Doc nodded. "He sure does."
"It's fantastic!" Johnny grumbled. "Those people vanished hundreds of years ago. At least, all those that comprised the highest civilization did. A few ignorant peons were probably left. Even those survive to this day. But as for the higher-class Mayan" he made a gesture of something disappearing "Poof! Nobody knows for sure what became of them."
"They were a wonderful people," Doc said thoughtfully. "They had a civilization that probably surpassed ancient Egypt."
"Ask him why he paints his fingers red?" Monk requested, unfazed by talk of lost civilizations.
Doc put the query in the tongue-flapping Mayan tongue. The stocky man gave a surly answer. "He says he's one of the warrior sect," Doc translated. "Only members of the warrior sect sport red finger tips."
"Well, I'll be dag-gone!" Monk snorted.
"He won't talk any more," Doc advised. Then he added grimly: "We'll take him down to the office, and see if he won't change his mind?"
Searching the prisoner, Doc dug up a remarkable knife. It had a blade of obsidian, a darksome, glasslike volcanic rock, and the edge rivaled a razor in cutting qualities. The handle was simply a leather thong wrapped around and around the upper end of the obsidian shaft.
This knife Doc appropriated. He picked up the prisoner's double-barreled elephant rifle. The marvelous weapon was manufactured by the Webley Scott firm, of England.
Monk eagerly took charge of the captive, booting him ungently out to the street and to their taxi.
Swishing downtown through the rain, Doc, speaking through the taxi window, tried again to persuade the stocky prisoner to talk.
The fellow disclosed only one fact and Doc had already guessed that.
"He says he's really a Mayan!" Doc translated for the others.
"Tell him I'll pull his ears off an' feed 'em to him if he don't come clean!" Monk suggested.
Doc, anxious himself to note the effect of torture threats on the Mayan, repeated Monk's remarks.
The Mayan shrugged, clucked in his native tongue.
"He says," Doc explained, "that the trees in his country are full of them like you, only smaller. He means monkeys."
Ham let out a howl of laughter at that, and Monk subsided.
Rain was threshing down less vigorously when they pulled up before the gleaming office building that spiked up nearly a hundred stories. Entering, they rode the elevator to the eighty-sixth floor.
The Mayan again refused to talk.
"If we just had some truth serum!" suggested Long Tom, running pale fingers through his blond, Nordic hair.
Renny held up a monster fist. "This is all the truth serum we need! I'll show you how it works!"
Big, with sloping mountains of gristle for shoulders, and long kegs of bone and tendon for arms, Renny slid over to the library door. His fist came up.
Wham! Completely through the stout panel Renny's fist pistoned. it seemed more than bone and tendon could stand. But when Renny drew his knuckles Out of the wreckage and blew off the splinters, they were unmarked.
Renny, having demonstrated what he could do, came back and towered threateningly over their captive.
"Talk to him in that gobble he calls a language, Doc! Tell him he's in for the same thing that door got if he don't tell us whether your father was murdered, and if he was, who did it. And we want to know why he tried to shoot us."
The prisoner only sat in stoical silence. He was scared but determined to suffer any violence rather than talk.
"Wait, Renny," Doc suggested. "Let's try something more subtle."
"For instance?" Renny inquired.
"Hypnotism," said Doc. "If this man is of a savage race, his mind is probably susceptible to hypnotic influence. It's no secret that many savages hypnotize themselves to such an extent that they think they see their pagan gods come and talk to them."
Positioned directly before the stocky Mayan, Doc began to exert the power of his amazing golden eyes. They seemed to turn into shifting, gleaning piles of the flaked yellow metal, holding the prisoner's gaze inexorably, exerting a compelling, authoritative influence.
For a minute the squat Mayan was quiet, except for his bulging eyes. He swayed a little in his chair. Then, with a piercing yell in his native tongue, the prisoner lunged backward out of his chair.
The Mayan's plunge carried him toward Renny. But the big-fisted giant had been watching Doc so intently he must have been a little hypnotized himself. He was slow breaking the spell. Reaching for the Mayan, he missed.
Straight to the window, the squat Mayan sped. A wild jump, and he shot head-first through it to his death!
Awed silence was in the room for a while.
"He realized he was going to be made to talk," Ham clipped, whipping his waspish frame over to the window to look callously down. "So he killed himself."
"Wonder what can be behind all this!" Long Tom puzzled, absently inspecting his unhealthy-looking features as reflected by the polished table top.
"Let's see if the message my father left written on the window won't help," Doc suggested.
They followed Doc to the library in a group. "Important papers back of the red brick," read the message in invisible ink which could only be detected by ultra-violet light. They were all curious to know where the papers were, anxious to see that they were intact. Above all, they wanted to know the nature of these "important papers."
Doc had the box which manufactured ultra-violet rays, under his arm. On into the laboratory, he led the cavalcade.
Every one noticed instantly that the laboratory floor was of brick, with a rubber matting scattered here and there.
Monk looked like he understood, then his jaw fell. "Huh!"
The floor bricks were all red!
Doc plugged the ultra-violet apparatus into a light socket. He switched off the laboratory lights. Deliberately, he played the black-light rays across the brick floor. The darkness was intense.
And suddenly one brick was shining with an unholy red luminance. The brick was the lid of a secret little cavity in the floor, and the elder Savage had treated it with some substance that had the property of glowing red under the black-light beams.
From the secret cavity, Doc lifted a packet of papers wrapped securely in an oilskin cloth that looked like a fragment of slicker. Ham clicked on the lights. They gathered around, eagerly waiting.
Doc opened the papers. They were very official looking, replete with gaudy seals. And they were printed in Spanish.
One at a time, as he finished glancing over them, Doc passed the papers to Ham. The astute lawyer studied them with great interest. At last Doc was completely through the papers. He looked at Ham.
"These papers are a concession from the government of Hidalgo," Ham declared. "They give to you several hundred square miles of land in Hidalgo, providing you pay the government of Hidalgo one hundred thousand dollars yearly and one fifth of everything you remove from this land. And the concession holds for a period of ninety-nine years."
Doc nodded. "Notice something else, Ham! Those papers are made out to me. Me, mind you! Yet they were executed twenty years ago. I was only a kid then."
"You know what I think?" Ham demanded.
"Same thing I do, I'll bet!" Doc replied. "These papers are the title to the legacy my father left me. The legacy is something he discovered twenty years ago."
"But what is the legacy?" Monk wanted to know. Doc shrugged. "I haven't the slightest idea, brothers. But you can bet it's something well worth while. My father was never mixed up in piker deals. I have heard him treat a million-dollar transaction as casually as though he were buying a cigar."
Pausing, Doc looked steadily at each of his men in turn. The flaky gold of his eyes shimmered strange lights. He seemed to read the thoughts of each.
"I'm going after this heritage my father left," he said at length. "I don't need to ask you fellows are with me!"