Last came the most remarkable character of all. Only a few inches over five feet tall, he weighed better than two hundred and sixty pounds. He had the build of a gorilla, arms six inches longer than his legs, a chest thicker than it was wide. His eyes were so surrounded by gristle as to resemble pleasant little stars twinkling in pits. He grinned with a mouth so very big it looked like an accident.
'Monk!' No other name could fit him!
He was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, but he heard the full name so seldom he had about forgotten what it sounded like.
The men entered the sumptuously furnished reception room of the office suite. After the first greeting, they were silent, uncomfortable. They didn't know what to say.
Doc Savage's father had died from a weird cause since they last saw Doc.
The elder Savage had been known throughout the world for his dominant bearing and his good work. Early in life, he had amassed a tremendous fortune for one purpose.
That purpose was to go here and there, from one end of the world to the other, looking for excitement and adventure, striving to help those who needed help, punishing those who deserved it.
To that creed he had devoted his life.
His fortune had dwindled to practically nothing. But as it shrank, his influence had increased. It was unbelievably wide, a heritage befitting the man.
Greater even, though, was the heritage he had given his son. Not in wealth, but in training to take up his career of adventure and righting of wrongs where it left off.
Clark Savage, Jr., had been reared from the cradle to become the supreme adventurer.
Hardly had Doc learned to walk, when his father started him taking the routine of exercises to which he still adhered. Two hours each day, Doc exercised intensively all his muscles, senses,and his brain.
As a result of these exercises, Doc possessed a strength superhuman. There was no magic about it, though. Doc had simply built up muscle intensively all his life.
Doc's mental training had started with medicine and surgery. It had branched out to include all arts and sciences. Just as Doc could easily overpower the gorilla-like Monk in spite of his great strength, so did Doc know more about chemistry. And that applied to Renny, the engineer; Long Tom, the electrical wizard; Johnny, the geologist and archaeologist; and Ham, the lawyer.
Doc had been well trained for his work.
Grief lay heavily upon Doc's five friends. The elder Savage had been close to their hearts.
'Your father's death — was three weeks ago,' Renny said at last.
Doc nodded slowly. 'So I learned from the newspapers when I got back to-day.'
Renny groped for words, said finally: 'We tried to get you in every way. But you were gone — as if you had been off the face of the earth.'
Doc looked at the window. There was grief in his gold eyes.
Chapter 2. A MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD
Falling rain strewed the outer side of the windowpane with water. Far below, very pallid in the soaking murk, were street lights. Over on the Hudson River, a steamer was tooting a foghorn. The frightened, mooing horn was hardly audible inside the room.
Some blocks away, the skyscraper under construction loomed a darksome pile, crowned with a spidery labyrinth of steel girders. Only the vaguest outlines of it were discernible.
Impossible, of course, to glimpse the strange, crimson-fingered servant of death in that wilderness of metal!
Doc Savage said slowly: 'I was far away when my father died.'
He did not explain where he had been, did not mention his 'Fortress of Solitude,' his rendezvous built on a rocky island deep in the arctic regions. He had been there.
It was to this spot that Doc retired periodically to brush up on the newest developments in science, psychology, medicine, engineering. This was the secret of his universal knowledge, for his periods of concentration there were long and intense.
The Fortress of Solitude had been his father's recommendation. And no one on earth knew the location of the retreat. Once there, nothing could interrupt Doc's studies and experiments.
Without taking his golden eyes from the wet window, Doc asked: 'Was there anything strange about my father's death?'
''We're not certain,' Renny muttered, and set his thin lips in an expression of ominousness.
'I, for one, am certain!' snapped Littlejohn. He settled more firmly on his nose the glasses which had the extremely thick left lens.
'What do you mean, Johnny?' Doc Savage asked.
'I am positive your father was murdered!' Johnny's gauntness, his studious scientist look, gave him a profoundly serious expression.
Doc Savage swung slowly from the window His bronze face had not changed expression. But under his brown business coat, tensing muscles had made his arms inches farther around.
'Why do you say that, Johnny?'
Johnny hesitated. His right eye narrowed, the left remaining wide and a little blank behind the thick spectacle lens. He shrugged.
'Only a hunch,' he admitted, then added, almost shouting: 'I'm right about it! I know I am!'
That was Johnny's way. He had absolute faith in what he called his hunches. And nearly always he was right. On occasions when he was wrong, though, he was very wrong indeed.
'Exactly what did the doctors say caused death?' Doc asked. Doc's voice was low, pleasant, but a voice capable of great volume and changing tone.
Renny answered that. Renny's voice was like thunder gobbling out of a cave. 'The doctors didn't know. It was a new one on them. Your father broke out with queer circular red patches on his neck. And he lasted only a couple of days.'
'I ran all kinds of chemical tests, trying to find if it was poison or germs or what it was caused the red spots,' Monk interposed, slowly opening and closing his huge, red-furred fists. 'I never found out a thing!'
Monk's looks were deceiving. His low forehead apparently didn't contain room for a spoonful of brains. Actually, Monk was in a way of being the most widely known chemist in America. He was a Houdini of the test tubes.
'We have no facts upon which to base suspicion!' clipped Ham, the waspish Harvard lawyer whose quick thinking had earned him a brigadier generalship in the World War. 'But we're suspicious anyway.'
Doc Savage moved abruptly across the room to a steel safe. The safe was huge, reaching above his shoulders. He swung it open.
It was instantly evident explosive had torn the lock out of the safe door.
A long, surprised gasp swished around the room.
'I found it broken into when I came back,' Doc explained. 'Maybe that has a connection with my father's death. Maybe not.'
Doc's movements were rhythmic as he swung over and perched on a corner of the big, inlaid table before the window. His eyes roved slowly over the beautifully furnished office. There was another office adjoining, larger, which contained a library of technical books that was priceless because of its completeness.
Adjoining that was the vast laboratory room, replete with apparatus for chemical and electrical experiments.
This was about all the worldly goods the elder Savage had left behind.
'What's eating you, Doc?' asked the giant Renny. 'We all got the word from you to show up here tonight. Why?'
Doc Savage's strange golden eyes roved over the assembled men; from Renny, whose knowledge of engineering in all its branches was profound, to Long Tom, who was an electrical wizard, to Johnny, whose fund of
