartment had been searched!
Swiftly, Doc made a circuit of the place. His nimble fingers, his all-seeing eyes, missed little.
He found the evidence on the typewriter! Jerome Coffern had installed a new ribbon on the machine before starting an extensive document. The machine had written the complete length of the ribbon, then back a considerable distance. But where it had not overwritten, the lettered imprint of the keys was discernible.
Doc read:
STATEMENT TO THE POLICE.
In view of a recent incident when a bullet came near me, I have come to the conclusion an attempt is being made to murder me. Furthermore, I suspect my alleged assailant of being guilty of at least one other murder. I realize I should have gone to the authorities earlier, but the very fantastic, horrible, and ghastly nature of the thing led me to doubt my own suspicions.
Herewith is my story:
Nearly a year ago, I went on a scientific expedition to New Zealand with Oliver Wording Bittman, the taxidermist, and Gabe Yuder. From New Zealand, a trip to Thunder Island was —
And there, to Doc’s disgust, it ended. The rest was illegible. But Jerome Coffern had obviously written it.
Doc continued his search. Jerome Coffern had been a man of few intimate friends. In his personal papers was no reference to any one called Kar.
Oliver Wording Bittman, Doc recalled, was a taxidermist who made a specialty of preparing rare animals for museums. But the name of Gabe Yuder was unfamiliar.
Doc knew the address of Oliver Wording Bittman. It was an apartment house two blocks southward along Central Park.
Doc Savage, unable to find anything else of interest, hurried to interview Oliver Wording Bittman. There was a chance Bittman might have heard of Kar, through Jerome Coffern.