DOC Savage’s mobile, strong lips made the slightest of appreciative smiles. Whether old-time corsairs had actually used smoke screens was immaterial. This was probably faked, like most of the other stuff aboard the ship.
But if it was desired to lay a smoke screen over this part of the river without attracting suspicion, here was an ingenious method. If anybody asked questions, the proprietors of the pirate exhibit could claim somebody had paid them a dollar to make the smoke.
BESIDE the smoke-maker stood a man. He had not yet become aware of Doc’s presence. The man was cleaning ashes out of the smoke-maker.
The fellow was tall and thin. His pasty complexion, his shaking hands, his inarticulate mumbling, marked him as a drug addict.
'Well?' said Doc.
The man whirled. His mean eyes goggled. His teeth rattled as a great terror seized him.
He was one of the unsavory crew assembled by Squint in that tenth house of the row of similar dwellings.
Suddenly, he leaped across the galley, pitched through a door. His feet hammered down a passage.
'Stop!' Doc rapped.
The terrified man never heeded. He was not long on nerve. And he had heard enough about Doc to know the giant bronze man was Nemesis to his kind.
Doc pursued. He put a great deal of effort in his flashing lunge. He wanted to question this rat. And he knew he would have to get the fellow before —
It happened!
Came a piercing shriek! It ended in a ghastly thunking sound and a horrible gurgling.
The man had fallen through the death trap in the passage — the trap from which the spar had saved Doc.
The upended swords in the pit under the trapdoor had thorned out the life of the fellow before Doc reached him!
Doc slowly returned to the deck. He had hoped to learn why the smoke screen had just been placed. His chance for that was gone with the thin man’s death.
Thus also had vanished whatever chance Doc might have had of learning that Monk was in a submersible barge under the river near by.
Chapter 9. THE COLD KILLER
DOC SAVAGE moved toward the bows of the corsair craft. He desired to ascertain what had become of the bodies of Squint’s unlucky companions. He had noted that the one who had died from the shock of a dismembered hand no longer reposed upon the deck.
The bodies had been added to the grisly exhibits of pirate butchery in the hold. A few garments of the seventeenth century had been drawn carelessly upon the bodies. So realistic was the rest of the exhibit that the real corpses fitted in perfectly with the ghastly scene. They could hardly be told from the papier-mвchй victims of corsair lust.
Doc began at the bows and searched the buccaneer craft minutely.
He soon found a twisted pair of insulated wires of a telephone line. These came aboard inside one of the rope hawsers that moored the vessel to the wharf. So cleverly were they concealed that they would have escaped any but an unusually intent inspection.
Doc traced the wires. They descended to the very keel, near the limber board. Here they were covered with rubber for protection from the bilge water. They progressed aft. At times Doc was forced to tear up planking to keep track of them.
Near the stern, the wires suddenly passed through the hull into the water.
Doc returned to the deck. He stood near the taffrail. His golden eyes roved the river surface.
Entering the deck house, he removed his outer clothing and shoes. An amazing figure of bronze, he returned to the stern. He poised at the taffrail.
But he did not dive overboard immediately to follow the wires underwater.
A great bubble arose a few yards out in the river. A second came. Then a
This was air leaving the underwater cell in which Monk was imprisoned. The escaping air made room for the water that was drowning Monk.
But Doc knew only that the phenomenon was something suspicious. He waited to see what would happen next. Nothing did, except that the bubbles ceased to arise.
Doc dropped into the river. He drew plenty of air into his lungs before he struck. He swam, beneath the surface, out to the spot where the bubbles arose.
His powerful hands soon touched the steel tanklike submersible which lay on the river bottom. He explored along it. He found a box of a protuberance. This was the size of a very large trunk.
He heard faint struggle sounds from within the box.
Instantly, his great fingers went to work on the hatch which gave admission to the box. He got it open.
Monk toppled out.
MONK was a mighty distressed man, but far from dead. Opening his eyes, he could see Doc faintly in the water.
Monk’s ill-timed bark of pleasure expelled the last vestige of air from his lungs. As a result, his drowning was nearly finished before Doc could get him to the surface.
'Imagine finding you here!' Doc chuckled. 'You pick the strangest places to visit!'
Monk spouted a prodigious quantity of river water. He held up his manacled arms.
'Get these off, Doc!' he roared. 'I’m gonna dive back down there and give them babies a taste of their own medicine! I’ll tear a hole in the thing if nothing else!'
Doc Savage grasped the first of the three handcuffs on Monk’s wrists. He brought the manacle close to his great chest and pulled.
Monstrous muscles popped out on his arms and shoulders. The handcuff chain snapped apart.
With successive duplications of this remarkable feat, Doc shattered the other cuffs securing Monk’s wrists and ankles.
Monk immediately prepared to dive to the tank of a submarine on the river bottom. His pleasantly ugly face sank. He was thirsting for vengeance on the men who had tried to murder him.
Doc Savage followed him down.
Doc it was who found a way to attack those inside the sunken tank of the craft. He discovered the dogs which held the entrance lid could be worked from the outside as well as the inside. They operated on the principle which is occasionally applied to the hatches of regulation submarines.
With a twist, Doc threw them. His powerful arms wrenched up the lid. With a great rush, water poured in.
Doc stroked back to the surface. Monk sputtered and splashed there, his simian face disappointed.
'I had no luck!' he growled.
'Watch it!' Doc called. 'They’ll be swimming out!'
Hardly had the warning been voiced when a streaming head broke water. Monk’s fist swung like a sledge. The victim would have drowned had Monk not seized and held him.
A second of Kar’s men came up from the tanklike craft, which, no doubt, was already filled with water. Doc captured that one. For the next few seconds, half-drowned villains bobbed on all sides.
