tumult overhead was beyond him.
Renny strained his eyes upward until they ached.
Sure enough, a hand grenade came sailing down the hatch.
Renny's machine gun blared. The burst of lead caught the grenade, exploded it. Renny was probably one of the most expert machine gunners ever to hold back a trigger. The noisy little weapons of Doc's invention, by no means easy to hold upon a target while operating, were steady as balanced pistols in his big paws.
There was quite a concussion as the grenade detonated. It harmed nobody, although a fragment hit Renny's bullet-proof
vest so hard it set him coughing. Doc, Ham, and Mindoro had dived to cover in the baggage.
'We can play that game with them!' Doc said dryly. He opened a second trunk, took out iron grenades the size of turkey eggs, and flirted two up through the hatch.
The twin roars brought a yowling, agonized burst of Oriental yells. The attackers withdrew a short distance and began pouring a steady stream of bullets at the hatch.
This continued some minutes. Then the hatch suddenly flopped shut. Chains rattled. The links were being employed to make the cover fast.
A flashlight appeared in Doc's hand. It lanced the darkness which now saturated the hold. Rapidly he tried all the exits.
'They've locked us in!' he told the others grimly.
MINDORO, lapsing into Spanish in his excitement, babbled expletives. 'This is incredible!' he fumbled. 'Imagine such a thing as this happening on one of the finest liners plying the Pacific! It feels unnatural!'
'I'll bet it feels natural to the pirates on deck,' Renny grunted. 'This is the way they work it on the China coast. The devils ship aboard as passengers and in the crew, then take over the craft at a signal.'
Comparative calm now settled upon the Malay Queen. The engines had not stopped; they continued to throb. They were modern and efficient, those engines. Up on deck they could not be heard. Down here in the hold they were barely audible.
'What are we going to do, Doc?' Ham wanted to know.
'Wait.'
'What on? They've got us locked in.'
'Which is probably fortunate for us,' Doc pointed out. 'We can hardly take over the ship, even if we whipped the whole gang. And they're slightly too many for us. We'll wait for — well, anything.'
'But what about Monk, Long Tom, and Johnny?'
Fully a minute ticked away before Doc answered.
'We shall have to take the chance that they'll be kept alive as long as I'm living — provided they haven't been eliminated already.'
'I don't think they have been killed,' Ham said optimistically. 'Tom Too is smart. He knows his three prisoners will be the price of his life should he fall into our hands. He won't throw away such a valuable prize.'
'My thought, too,' Doc admitted.
Mindoro was moved to put a delicate question. Perhaps the strain under which he was laboring made him blunt, for he ordinarily would have couched the query in the most diplomatic phraseology, or not have asked it at all.
'Would you turn Tom Too loose to save your friends?' he quizzed.
Doc's reply came with rapping swiftness.
'I'd turn the devil loose to save those three men!' He was silent the space of a dozen heartbeats, then added: 'And you can be sure that when they joined me, they'd turn around and catch the devil again.'
The others were silent. Mindoro wished he hadn't asked the question. There was something terrible about the depth of concern the big bronze man felt over the safety of his three friends — a concern which had hardly showed in his manner, but which was apparent here in the darkness of the hold, where they could not see him, but only hear his vibrant voice.
Minutes passed, swiftly at first, then slowly. They dragged into hours.
THE engines finally stopped. A rumble came from forward.
'The anchor dropping!' Doc declared.
'Any idea where we are?' Ham wanted to know.
'We've about had time to reach the harbor of Mantilla.'
The four men listened. The great liner whispered with faint sound, noises too vague for Ham, Renny, and Mindoro to identify. But Doc's highly tuned ears, his greater powers of concentration, fathomed the meaning of the murmurings.
'They're lowering the boats.'
'But this craft was supposed to tie up at the wharf in Mantilla,' said Mindoro.
Silence fell. They continued to strain their eardrums until they crackled protest.
This continued fully half an hour.
'The liner anchored in about seventy feet of water,' Doc stated.
'How can you tell?' Ham asked surprised.
'By the approximate number of anchor-chain links that went overboard. If you had listened carefully, you'd have noted each link made a jar as it went through the hawse hole.
Ham grinned. He had not thought of that. He gave their flashlight a fresh wind. This light used no battery, current being supplied by a spring-driven generator within the handle.
'Things have sort of quieted down,' murmured Renny, who had been sitting with an ear pressed to a bulkhead.
Mounting the metal ladder to the hold hatch, he struck the lid fiercely with his fist. Bullets instantly rattled against it. A few, driven by rifles, came inside. Renny descended hastily.
'They haven't gone off and left us!' he grunted, 'What d'you reckon they're planning to do?' Ham questioned.
'Nothing pleasant, you may be assured,' said Mindoro.
Mindoro's nerve was holding up. He showed none of the hysteria which comes of terror. His voice was not even unduly strained.
Faint sounds could now be heard on the deck immediately above. Wrack their ears as they might, Doc and his men could not tell what was happening.
'They're doing something!' Renny muttered, and that was as near as they came to solving the mystery.
The sounds ceased.
Mindoro's anxiety moved him to speak. 'Hadn't we better do something?'
'Let them make the first move,' Doc replied. 'We're in a position down here to cope with any emergency.'
Mindoro had his doubts; it looked to him as if they were merely trapped. But Ham and Renny understood what Doc meant — in Doc's baggage there was probably paraphernalia to meet any hostile gesture the pirates might make.
'This waiting gets in my hair!' Renny thumped. 'I wish something would happen! Anything — '
Whur-r-room!
The hull of the liner jumped inward, shoved by a monster sheet of flame and expanding gases.
The Orientals had lowered dynamite overside and exploded it below the water line!
TRUNKS and valises were shoveled to the opposite side of the hold by the blast. Fortunately the liner hull absorbed much of the explosion force.
Doc and his three companions extricated themselves from the mess of baggage.
A wall of water poured through the rent in the hull. It scooted across the hold floor. A moaning, swirling flood, it rose rapidly.
Instinct sent Ham, Renny and Mindoro to the ladder that led to the deck hatch. They mounted.
