"I'd like to take my men in there with machine guns!" a bandit chieftain muttered angrily.
"You tried that once, didn't you?" snapped the curtain speaker. "And you were nearly wiped out for your pains. The Valley of the Vanished is impregnable. The best we can do is get enough gold as offerings to finance this revolt."
"How do you get the gold?" asked a robber, evidently not as well posted as the others.
Again the man laughed back of the curtain. "I simply turn the Red Death loose on the tribe. Then they make a big offering of gold which reaches my hands. Then I give them the cure for the Red Death." He snorted mirthfully. "The ignorant dupes think their deity sends the Red Death, and the gold offering appeases his wrath."
"Well, you had better turn the Red Death loose soon," suggested a man. "We need an offering bad. If we don't get it, we can't pay for those guns we must have to put over the revolt."
"I will, very shortly. I have been sending my blue plane over the Valley of the Vanished. That's a new idea of mine. It impresses the inhabitants of the Valley a lot. Blue is their sacred color. And they think the plane is a big winged god flying around."
There was a lot of evil laughter in appreciation of their leader's cleverness.
"That Red Death is great stuff!" grated the man behind the curtain. "It put old man Savage out "
The speaker suddenly emitted a frenzied scream and sprang forward, taking the curtain with him. He plunged head over heels across the floor.
The stunned bandits saw, towering in the door back of the curtain, a great bronze, frightsome figure of a man.
"Doc Savage!" one squawked.
Doc Savage it was, right enough. Doc, when he had seen that knife in the street, had a moment later heard footsteps approaching. He had followed the man who had picked up the knife to this hotel room.
Doc had heard the whole vile plot!
And for probably the first time in his career, Doc had failed to get his man. Rage at the leader of the revolutionists, the murderer of his father, had momentarily blinded Doc. A tiny gasp had escaped from his great chest and the man had heard.
A bandit drew a pistol. Another doused the lights. Guns roared deafeningly. Blows smacked. Terrific blows that tore flesh and bone! Blows such as only Doc Savage could deliver!
The window burst with a glassy rattle as somebody leaped through, heedless of the fact that it was three floors to the earth. A second man took the same leap.
The fight within the room was over in a matter of thundering seconds.
Doc Savage turned on the lights. Ten bandits in various stages of stupor and unconsciousness and even death, were strewed on the floor. Three of them would never murder again. And the Blanco Grande police, already clamoring in the corridor outside, would make short shift of the rest.
To the window, Doc swept. Poising a moment easily, he took the three-story drop as lightly as if he were leaping off a table.
Under the window, he found another cutthroat. The man had broken his neck in the plunge.
There was no trace of the leader. The man had survived the jump and escaped.
Doc stood there, rage tingling all through his powerful bronze frame. The murderer of his father! And he didn't even know who the man was!
For Doc, in following the fellow to the hotel, had not once been able to glimpse the master villain's face. Up there in the room, the curtain had enveloped the fiend until the lights went out.
Doc slowly quitted the vicinity of the hotel with its holocaust of death. In that hostelry room, he had left something that would become a legend in Hidalgo. A dozen men whipped in a matter of seconds!
For days, the Blanco Grande police puzzled over what manner of fighter had overpowered these worst of Hidalgo's bandits in a hand-to-hand fray.
Every cutthroat had a reward on his unkempt head. The reward went unclaimed. Finally, by decree of President Avispa, it was turned over to charity.
Doc Savage, with hardly a thought about what he had done, had gone to his camp and to bed.
Chapter 11. VALLEY OF THE VANISHED
By the time the sun had crawled off one of Hidalgo's spike like mountaintops, Doc and his men were ready for departure.
Doc had taken his usual two-hour exercise long before dawn, while the others still slept.
After that, Doc had awakened his men, and they had all seized brushes and quick-drying blue paint, and gone over their entire plane. The ship was now blue, the sacred color of the Mayans!
"If the inhabitants of this mysterious Valley of the Vanished think we're riding in a holy chariot," Doc had commented, "they may let us hang around long enough to make friends."
Ham, waspish and debonair, carrying his inevitable sword cane for he had several of them offered jocosely: "And if they believe in evolution, we can arouse their interest by passing Monk off as the missing link."
"Oh, yeah?" Monk grinned. "Some day you're gonna find yourself in a pile that will pass for hamburger steak, and you won't know any more about who done it than you do about who framed that ham-stealing charge on you."
Red-necked, Ham twiddled his cane and had nothing more to say.
Gasoline for twenty hours' flying reposed in the tanks of the big tri-motor speed plane.
Doc, in the control bucket, turned the radial motors over with the electro-inertia starting mechanism. He let the cylinders warm so there would be no such unpleasantness as a cold motor stopping at a critical moment in the take-off.
Out across the lake, Doc ruddered the plane. He rocked the deperdussin type control wheel. The floats went on step skimming the lake surface. Then they were off. Doc banked about and headed directly for the most rugged interior region of Hidalgo.
It was Doc's own idea, borne out by Johnny's intensive study of the country's topography, to use pontoons instead of landing wheels on the plane. Due to the wildly rank jungle and the unbelievably craggy nature of the region, chances were one in a thousand of finding a clearing large enough for a set-down.
On the other hand, Hidalgo was in a sphere of great rainfall, of tropical downpours. The streams were small rivers, and here and there in a mountain chasm lay a tiny lake. Hence the floats on the plane.
While Doc lifted the plane to ten thousand feet to find a favorable air current, and thus cut gasoline consumption, his five friends used binoculars through the cabin windows.
They hoped to find trace of their enemy, the blue monoplane. But not a glimpse of its hangar did they catch in the nodular, verdurous carpet of jungle. It must be concealed, they reasoned, somewhere very near the capital city of Blanco Grande. But they didn't sight it.
Below was an occasional patch of milpa, or native corn, growing in jungle clearings. Through the glasses, they could see natives carrying burdens in macapak, or netting bags suspended by a strap about the forehead. These became scarcer. Where had once been milpa patches was only a thick growth of uamiz bushes ten to twenty feet high. They were leaving civilization behind. Hours passed.
Great barrancas, or gorges, began to split the terrain. The earth seemed to tumble and writhe and pile atop itself in inconceivable derangement. Mountains lurched up, gigantic, made black and ominous by the jungle growth. From above, the flyers could look down into canyons so deep their floors were nothing but gloomy space.
"There's not a level place down there big enough to stick a stamp on!" Renny declared in an awed voice.
Johnny laughed. "I told Monk that Columbus tackling the Atlantic Ocean had a pipe compared to this."
Monk snorted. "You're crazy. Us settin' in comfortable seats in this plane, and you call it somethin' hard! I don't see nothin' dangerous about it."