Doc Savage - The Stone Man Part 3

Ham now told what he had overheard as a result of his eavesdropping.

"Mysterious business, seems to me," Ham finished. "And this Herman Locatella, bird of fine feather, turned into a buzzard."

Doc Savage's metallic features had shown no particular emotion during the recital-which meant nothing, since he had a carefully developed ability to keep his feelings where they belonged, in his mind.

"Planes, bombs, gas," Doc Savage said quietly. "And a black arrowhead."

"The black arrowhead puzzles me particularly."

"Does it make sense to you?"

"No," Ham admitted. "But it interests me. It looks like the kind of a thing we usually investigate."

"What would you suggest?"

"If we get a move on," the dapper lawyer said, "we may reach Locatella's office in time to overhear the plans they make to seize these two-er-strange people, as Spad Ames called them. Mark and Ruth Colorado, he said their names were."

"We will take Monk and Renny along," Doc said quietly.

But Monk and Renny were missing from the reception room.

"I wonder where they went?" Ham grumbled. "They'll hate to miss this-and I'll hate not having them there. Monk knows I've been watching Herman Locatella's office, and he's made cracks about it. I'd like to see him eat the cracks. Boy, have I been getting revenge on Monk lately!"

Ham chuckled over his bet while a private elevator lowered them to the garage which Doc Savage maintained in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the huge building. They selected a taxicab which seemed as ordinary as the thousands of other cabs on New York streets, the armor-plate body and the oversized engine being cleverly constructed to give an uninteresting effect.

It was getting dark.THE night had become completely dark by the time they climbed through the hatch onto the roof which adjoined the building housing Locatella's office.

"Over this way," Ham breathed. "You cross the roof to the window of a room where I've got my recording apparatus."

The roof had a covering of thick asphalt compound in which gravel was embedded, and the gravel crunched slightly under their feet. Dark clouds rolling out of the west had packed overhead, and there was chill fog which absorbed the city lights.

Ham stopped suddenly. "What was that?"

It had been a small squas.h.i.+ng sound.

"Probably a pigeon egg rolled out of a nest up in the eaves," Ham decided. "That's what it sounded like."

Then Ham grasped his throat and made a strangled noise.

"Gas!" he exploded.

He realized ponderous figures were suddenly rus.h.i.+ng upon them.

"Locatella must have found out about me!" Ham barked, and tried to bring his sword-the innocent-looking dark cane which he carried was a sword cane-into action.

The a.s.sailants, instead of rus.h.i.+ng directly upon them, raced around them. The circling maneuver puzzled Ham until he discovered the reason. The attackers had some kind of a net, probably an ordinary fis.h.i.+ng seine of strong twine, and they enveloped Ham and Doc with this. They fought the cords, broke a few, but were jerked from their feet.

They lay there and struggled with the net until they had to breathe and take the gas into their lungs and become unconscious. Ham, trying to yell for help, managed to emit a shrill and eerie wail, and always afterward it seemed to him that he pa.s.sed out while still making the sound.

Chapter V. THE MYSTERIOUS COLORADOS.

THE wail of a noise that Ham made carried to the ears of Spad Ames, and Spad looked puzzled.

"What was that?" he growled.

"A tomcat," Herman Locatella said. "Or maybe a drunk."

Herman Locatella was feeling proud of himself as he sat behind his desk, tipped back in a chair, cigar tilted up in an amber holder, and adjusted his bow tie. He had just changed to full evening garb in the little dressing room adjoining his office.

Spad Ames dismissed the wailing sound out of the night and went back to studying his new gang-or the seven members whom Locatella, to Spad's astonishment, had managed to a.s.semble within two hours.

Spad was a judge of certain types of character, and he approved of the seven. They did not look too obviously like thugs, not sufficiently so to alarm a policeman. Not that they resembled honest businessmen. They might have been a group of perfectly honest and dressed-up truck drivers or water-front roustabouts.

They had arrived one at a time, and Spad had been listening to Locatella state their qualifications, which consisted mainly of a string of penitentiary records."You'll do," Spad said. "The pay is one hundred bucks a day, payable at six o'clock each day. Locatella, here, is the bankroll. He pays you. I give the orders."

They watched him. They were not afraid of him. He was glad of that; he could make them afraid later, if necessary. There was only one of them about whom he had doubts.

That one seemed a little young, and he was going out of his way to act tough. He had sneered at Spad when he came in.

"Any of you got a gun?" Spad asked.

"I have," said the young one insolently. "What about it?"

"Give me the gun," Spad Ames requested quietly.

The youngster drew the weapon with a flourish and tossed it over. It was a nickel-plated pistol of the $8.98 variety, with practically all the barrel sawed off.

Spad Ames. .h.i.t the young man. He struck open-handed. The young fellow upset. He was quick, seemed to land on his feet, instantly lashed back at Spad Ames. Spad dodged. He gave the youngster a knee in the midriff; when the fellow doubled and gasped in agony, Spad grabbed the front of the coat and slammed him into a chair.

"In New York, don't pack a rod except when you need it," Spad said grimly. "Once the cops find a heater on you, they can hold you in the can until you rot."

The young man cradled his middle, said nothing.

"Give him a hundred bucks, Locatella," Spad ordered.

Locatella removed five twenties from his billfold and pa.s.sed them over, without objecting.

"Now," Spad told the youngster, "you can take that dough and do a scram. Or you can stay, take orders and stick that lip out at somebody besides me."

The young man folded the money, doing so slowly, and by the time he pocketed it, had thought over the matter.

"I'll stick," he said.

Spad handed back the nickeled gun, said: "Throw that thing in the first river you come to. It's only good for noise."

Now Spad strode back and forth a few times. He had put on a good show, and he knew it. He'd had experience at handling men like these. Because he was going to use them immediately, he had to impress them-convince them that he knew what he was doing, that he was tough, but also fair, according to their standard. He had done so, he believed.

He made a little speech.

"We're going up against something pretty fantastic," he said, "so if you see something you don't understand, keep your s.h.i.+rts on."

He pulled the strange black arrowhead out of his pocket and showed it to them."Whenever you see anybody with one of these"-he shook the black arrowhead-"grab them right away. If you can't take them alive, kill them. And be careful. Anybody who has one of these black arrowheads isn't-well-they're not what you think they are."

They looked at him blankly.

"There are two people attending Phenix Academy," Spad Ames said. "They are named Mark and Ruth Colorado. We are going to get them tonight, and hold them as prisoners."

He gestured, and they all filed out of the office.

"You know where the Phenix Academy is?" Spad asked Locatella.

"Sure," Locatella said. "Uptown."

PHENIX ACADEMY was not widely known, for the good reason that it did not need to advertise itself-it did not use such devices as, for instance, a high-powered football team to make headlines in order to get students. Athletics were not even included in the curriculum; there was no gymnasium. There were not even any cla.s.srooms of the conventional type. Instead, there were laboratories.

Phenix was a modern venture in specialized higher education. Diplomas were not necessarily tickets of admission. Instead, one examining board ascertained how much the applicant actually knew, and another board, composed of psychologists, weeded out those who only wanted to learn a lot, and use the knowledge to get rich. Phenix Academy was trying not to turn out fortune-makers. There were students in Phenix who had never been in a high school, much less a college. And Phenix had turned down stellar graduates of Yale, Harvard and Heidelberg. So the inst.i.tution had a strange bunch in attendance.

Strangest of all Phenix students were Mark and Ruth Colorado. They had arrived quietly one day some months before, plainly dressed, and wearing something suspended on thin steel hairs around their necks.

"What previous education have you had?" they were asked.

"We understood one merely had to take an examination here," Mark Colorado said.

The examining officer had been a little irritated. These two were too confident.

"You'll get tested, all right," he snapped.

Results of the tests were peculiar.

"Amazing minds," reported the general science examining board. "Both brother and sister have an astounding fund of scientific knowledge which has come from books, apparently. And almost no workaday knowledge."

Reported the board of psychologists: "We are somewhat puzzled. Both applicants seem to know practically nothing about civilized customs. They might almost be persons not of this world at all. They refuse to tell anything of their past. In spite of strange circ.u.mstances, we suggest acceptance, because they unquestionably have the most brilliant minds of any Phenix applicants to date. We recommend observation, however."

Mark and Ruth Colorado puzzled the examining boards, and they became an enigma to professors and students.

Both Colorados were perfect physical specimens. Both had entirely white hair. They were also ofextremely fair complexion. They were not, as some at first supposed, albinos; for the term albino is applied to individuals whose features lack coloring pigment, and usually includes colorless eyes. The Colorados had deep-blue eyes of striking alertness and-it was often remarked-of eaglelike ability.

Ruth Colorado was breathtakingly beautiful. As was expected, none of the male students learned anything whatever when she first appeared in cla.s.ses. But the girl had nothing to do with men. None succeeded in dating her, although practically all tried.

Particularly noticeable was the way that both Mark and Ruth Colorado kept to themselves; and they rarely ventured off the campus.

Once a professor of languages heard them conversing in a strange tongue. The professor went home and got a headache trying to identify the lingo-he'd thought he had a smattering of every language being spoken, enough knowledge to identify the tongue, at least, but this one defeated him. When he asked the Colorados about it, all he received was a strange blank smile. And he got the idea they were worried because he had overheard them.

On another occasion, Mark Colorado went downtown for dinner with some of the men students. They discovered that Mark Colorado seemed a little shy on previous experience.

The dessert course came.

"What is this?" asked Mark Colorado.

"Ice cream," someone explained, staring at him curiously.

"Oh."

They took in a movie, and the strange white-haired fellow stared with rapt attention.

"Like the show?" one of the others asked.

"I never saw one before," said Mark Colorado.

They did some wondering about Mark and Ruth Colorado at Phenix Academy. "We recommend close observation," the board of psychologists had said. But the observers couldn't quite make up their minds.

Both Colorados still wore the thin steel chains around their necks, and one evening Mark and Ruth Colorado went swimming and onlookers got a chance to see what was suspended on the chains. Two black arrowheads.

It was noticed that both Colorados seemed to like to walk alone about the campus grounds at night.

Ruth Colorado was taking one of these nocturnal strolls, alone, when Spad Ames lunged out of the darkness and trapped her with his arms.

SPAD barked, "Help me, guys!" and the rest of his men rushed to his aid. If it struck any of them as foolish that a long wolf of a man like Spad Ames should need help to seize one girl, they were disillusioned, for Ruth Colorado got hold of one man's arm and twisted it out of joint, practically yanked an ear off another, and did a quant.i.ty of lesser damage before they threw her, gagged her, and hauled her into thick bushes.

A man folded a handkerchief over a flashlight lens and put a glow on the girl."I never saw white hair like that before," he muttered. "Except it's maybe a little like Spad's."

"Give me a hand!" croaked the man whose arm the girl had twisted. "She got my arm out of joint."

Spad Ames yanked strong cords out of his pockets and tied the girl, taking care with the knots, testing each binding carefully.

He seized the thin stainless steel chain around the girl's neck and dragged the black arrowhead into view.

s.n.a.t.c.hing the arrowhead quickly, he pocketed it.

During the fight, Herman Locatella had remained in the background where he would not be seen and identified, but his curiosity had overcome prudent caution, and he had stepped close enough to glimpse the article on the steel chain.

"Hey," he said. "What was that you grabbed?"

Spad Ames scowled at him. "You afraid of getting that monkey suit mussed? Why didn't you help us?"

"I'm doing my helping with dollars. Remember?" Locatella tapped Spad Ames on the chest with a stiff forefinger when the latter stood up. "Don't try to shove me around, Spad. What'd you find? Another arrowhead, wasn't it?"

Spad Ames ignored the question. He leaned over the girl, produced his own arrowhead, and let her see it. Her eyes widened. She was impressed.

"Where is your brother?" Spad Ames asked.

"Why should I tell you?" The girl spoke slowly, as if English was not her natural language.