This gave Doc a clew to the dialect they spoke. Roughly translated, the word meant "the soul of a man." So swiftly had Doc evaded their charge that one of the Eskimos had remarked he must be but a ghost!
"Chinzo!" Doc told them in their own lingo. "Welcome! You are my friends! But you have a strange way of greeting me."
This friendship business was undoubtedly news to everybody concerned. But Doc figured it wouldn't hurt to try that angle on them.
He spoke several variations of Eskimo dialect, among scores of other lingos he had mastered in his years of intensive study.
He might as well have saved his breath.
In a squealing knot, the Innuits bore down upon him. Again, they found themselves beating empty space, or whacking each other by accident.
From a position thirty feet away, Doc planted his flash beam on them. They were in a nice, tight bunch. A great chair stood at Doc's elbow. No doubt it would have been a load for any single steward who had long ago sailed on the ill-fated Oceanic.
It lifted in Doc's mighty hand as lightly as though it were a folding camp stool. It slammed into the midst of the Eskimos. They were bowled over, practically to a man.
Those able to, raised a terrific squawling.
They were calling upon more of their fellows outside for help.
Doc saw no object in standing up and fighting an army. If there had been some reason for it, that would be different.
He made swiftly for the forward staircase out of the lounge.
His thoughts flickered for an instant to the strange thing which had touched his neck. It had been none of these queer-smelling Innuits.
He forgot that puzzle speedily.
The staircase he was making for erupted warlike, greasy Eskimos. His retreat was cut off!
There was nothing to do now but make a fight of it.
FOUR OF the five Innuits carried lighted blubber lamps. Doc wondered where they had conjured them from. They Illuminated the lounge.
"You are making a mistake, my children," Doc told them in their lingo. "I come in peace!"
"You are a tongak, an evil spirit sent to harm us by the chief of all evil spirits!" an oily fellow clucked at him.
Doc sneezed. He had never smelled an Eskimo as aromatic as these fellows — and Eskimos are notoriously malodorous.
"You are wrong!" he argued with them. "I come only to do you good."
They threw gutturals back and forth at each other. All the while, they kept closing in on the giant bronze man.
"Where you come from?" demanded one.
"From a land to the south, where it is always warm."
Doc could see they didn't believe this.
One waved an arm expressively.
'"There is no such land," he said with all the certainty of a very ignorant man. "The only land besides this is nakroom, the great space beyond the sky."
They had never heard of Greenland, or any country to the south, Doc gathered.
"Very well, I come from nakroom," Doc persisted. "And I come to do good."
"You speak with a split tongue," he was informed. "Only tongaks, evil spirits, come from nakroom."
Doc decided to drop the subject. He didn't have time to convert their religious beliefs.
Doc took stock of their weapons. They carried harpoons with lines of hair seal thong bent in the detachable tips. Some held oonapiks, short hunting spears. Quite a few bayonets were in evidence. These had evidently been garnered from the Oceanic. No firearms were to be seen.
Not the least dangerous were ordinary dog whips. These had lashes fully eighteen feet long. From his vast knowledge, Doc knew an Eskimo could take one of these whips and cut a man's throat at five paces. Flicking at distant objects with the dog whips bordered on being the Eskimo national pastime.
"Kill him!" clucked the Eskimo leader. "He is only one man! It will be easy!"
The Innuit was underestimating, a mistake Doc's enemies quite often made.
DOC PICKED up a round-topped table. This would serve as a shield against any weapon his foes had.
He seized a chair, flung it as though it were a chip. Three Innuits were bowled over. They hadn't had time to dodge.
A flight of harpoons and short hunting spears chugged into the table. Doc threw two more chairs. He retreated to a spot far from the nearest flickering blubber lamp. He lowered the table, making sure they all saw he was behind it. Then he flattened to the lounge floor and glided away, unnoticed.
The Eskimos rushed the table, bent on murder. They howled in dismay when they found no one there. The howls turned to pain as hunters in the rear began dropping from bronze fists that exploded like nitro on their jaws.
An Innuit lunged at Doc with a harpoon. Doc picked the harpoon out of the fellow's hands and broke it over his head. A tough walrus lash on a dog whip slit the hood of Doc's parka like a knife stroke.
The bronze giant retreated. Thrown spears and bayonets seemed to whizz through his very body, so quickly did he dodge.
His uncanny skill began to have its effect. The greasy fellows rolled their little eyes at each other. Fear distorted their pudgy faces.
"Truly, he is a tongak, an evil one!" they muttered. "None other could be so hard to kill."
"All gather together!" commanded their leader. "We will rush him in a group!"
The words were hardly off the leader's lips when he dropped, his blank and senseless face looking foolishly through the rungs of the chair which had hit him.
The harm had been done. The Innuits grouped. They took fresh holds on their weapons.
They charged.
They had hit upon the only chance they had of coping with Doc. There were nearly fifty of them. Despite their short stature and fat, they were stout, fierce fighters.
With mad, bloodthirsty squeals, they closed upon the mighty bronze man. For a moment, they covered him completely. A tidal wave of killers!
Then a bronze arrow of a figure shot upward from the squirming pile.
The ceiling of the lounge was criss-crossed with elaborately decorated beams. Doc's sinewy hands grasped these, clinging to a precarious handhold as he moved away.
He dropped to the floor, clear of the fight, before he was hardly missed.
But the Eskimos still had him cut off from the exits. They closed in again. They threw spears and knives and an occasional club, all of which Doc dodged. They shrieked maledictions, largely to renew their own faltering nerve.
The situation was getting desperate. Doc put his back to a bulkhead.
He did not pay particular attention to the fact that he was near the spot where the strange, warm, soft object had touched his neck.
With hideous yells, the killing horde of Innuits charged.
A door opened beside Doc. A soft, strong hand came out. It clutched Doc's arm.
It was a woman's hand.
Chapter 15
THE ARCTIC GODDESS
DOC SAVAGE whipped through the door. He caught a brief glimpse of the girl.
She was tall. Nothing more than that could be told about her form, since she was muffled in the garb of the arctic — moccasins reaching above her knees, and with the tops decorated with the long hair of the polar bear, trousers of the skin of the arctic hare, a shirt-like garment of auk skins, and an outer parka of a coat fitted with a hood.
But her face! That was different. He could see enough of that to tell she was a creature of gorgeous beauty. Enthralling eyes, an exquisite little upturned nose, lips as inviting as the petals of a red rose — they would have made most men forget all about the fight.
Had there been light to disclose Doc's features, however, an onlooker would have been surprised to note how little the giant bronze man was affected by this entrancing beauty.