They had been trapped!
Monk emitted a great howl. Monk's fights were always noisy, unless there was reason for them being quiet. Like a gladiator of old, Monk fought best when the racket was loudest.
Knives glittered in the dark. Sandals, made of tapir hide and held on with coarse henequin rope, slammed the cobbles.
Monk lunged and got the man who had been their guide by the nape and the seat of his dungaree pants. As though he were a straw, Monk whirled the man up and back, let him fly. The victim screamed in a strange tongue. A clot of the attackers went down like ten-pins before his hurtling body.
The scream, the ex-guide's red finger tips, told Monk something. The man was a Mayan! The same race as the fellow who had committed suicide in New York! That was why he seemed familiar.
Like the gigantic anthropoid he resembled, Monk went into action. His first fist blow jammed a ratty, dark-skinned man's jaw back under his ear. The fellow dropped, convulsively throwing his knife high in the air.
Ham, dancing like a fencer, tapped a swarthy skull with his sword cane. The cane looked very light, but the tube-like case over the long, keen blade of steel was heavy. The blade itself was by no means light.
As the first assailant went over backward, Ham unsheathed his sword cane. He expertly skewered a fellow who tried to stab him.
But where one besieger went down, a half dozen took his place. The street was full of snarling, vicious devils. None of these had red finger tips, or even resembled Mayans.
The one who was a Mayan, their late guide, had regained his feet, dazed.
Men were clinging like leeches to Monk. One sailed fully ten feet straight up when Monk threw him off. But suddenly, weighted by hopeless odds, Monk went down.
Ham with his sword in another unlucky one, was overcome an instant later.
A resounding blow delivered on the head of each one rendered Monk and Ham senseless.
Monk's awakening was one long blaze of pain. He rolled his eyes. He was in a mud-walled, mud-floored room. There was not a single window, and the one door was low and narrow. Monk tried to sit up and found himself tied hand and foot not with rope, but with heavy wire.
Ham sprawled near by on his back. Ham was also wired.
The red-fingered Mayan was bending over Ham. He had just appropriated Ham's papers Doc's sole documentary proof to his ownership of the tract of land in interior Hidalgo.
Evidently he had been after these. He hissed a number of words in Mayan, which neither Ham nor Monk understood. It didn't sound complimentary, whatever it was.
The Mayan whipped a knife from inside his bright-green shirt.
But even as his knife started up, he seemed to get a more satisfactory thought. From within the capacious green shirt he drew an evil-looking little statuette. The features carved on this faintly resembled those of a human being, a tremendously long nose being most notable. It was artfully sculptured out of a dark obsidian rock.
The Mayan mumbled words, and there had suddenly come into his voice a religious fervor. Monk caught the name "Kukulcan" a time or two, and recognized it as the name of an ancient Mayan deity. The fellow was going to offer them as a sacrifice to his hideous little idol!
Monk heaved against the wires, but only bruised his huge muscles and started crimson running from torn skin. Numberless turns of the wire held him.
The Mayan concluded his paean to the idol. A wild light inflamed his nigrescent eyes. He was slavering like an idiot.
Faint light scintillated from the knife as it uplifted once more.
Monk shut his eyes. He opened them instantly it was all he could do to stem a yell of utter joy.
For into that unsavory room had penetrated a low, mellow sound that trilled up and down the scale like the song of some rare bird. It seemed to filter everywhere. The sound was strengthening, inspiring.
The sound of Doc!
The Mayan was puzzled. He looked about, saw nothing. The idol-worshiping fervor seized him again. The knife poised.
The blade rushed down.
But no more than a foot did it travel. Out of the narrow black doorway flashed a gigantic figure of bronze. A Nemesis of power and speed, Doc Savage descended upon the devilish but luckless Mayan.
Doc's hand seemed hardly to touch the Mayan's knife arm before the bone snapped loudly and the knife gyrated away.
The Mayan twisted. With surprising alacrity, his other hand darted inside his green shirt and came out with a shiny pistol. He aimed at Ham, not Doc. Ham was handiest.
There was only one thing Doc could do to save Ham. He did it chopped a blow with the edge of his hand that snapped the Mayan's neck instantly. The fellow died before he could pull trigger.
It took only a moment for Doc to free Ham and Monk of the wires.
A swarthy native one of the Mayan's hirelings popped through the door with a long-bladed knife that resembled nothing so much as an ordinary corn knife. In fact, it was a corn knife, with "Made in U.S. A." on the handle. But the native would have called it a machete.
His precipitous arrival was just his hard luck. A leap, a blow so swift the native probably never saw it, and the fellow was flying head over heels back the way he came.
Doc guided Ham and Monk outside They turned left. Doc seized Ham and gave him a toss that lifted him to a low roof. Monk managed the jump unassisted, and Doc followed. They leaped to another roof, another.
On that one lay the silken folds of a parachute.
"That's how I got here," Doc explained. "News of that fight you had spread fast. I heard it and took off in the plane. Two thousand feet up I touched off a parachute flare. That lighted the whole town. I was lucky enough to see the gang haul you into that joint. So I simply jumped down to help you."
"Sure!" Monk grinned. "There wasn't nothin' to it, was there, Doc?"
Chapter 10. TROUBLE TRAIL
Doc, Ham, and Monk strolled through the moonlight to the spot on the lake shore where they had pitched camp. A crowd of curious natives were there inspecting the plane, talking among themselves. Aircraft were still a novelty in this out-of-the-way spot.
Doc, a bronze giant nearly twice as tall as some of the swarthy fellows, mingled among them and asked questions in the mixture of Spanish and Indian lingo they spoke. He wanted to know about the blue plane which had attacked him at Belize
The blue plane had been seen a few times by the natives. But they did not know from whence it came or where it went.
Doc noticed some of the swarthy little men were very superstitious about the blue plane. These would give him little information. In each case the features of such men showed they were of Mayan ancestry.
Doc recalled then that blue was the sacred color of the ancient Mayans. It only added to this mysterious thing confronting him.
Renny and the others had erected a silken tent. But they had also dug inside the tent a deep hole, sort of a dugout in which to sleep. From the outside, the excavation would escape detection. They were taking no chance on a sudden machine-gun burst in the night.
Monk and Ham, completely recovered from their narrow brush with death, decided to sleep in the plane cabin, alternating on keeping guard.
Doc himself set off alone through the night. Thanks to the marvelous faculties he had developed by years of intensive drill, he had little fear of his enemies attacking him successfully.
He went to the presidential palace. To the servant who admitted him, Doc gave simply his name and a request to see the President of Hidalgo.
In a surprisingly brief interval, the flunky was back. Carlos Avispa, President of Hidalgo, would see Doc at once.
Doc was ushered into a great, sumptuously fitted room. The chamber was in twilight, and a small motion-picture projector was throwing shifting images onto a white screen. However, the film being run off was one concerning military tactics instead of a mushy love drama.