another, a third, a fourth.
All were unconscious!
With mad haste, Liang-Sun shucked the rug off the head and shoulders of the man he had cut in two.
Liang-Sun's squawl of horrified surprise was like that of a cat with its tail stepped on.
The body in the rug was one of his own men!
Terror laid hold of Liang-Sun, a fright such as he had never before experienced. He dashed headlong out into the court.
'The bronze man is a devil!' he shrilled. 'Flee, my sons!'
The Orientals who had been on guard outside, needed no urging. They battled each other to be first across the drawbridge and into their cars. They had their fill of fighting the bronze giant.
They departed without knowing what had made their fellows unconscious. A close inspection of the room where the men slept would have shown the remains of many thin-walled glass balls. Perhaps they might have guessed these had originally contained an anaesthetic gas which made men unconscious the instant they breathed it, yet which became harmless after it had been in the air two or three minutes.
These anaesthetic globes were Doc's invention. He always carried a supply with him.
Cars bearing the fleeing Mongols were not out of earshot when Doc arose from the concealment of a divan not six feet from the phone over which Liang-Sun had talked to his chief.
Doc had heard that conversation.
Doc's escape from the tightly chained rug, so mystifying to Liang-Sun, had not been difficult. Doc had employed a simple trick used by escape artists. He had tensed all his muscles when the rug was being tied. Relaxing later, he had plenty of room to crawl out after he had reduced the guards to unconsciousness with the anaesthetic.
Doc had not been affected by the anaesthetic for the simple reason that he could hold his breath during the two or three minutes it was effective.
He sped out of the castle, with the idea of following Liang-Sun and the others. But they had stolen his gray roadster.
Doc ran for the nearest boulevard. It was a quarter of a mile distant. Had official timers held stop watches on that quarter, the time Doc did it in would have been good for a headline on any sport page in the country. But the only observer was a stray dog which sought to overhaul the bronze man.
On the boulevard, Doc hailed a taxi.
Chapter 5
THE DRAGON TRAIL
THE cab let Doc Savage out before an uptown New York police station. He entered. The marked deference of the cops, the celerity with which they sprang to grant his wishes, showed they knew him as a person of power. The police commissioner himself would not have gotten better service.
A 'back number' telephone directory was produced. This listed the phone numbers, and the names to which they belonged, rather than the name followed by a number, as in an ordinary directory.
Doc looked up the number Liang-Sun had called — Ocean 0117. It was listed as the:
DRAGON ORIENTAL GOODS CO.
The address was on Broadway, far south of the theatrical portion of the street known as the Great White Way.
Doc took a cab downtown. The hack driver wondered all the way why his passenger rode the running board of the taxi, rather than inside. The hackman had never before had a thing like that happen.
The building, housing the Dragon Oriental Goods Company, was a shabby, ten-story structure. It was decorated in the ornate fashion popular thirty years ago. 'The Far East Building,' a sign said.
Chinatown lay only a few blocks away.
Directly across the street, a new forty-story skyscraper was going up. The steel framework of this was nearing completion. A night force of men was pushing construction. Noise of riveting machines banged hollowly against near-by structures and throbbed in the street.
A dusty directory told Doc the Dragon concern occupied a tenth-floor office.
An elevator, driven by a man in greasy tan coveralls, was in operation. The fellow's round moon of a face and eyes sloping slightly upward at the outer ends advertised that some of his recent ancestors had come from the Far East.
This man never saw Doc enter. The bronze giant walked up. He did not want to advertise his presence — the elevator operator might get word to whoever was leading the Mongol horde.
The office of the Dragon Oriental Goods Company faced the front of the building. The door lock yielded readily to a thin steel hook of an implement from Doc's pocket. He entered.
No one was there.
For furniture, the place had a couple of desks, worn chairs, filing cabinets. Desk drawers and filing cabinets were empty. There was not a sheet of paper in the place. No finger prints were on the telephone, desk; window shade, or doorknob.
The window was dirty. Across the street, the girders of the building under construction made a pile like naked brush. The drum-drum of riveters was a somber song.
The elevator operator did not see Doc quit the building.
HALF an hour later, Doc entered his eighty-sixth-floor skyscraper office uptown.
He was surprised to find none of his five friends there. He consulted one of the elevator boys.
'They all five went out a few minutes ago to get something to eat,' explained the youth.
'When they come back, tell them I was here,' Doc directed.
He did not depart immediately, though. His next actions were unusual.
From a pocket, he took a bit of colorless substance shaped like a crayon. He wrote rapidly on his office window with this — putting down a lengthy message.
Yet when he finished, there was no trace of what he had written. Even a magnifying glass would not have disclosed the presence of the writing.
The elevator carried him down to the street. He walked away rapidly.
Some ten minutes later, his five men returned. Their faces mirrored the satisfaction of men who had just eaten a hearty shore dinner after some weeks of dining in the grease-soaked interior of a submarine.
'I missed the pint of grease I've had to take with my meals recently,' Monk grunted contentedly. Then he leered at Ham. 'Them pigs' knuckles and sauerkraut was swell!'
The distinguished, snappily clad Ham scowled at hairy Monk. Any mention of pigs that Monk made was sure to aggravate Ham. This hearkened back to a couple of incidents in the War.
Ham had taught Monk certain highly insulting French words, and told him they were just the thing to flatter a French general with. Monk had used them-and landed in the guardhouse.
Monk had barely been released when there occurred one of the most embarrassing incidents of Ham's career. He was hailed up on a charge of stealing hams. somebody had framed him!
To this day, Ham hadn't been able to prove the framing was Monk's work. That rankled. Especially since Ham had received his nickname from the incident; a nickname he didn't care for in the least.
'After the way you stuffed yourself, I have hopes!' Ham snapped.
'Hopes of what?' Monk queried.
'That you'll croak of indigestion!'
The elevator operator spoke up eagerly when he saw them.
'Mr. Savage was here, and has gone,' he said.
Doc's five men exchanged sharp glances. They lost no time getting up to the eighty-sixth floor.
