"But think of the handicap of not being armed!" Mindoro objected.
Doc shrugged and dropped the subject.
Ham and Renny grinned at this word play. Doc handicapped? Not much! They had never seen mighty bronze man in a spot yet where he didn't have a ready way out.
Doc rode the outside of the cab which whisked them down Broadway. He watched the diallike lens of his telewatch almost continuously.
Several Mongols were now in the Dragon concern office. They moved about, conversing. The image carried to Doc by television was too jittery and dim to permit him to read their lips. Indeed, he could not even identify the faces of the men in the room, beyond the fact that they were lemon-hued and slant-eyed.
Considering the compactness of Doc's tiny apparatus, how ever, the transmitted image was remarkably clear. An electrical engineer interested in television would have gone into raptures over the mechanism. It was constructed with the precision of a lady's costly wrist watch.
An interesting bit of drama was now enacted on the telewatch lens.
Monk, by squirming about in the chair in which he was bound, got his toes on the floor. Hopping like a grotesque, half-paralyzed frog, he suddenly reached the grimy window. He fell against the pane. It broke.
Some glass fell inside the room; some dropped down into the street.
A yellow man ran to Monk and delivered a terrific blow. Monk upset, chair and all, onto the floor. He landed on fragments of the window he had broken. Doc watched Monk's hands intently after the fall.
The Mongols peered anxiously out of the window. They drew back after a time, satisfied the falling glass had alarmed no one.
Doc's view was now interrupted.
A slant-eyed man came and stood directly before the eye of the hidden television transmitter. All the apparatus registered was a limited view of the fellow's back.
Doc waited, golden eyes never leaving the telewatch dial. None of his impatience showed on his bronze features. Three minutes passed. Four. Then the Mongol moved away from the television eye.
The situation in the Dragon concern office was exactly as it had been four minutes ago. The three forms bound to chairs were quiet.
Doc's head shook slowly.
"I don't like this," he told those inside the taxi. "Something strange is happening in that office."
Doc continued to watch the scanning lens. The three tied to the chairs were motionless as dead men. He could not see their faces.
"We're almost there, Doc," Renny said from the cab interior.
Doc directed the driver to stop the machine. They got out.
"Let's rush 'em!" Renny suggested, his voice a rumble like thunder in a barrel.
"That is probably what they're hoping we'll do," Doc told him dryly.
Renny started. "You think this is a trick?"
"Tom Too is clever enough to know you picked up the trail of his man at the Dragon concern office. He must surely know we are away he has been using the office. Yet he chanced discovery in bringing our pals there, or having his men bring them. He would not do that without a reason."
"But what "
"Wait here!"
Leaving them behind, Doc moved down a side street. Two or three pedestrians turned to stare after his striking figure, startled by sight of a physique such as they had not glimpsed before.
SOME distance down the side street, a street huckster stood beside a two-wheeled hand cart piled high with apples and oranges. This man had but recently arrived from his native land in the south of Europe, and he spoke little English.
He was surprised when a voice hailed him in his native tongue. He was impressed by the appearance of the bronze, golden-eyed man who had accosted him. A short conversation ensued. Some money changed hands.
The huckster wheeled his cart to a secluded spot. But he shortly reappeared, pushing his vehicle toward Broadway. He turned south on Broadway, and was soon before the Far East Building, on the tenth floor of which was the office of the Dragon Oriental Goods Company.
The door of the Far East Building was wide. The huckster calmly wheeled his car inside an unheard-of thing.
The half-caste elevator operator dashed forward angrily. Another man was loitering in the lobby. His broad face, prominent cheek bones and almost entire absence of beard denoted, to an expert observer, Mongol blood. He joined the elevator operator.
They proceeded to throw the fruit vender out bodily. It took both of them. They wrestled the peddler clear to the sidewalk and dumped him into the gutter. Then they came back and shoved the cart out.
Neither man noticed the fruit in the cart was not heaped as high as it had been a moment before.
The huckster wheeled his vehicle away, barking excitedly in his native tongue. He disappeared.
Doc Savage had been hidden under the fruit. No one but the peddler knew Doc was now in the Far East Building least of all the Mongol in the lobby, who was obviously one of Tom Too's pirate horde.
"Me think that velly stlange thing to happen," the Mongol told the elevator operator.
"Allee same lookee funny," agreed the operator. "Mebbe so that fella wolk alongside blonze man?"
The Mongol swore a cackling burst in his native tongue. "Me thinkee good thing follow fluit fella! Alee same cut thloat and play safe."
With this, he felt a knife inside his sleeve and started out. He reached the door.
Splat! The sound was dull, mushy. It came from the side of the door. Thin glass fragments of a hollow ball tinkled on the floor tiling.
The Mongol went to sleep on his feet fell without a sound.
Doc had hurled one of his anaesthetic balls from the stairway. He had not intended to reveal his presence. But it was necessary that he protect the innocent huckster whom he had bribed to bring him here.
The elevator operator spun. He saw Doc. A screech of fright split past his lips. He charged wildly for the street door.
The cloud of invisible, odorless anaesthetic had not yet become ineffective. The man ran into it. He folded down, and momentum tumbled him head over heels across the walk.
Doc stepped to the door.
From two points one up the street, one down it machine guns brayed a loud stream of reports.
Doc had expected something like that. This was a trap, and Tom Too's men were hardly fools enough to wait for him on the upper floors of the building, where their retreat would be cut off.
He flashed backward in time to get in the clear.
Fistfuls of stone powdered off the building entrance as jacketed bullets stormed. Falling glass jangled loudly. Ricocheting lead squawled in the lobby.
Doc glided to the stairs, mounted to the second floor and tried the door of a front office. It chanced to be locked. He pulled not overly hard, it seemed. The lock burst from its anchorage as though hitched to a tractor.
Entering the office, Doc crossed to a window and glanced down.
The machine guns had silenced. A gray sedan sped along the street, slowing to permit the Mongols to dive aboard. The car continued north. It reached the first corner.
Suddenly there was a series of sawing sounds, like the rasp of a gigantic bull fiddle.
Doc knew those noises instantly the terrific fire of the compact little machine guns he had invented. Renny, Ham, and Mindoro had turned loose on the Orientals.
The gray sedan careened to the left. It hurdled the curb. There was a roar of rent wood and smashing glass as it hit a display window. The car passed entirely through the window. Wheels ripped off, fenders crumpled, top partially smashed in, it sledded across the floor of a furniture store.
Doc saw the attackers wade through the wreckage after the car. Several times their little machine guns made the awful bull-fiddle sawings.
Then the three men came out and sped toward the Far East Building.
Doc met them downstairs.
"Three of the devils were in the car!" Renny grimaced. "They're all ready for the morgue."