Doc sank beside the man. When the fellow saw he was not to be harmed more, he quieted a little.
'You were hired to kill Jerome Coffern?' Doc asked in a calm, compelling voice.
'No! No!' wailed the dying man. But the expression on his pinched and paling face showed he was lying.
For a moment, Doc said nothing. He exerted the full, strange quality of his golden eyes. Those eyes were warm and comforting now. Doc was making them exert a command for the truth.
It was amazing, the things Doc could do with his eyes. He had studied with the great masters of hypnotism, just as he had studied with famous surgeons. He had even gone to India and the Orient to gain knowledge from the mystic cults of the Far East.
By the time Doc asked his next question, he had exerted such a hypnotic influence upon the dying man that the fellow replied with the truth.
'What is the strange substance that dissolved the body of Jerome Coffern?' Doc prompted.
'It is called the Smoke of Eternity,' whimpered the dying man.
'Of what is it made?'
'I don’t know. None of us know. None of us little guys, that is. The Smoke of Eternity is just given us to use. We never get more than one cartridge at a time. And — and we get — get orders of who to use it on.'
The man was about gone. Swiftly, Doc questioned, 'Who gives it to you?'
The thin lips parted. The man gulped. He seemed to be trying to speak a name that started with the letter 'K.'
But he died before he could voice that name.
OF the five who had gone to New Jersey to slay Jerome Coffern, only Squint was now alive.
A bronze giant of vengeance, Doc made for the stern of the strange old buccaneer ship. Squint was back there somewhere.
A time or two, Doc paused to press an ear to the deck planking. To his supersensitive ears, many sounds came. Wavelets lapped the hull. Rats scurried in the hold. Animal rats, these were.
Finally, Doc heard Squint skulking.
Doc reached a companionway. He eased down it, a noiseless metal shadow that faded into darker shadows below. He came upon a long, heavy timber. It was round, a length of an old spar. It weighed nearly two hundred pounds and was a dozen feet in length, thick as a keg. He carried it along easily.
The spar promptly saved him death or serious injury. He was thinking of what he had read in the Sunday paper. He never forgot things he read.
The article had said there was a trapdoor in a passage which let the unwary upon a bed of upturned swords. He figured Squint might put that death trap in operation again.
Squint had.
So, when a passage floor suddenly opened under his weight, it was not an accident that the twelve-foot spar kept Doc from dropping upon needle-pointed blades below. Probably some old pirate had constructed this trap to bring death to one of his fellows he didn’t like.
With a deft swing, Doc got atop the spar. He ran along it to solid footing. Then he picked up the heavy spar again.
Squint had been waiting behind a door at the end of the passage. At the crash of the sprung trapdoor, he let out a loud bark of glee. He thought Doc was finished. Doc heard the bark.
To accommodate him, Doc emitted a realistic moan. It was the kind of a moan a man dying on those upturned swords might have given. It fooled Squint.
He opened the passage door.
Before the door could swing the whole way, Doc hurled the spar. He purposefully missed Squint. The spar burst the door planks with a resounding smash.
Squint spun and fled. He was so terrified he didn’t even stop to use his gun.
He must have been surprised when Doc’s powerful hands did not fall upon his neck. Probably he considered himself quite a master of strategy when he reached deck without seeing another sign of Doc.
He did not have the sense to know Doc had purposefully let him escape.
Almost at once, Squint quitted the pirate ship. He left furtively. He looked behind often. But not once did he catch sight of the terrible Nemesis of bronze.
'Gave him the slip!' Squint chortled, almost sobbing in his relief.
As he crept away, he continued to look behind. His elation grew. There was no sign of Doc.
Actually, Doc was
Doc hoped Squint would lead him to the sinister mastermind who had ordered Jerome Coffern slain.
Chapter 4. THE NEST OF EVIL
SQUINT climbed up to Riverside Drive. He dodged limousines and taxicabs across the Drive. Turning south a few blocks, he strode rapidly east until he reached Broadway, the sole street which runs the full length of Manhattan Island. A subway lies beneath Broadway nearly the whole distance.
Into this subway, Squint scuttled. He cocked a nickel into the entrance turnstile and waited on the white- tiled station platform. The light was dim. At either end, dark gullets of the tunnel gaped.
Squint felt safe. He had been listening to the entrance turnstile. The turnstiles always gave a loud clank when a customer came through. There had not been a single clank since Squint entered.
A subway train came howling down the tunnel, headlights like bleary red eyes. The roar it made, to which New Yorkers are accustomed, was deafening. At the height of the noise, the entrance turnstile clanked behind Doc Savage’s giant, bronze form. Nobody saw him.
Doc saw Squint wait in a car door until the other doors in the train, operated automatically, had all closed. Squint held his own door open against the gentle pull of the automatic mechanism. When he was satisfied no bronze giant had boarded the train, he let the door close. The train moved.
Running lightly, Doc reached an open car window. He dived through it. The train plunged into the tunnel with a great moan.
Squint alighted at Times Square, which might easily be dubbed the crossroads of New York City. He mingled with the dense crowd. He went in one door of a skyscraper and out another. He changed taxis twice going back uptown.
Unseen, his presence even unsuspected by Squint, a great bronze shadow clung to Squint’s trail.
Squint wound up on the street which had the long row of houses exactly alike.
Before the tenth house from the corner, a considerable crowd milled. Long since, an ambulance had taken away the body of the ratty man whose neck Doc had been forced to break. However, the police had found the cache of machine guns beneath the floorboards of the touring car. Curious persons were inspecting the vicious weapons.
A cop was getting the motor number of the car.
Squint chuckled. The officers would never trace that machine to him. It had been stolen in a Middle Western State.
'Let ‘em try to figure it out!' Squint sneered.
Then his gaze rested on Doc Savage’s big, efficient roadster, and his ugly glee oozed. He could see the license number of the car. This was a single figure. Only personages of great importance in New York had such low license numbers.
Squint shivered, thinking of the fearsome giant of bronze. He wondered who that awesome personage could be.
Squint had never heard of Doc Savage, largely because he never read anything but the newspapers, and Doc Savage never appeared in brazen newspaper yarns. In truth, Squint’s intelligence was not enough to rate a
