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"Take 'er off, matey," howled Ben O'Gard. "Rust my — " He fell silent. The drone of a plane had come to their ears. "That's Keelhaul de Rosa comin' back," bawled the walrus. "Hurry, matey. Our lives is in your hands."
"I wish they were," Doc said under his breath. Then, aloud:
"Give me the best machine gun. And throw every other weapon overboard."
"Aw, don't worry about us keepin' our hands offn you from now on,' fawned the walrus. "Why, we'll cut you in on a share of the boodle — "
"Over with the guns," Doc rapped.
There was more squawking. But the motor sound of the approaching plane was like the howl of doom. No argument could have been more persuasive. Falling pistols, rifles, knives, and machine guns whipped the surrounding water into a foam.
Doc waited until the last arm vanished.
Then his mighty bronze form plugged into the tiny seaplane cockpit. The motor purred like a big cat.
He took the air. The all-important valve went with him.
Every fourth or fifth slug it fired was a phosphorus-burning tracer. The bullets scuffed the water below Doc's fleet little flivver craft. In the green sea, before they were extinguished, the tracers glowed like a streak of scattered sparks.
Cobwebby, gruesome, tracer strings waved before Doc's golden eyes. Phosphorus fumes reeked in his nostrils. Lead gashed a hole in the right-wing bank. The flivver wouldn't stand much of that.
Doc banked quickly. The tiny seaplane was agile as a fly in his master hand.
Twice more, Keelhaul de Rosa's killer craft dived angrily. Its lead missed both times.
Ben O'Gard and his gang now gathered the fruit of all that squawking about giving up their guns, They had delayed Doc almost too long.
Keelhaul de Rosa's plane swooped upon the Helldiver. It released an elongated metal egg. This hatched a choice lump of hell alongside the submarine. Water geysered two hundred feet in the air. A huge wave sprang outward in a circle.
Over heeled the sub, over — over. It writhed. It skewered like a tadpole out of water.
Then it slipped free of the ledge upon which it had been hung.
For a long minute, the Helldiver was lost under the water. Then it came up — and floated.
Doc flung his flivver for the other plane. If size of the craft had been important, the scrap would have been ridiculous. Doc's steed was to the other like a sparrow to a hawk. But size counts little in an air battle.
Doc, however, was handicapped by having to fly his plane and shoot his sub-machine gun by hand at the same time.
He jockeyed in above the enemy. His rapid-firer burred noisily, the breech mechanism spewing a string of smoking empty cartridges.
The other plane jumped in the sky like a thing bitten,
Keelhaul de Rosa's seaplane was a low-wing, all-metal job of late production. Its two motors were huge and speed-cowled for efficiency. Even the pontoon floats were streamlined in a fashion which made them virtually another pair of small wings.
Only two men occupied the craft.
Neither of these was Keelhaul de Rosa. They had, rather, the wind-burned look of professional airmen of the northland. Probably Keelhaul de Rosa had picked them up to do his flying.
The jockeying for position ended suddenly. A quick flip of Doc's bronze wrist, a gentle pressure from one foot, and the tiny seaplane pounced like a bull pup. It was doubtful if the pair in the big plane understood quite how the maneuver had been managed. But Doc was upon them while the pilot still goggled through the empty sight rings of his cowl rapidfirers.
Doc's small machine gun shimmied and lipped flame. His bullets pushed cabin windows out of the other ship. They tore the goggles off the other pilot.
The big plane did half a wingover, eased into a dizzy slip, and would have collided with Doc's little bus. He evaded it by zooming sharply.
The second man in Keelhaul de Rosa's craft took over the controls.
Once again, the man-made birds skulked each other's sky trails warily. The motors panted and steamed. The evil gray mist squirmed and boiled in the prop wakes.
Doc got in a burst. His lead started colorless streams of liquid stringing from the wings of the other plane. He had opened the fuel tanks in the wings.
In return, he took a lead-whipping that gnawed a ragged area in the fuselage of his little fiivver. After that, the craft flew with a strangely broken-backed feel.
Then fresh trouble loomed. Doc's fuel gauge needle had retreated a lot. It already covered the first two letters of the word "empty." There had been no time to charge the fuel tanks before he took off.
Doc calculated. Fifteen minutes more, and he would have to come down. He'd better finish this sky brawl quickly.
For the second time. Doc's small craft pulled its bewildering pounce of a maneuver. His gun hammered. Lead went home to vital points of the opposing plane. The plane climbed up on its tail and hung hooting at the borealis. It slipped off on a wing tip. It rocked into a tailspin.
It hit a floe hard enough to knock a hole through four feet of pan ice. After that, nothing was left but a wad of tin and wire sticking out of the ice.
Doc slammed his bus back for the cove. He found it in the gray haze.
A disquieting sight met his gaze.
The Helldiver was stealing straight for the open sea — or, rather, the ice-covered sea. All hatches were battened.
Doc's powerful bronze hand closed over the tank valve. He had it in the plane cockpit. If the submarine dived with the tank open, it would never come up.
The sub dived!
Doc's bronze features, remarkably handsome in their rugged masculine way, did not alter expression. He banked away. The tiny folding seaplane climbed. It boomed along at the speed most economical on the fuel.
Doc was hunting his friends.
The outlook was not pleasant. The plane his friends had flown was no match for Keelhaul de Rosa's killer ship. This tiny collapsible crate of Doc's was far more efficient, and Keelhaul de Rosa's bus would have sky-scalped it easily except for Doc's master hand at the controls.
The fog wrapped him around like an odious, ash-colored death shroud. The small engine moaned defiantly. But its life blood, the high-test gas in the tank, ran lower and lower.
Suddenly Doc sighted a human figure below. It was a tiny form. It crawled on all fours, like a white ant in its light-hued fur garments.
Doc dropped his plane to within a score of feet of the ice. The jagged hummocks fanged hungrily at the floats. They seemed to miss them by scant inches.
The crawling human being flashed beneath
It was Victor Vail. He carried a bundle of white silk.
Doc's bronze head gave the barest of nods. He could guess why Victor Vail was down there, carrying the folds of a parachute.
Monk, Renny, Long Tom, Ham. and Johnny — Doc's five iron-nerved, capable friends — had given battle to the sky killer of Keelhaul de Rosa. They had dumped Victor Vail overboard by chute. They had wanted him clear of danger. That meant they knew they were fighting hopeless odds.
It boded ill for Doc's five pals, did that crawling figure of Victor Vail. It meant the five had felt they were going to their death.
Doc flew on. He aimed the noisy snout of his little plane in the direction Victor Vail was crawling. For the violinist had been headed, not for land, but out into the grisly waste of the polar ice pack.
This indicated he had some goal out there.
Doc found that goal in slightly more than a minute-about two miles from where Victor Vail crept.
It was a horrible sight. The mighty bronze man had seen few more ghastly. None that tore at the insides of him like this one did!
A ruptured seaplane float lay on the ice. It was a mass of splinters. Forty yards farther on was the second. Then the ice bore a sprinkling of airplane fragments.
A section of a wing still poured off gruesome yellow smoke.
Gaping, sinister, an open lead in the ice yawned just beyond. Into this had plainly gone engine, fuselage, and the heavier parts of the plane.
To Doc's golden eyes, the whole sickening story was clearly 'written. Tracer bullets had fired the fuel tanks of the shabby seaplane. It had crashed in flames.
The odious green depths of the polar sea was the grave of whatever and whoever had been in the fuselage when the old crate cracked up.
Doc circled slowly.
The engine of his plane gurgled loudly. It coughed.
Then it stopped dead.
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
"I wish they were," Doc said under his breath. Then, aloud:
"Give me the best machine gun. And throw every other weapon overboard."
"Aw, don't worry about us keepin' our hands offn you from now on,' fawned the walrus. "Why, we'll cut you in on a share of the boodle — "
"Over with the guns," Doc rapped.
There was more squawking. But the motor sound of the approaching plane was like the howl of doom. No argument could have been more persuasive. Falling pistols, rifles, knives, and machine guns whipped the surrounding water into a foam.
Doc waited until the last arm vanished.
Then his mighty bronze form plugged into the tiny seaplane cockpit. The motor purred like a big cat.
He took the air. The all-important valve went with him.
* * *
HE WAS none too soon. With a bawl like a banshee spawned by the foul gray haze overhead, Keelhaul de Rosa's plane dived. It opened with a machine gun. The craft had come into the arctic spurred for war. It had a pair of cowl guns, synchronized through the prop.Every fourth or fifth slug it fired was a phosphorus-burning tracer. The bullets scuffed the water below Doc's fleet little flivver craft. In the green sea, before they were extinguished, the tracers glowed like a streak of scattered sparks.
Cobwebby, gruesome, tracer strings waved before Doc's golden eyes. Phosphorus fumes reeked in his nostrils. Lead gashed a hole in the right-wing bank. The flivver wouldn't stand much of that.
Doc banked quickly. The tiny seaplane was agile as a fly in his master hand.
Twice more, Keelhaul de Rosa's killer craft dived angrily. Its lead missed both times.
Ben O'Gard and his gang now gathered the fruit of all that squawking about giving up their guns, They had delayed Doc almost too long.
Keelhaul de Rosa's plane swooped upon the Helldiver. It released an elongated metal egg. This hatched a choice lump of hell alongside the submarine. Water geysered two hundred feet in the air. A huge wave sprang outward in a circle.
Over heeled the sub, over — over. It writhed. It skewered like a tadpole out of water.
Then it slipped free of the ledge upon which it had been hung.
For a long minute, the Helldiver was lost under the water. Then it came up — and floated.
Doc flung his flivver for the other plane. If size of the craft had been important, the scrap would have been ridiculous. Doc's steed was to the other like a sparrow to a hawk. But size counts little in an air battle.
Doc, however, was handicapped by having to fly his plane and shoot his sub-machine gun by hand at the same time.
He jockeyed in above the enemy. His rapid-firer burred noisily, the breech mechanism spewing a string of smoking empty cartridges.
The other plane jumped in the sky like a thing bitten,
* * *
NO SERIOUS damage had been inflicted, however. The two craft sparred wanly. At this, they were about evenly matched.Keelhaul de Rosa's seaplane was a low-wing, all-metal job of late production. Its two motors were huge and speed-cowled for efficiency. Even the pontoon floats were streamlined in a fashion which made them virtually another pair of small wings.
Only two men occupied the craft.
Neither of these was Keelhaul de Rosa. They had, rather, the wind-burned look of professional airmen of the northland. Probably Keelhaul de Rosa had picked them up to do his flying.
The jockeying for position ended suddenly. A quick flip of Doc's bronze wrist, a gentle pressure from one foot, and the tiny seaplane pounced like a bull pup. It was doubtful if the pair in the big plane understood quite how the maneuver had been managed. But Doc was upon them while the pilot still goggled through the empty sight rings of his cowl rapidfirers.
Doc's small machine gun shimmied and lipped flame. His bullets pushed cabin windows out of the other ship. They tore the goggles off the other pilot.
The big plane did half a wingover, eased into a dizzy slip, and would have collided with Doc's little bus. He evaded it by zooming sharply.
The second man in Keelhaul de Rosa's craft took over the controls.
Once again, the man-made birds skulked each other's sky trails warily. The motors panted and steamed. The evil gray mist squirmed and boiled in the prop wakes.
Doc got in a burst. His lead started colorless streams of liquid stringing from the wings of the other plane. He had opened the fuel tanks in the wings.
In return, he took a lead-whipping that gnawed a ragged area in the fuselage of his little fiivver. After that, the craft flew with a strangely broken-backed feel.
Then fresh trouble loomed. Doc's fuel gauge needle had retreated a lot. It already covered the first two letters of the word "empty." There had been no time to charge the fuel tanks before he took off.
Doc calculated. Fifteen minutes more, and he would have to come down. He'd better finish this sky brawl quickly.
For the second time. Doc's small craft pulled its bewildering pounce of a maneuver. His gun hammered. Lead went home to vital points of the opposing plane. The plane climbed up on its tail and hung hooting at the borealis. It slipped off on a wing tip. It rocked into a tailspin.
It hit a floe hard enough to knock a hole through four feet of pan ice. After that, nothing was left but a wad of tin and wire sticking out of the ice.
Doc slammed his bus back for the cove. He found it in the gray haze.
A disquieting sight met his gaze.
The Helldiver was stealing straight for the open sea — or, rather, the ice-covered sea. All hatches were battened.
Doc's powerful bronze hand closed over the tank valve. He had it in the plane cockpit. If the submarine dived with the tank open, it would never come up.
The sub dived!
* * *
TWO MINUTES — three — Doc circled the spot where the Helldiver had gone under the ice pack. Green water boiled. A lot of bubbles came up. Small growlers of ice cavorted like filthy blue animals. And that was all.Doc's bronze features, remarkably handsome in their rugged masculine way, did not alter expression. He banked away. The tiny folding seaplane climbed. It boomed along at the speed most economical on the fuel.
Doc was hunting his friends.
The outlook was not pleasant. The plane his friends had flown was no match for Keelhaul de Rosa's killer ship. This tiny collapsible crate of Doc's was far more efficient, and Keelhaul de Rosa's bus would have sky-scalped it easily except for Doc's master hand at the controls.
The fog wrapped him around like an odious, ash-colored death shroud. The small engine moaned defiantly. But its life blood, the high-test gas in the tank, ran lower and lower.
Suddenly Doc sighted a human figure below. It was a tiny form. It crawled on all fours, like a white ant in its light-hued fur garments.
Doc dropped his plane to within a score of feet of the ice. The jagged hummocks fanged hungrily at the floats. They seemed to miss them by scant inches.
The crawling human being flashed beneath
It was Victor Vail. He carried a bundle of white silk.
Doc's bronze head gave the barest of nods. He could guess why Victor Vail was down there, carrying the folds of a parachute.
Monk, Renny, Long Tom, Ham. and Johnny — Doc's five iron-nerved, capable friends — had given battle to the sky killer of Keelhaul de Rosa. They had dumped Victor Vail overboard by chute. They had wanted him clear of danger. That meant they knew they were fighting hopeless odds.
It boded ill for Doc's five pals, did that crawling figure of Victor Vail. It meant the five had felt they were going to their death.
Doc flew on. He aimed the noisy snout of his little plane in the direction Victor Vail was crawling. For the violinist had been headed, not for land, but out into the grisly waste of the polar ice pack.
This indicated he had some goal out there.
Doc found that goal in slightly more than a minute-about two miles from where Victor Vail crept.
It was a horrible sight. The mighty bronze man had seen few more ghastly. None that tore at the insides of him like this one did!
A ruptured seaplane float lay on the ice. It was a mass of splinters. Forty yards farther on was the second. Then the ice bore a sprinkling of airplane fragments.
A section of a wing still poured off gruesome yellow smoke.
Gaping, sinister, an open lead in the ice yawned just beyond. Into this had plainly gone engine, fuselage, and the heavier parts of the plane.
To Doc's golden eyes, the whole sickening story was clearly 'written. Tracer bullets had fired the fuel tanks of the shabby seaplane. It had crashed in flames.
The odious green depths of the polar sea was the grave of whatever and whoever had been in the fuselage when the old crate cracked up.
Doc circled slowly.
The engine of his plane gurgled loudly. It coughed.
Then it stopped dead.
Chapter 13
ICE GHOSTS
THE FUEL had run out. Doc realized this — and slammed the nose down.
Practically no height for maneuvering lay below. The little flivver, due to small wingspread and not inconsiderable weight, would glide about as well as a brickbat.
The only landing place was the lead which had swallowed the remains of the shabby seaplane flown by Doc's friends. And that had hardly the width of a city street. It was about half a block long.
Had Doc Savage's hand on the controls been a whit less masterful than it was, the rent in the arctic ice would have claimed his life. Nothing short of a miracle was the landing Doc made in the cramped space.
Above one end of the lead — smaller than many a private swimming pool — the plane abruptly turned broadside in the air. As swiftly, it turned to the other side. This fishtail maneuver lowered air speed to near the stalling point. With a sizable splash, the floats dug in the icy water. They plunged so deep the plane wetted its bottom.
Doc had known from the first he was due for a crack-up. He was not wrong. The plane sloughed for the wall of ice. Doc vaulted out of the cockpit
Only fractional seconds elapsed between the time the plane plumped into the water and the instant it smashed into the icy bank of the lead. It taxed even Doc's blinding speed to get out of the control bucket in time. He leaped. His feet landed on the ice. He slid a dozen yards as though on skates.
The plane hit. There was a jangling crash remindful of an armload of tin cans dumped on a concrete walk. Metal rent, crumpled. The plane sank like a monkey wrench.
By the time Doc had ceased sliding and wheeled back, the craft was gone. The repellent water boiled as in a hideous cauldron. Big bubbles climbed to the surface with ghastly glub-glubs. It was as though a living thing was drowning in the depths.
Doc Savage turned away. The valve from the submarine had gone down with the plane. So had the machine gun.
Doc stood on the menacing arctic ice pack armed only with his tremendous muscles and his keen brain. He had no food. He had no tent, no bedding, no boat to cross leads in the ice.
Probably no one could have understood more fully than Doc the meaning of this. He was in a region so rugged, so bleak, that out of countless expeditions traveling on the ice and equipped with the finest of dog teams and food, few escaped a dire fate.
Yet one beholding the quiet composure of the bronze man's features would have thought he didn't realize what he was up against. Doc's giant figure was striking, even swathed as it was in fur garments.
He roamed the vicinity of the wrecked planes for an hour. Nothing did he find to indicate his five friends still lived. So Doc went to meet Victor Vail.
He had progressed a scant half mile from where Doc had sighted him from the plane. His breath sobbed through his teeth. He tottered, near exhaustion. He was indeed glad to see the bronze man.
Doc Savage had covered thrice the distance negotiated by Victor Vail. Yet Doc's bronze sinews were unstrained. He breathed normally. He might have been taking a stroll down Park Avenue.
"Your friends!" gasped Victor Vail. "Did you find them safe?"
Doc Savage shook a slow negative. "I found where their plane sank through a hole in the ice. That was all."
Victor Vail sagged down wearily, disconsolately.
"I heard the plane crash," he murmured. "I was making for the spot. I could not see the crash, because of the haze. But Keelhaul de Rosa's hired killers shot them down."
Doc made no sound. Victor Vail nipped his lips, then continued.
"Your five friends forced me to leave the plane by parachute — to save my life," he murmured. "Others of the five could have escaped. Yet they chose to fight together, to the end. They were brave men."
Doc still made no sound. The moment was too pregnant with sorrow to be shattered by cold words.
"What do we do now?" Victor Vail queried at length.
"We'll find the lost liner Oceanic," Doc replied. "And we will find Keelhaul de Rosa."
The chill ferocity in the bronze giant's expressive voice made Victor Vail shiver. At that instant, he wouldn't have traded places with Keelhaul de Rosa for all the wealth in the world, with a safe return to New York City thrown in. Keelhaul de Rosa was going to feel the kind of justice this mighty bronze man dealt.
"What about Ben O'Gard?" questioned Victor Vail. "Do we still have him and his crew of devils to fight?"
"The Helldiver submerged with all aboard," Doc replied. "I had that valve off the tanks with me."
Victor Vail gestured as if tossing something away. "We're rid of them, then. Water will flood the submarine through the hole left by the missing valve."
A vast quaking and rumbling seized the ice pack. They became aware that a wind had sprung up. This gave signs of increasing to a gale. The ice was beginning to shift. It was as though they strode the white, heaving, crusted paunch of a great monster of cold.
A crevice opened unexpectedly. Victor Vail toppled on the brink. He slipped into space. But strong bronze fingers snatched him back.
The crevice closed as swiftly as it had opened. It made a ghastly crunching. Chunks of ice flew high in the air. The frozen monster might have been angry at being cheated of a victim, and was spitting its teeth out in a rage.
It was several minutes before Victor Vail could still the trembling of his knees.
"What a ghastly region!" he muttered.
"There must be a hard storm to the southward," Doc explained. "It is causing a movement of the ice field."
The going was incredibly rough. Sheer blocks of bergs jutted up everywhere. Many were as large as houses. Occasionally these toppled over. Sometimes they piled one atop the other after the fashion of cards shuffled together. These occurrences were without warning.
Twice more, Victor Vail was saved by his giant bronze companion.
"I shall never be able to pay my debt of gratitude to you," the violinist said feelingly.
Doc had a two-word reply to all such protestations.
"Forget it," he said.
As they neared land, the seemingly impossible happened — the going became harder. The arctic ice pack was at its worst. Summer, such as it was, was in full swing. The sun had been shining steadily for two months. This had rotted the ice enough that it broke up under a brisk blow.
Doc now virtually carried Victor Vail. Time after time, ice pinnacles crashed upon the very spot where they stood. But in some magic manner, the mighty bronze man always managed to get himself and the violinist in the clear.
The air was filled with a cracking and rumbling so loud as to almost produce deafness. They might have been in the midst of a raging battle.
"You can tell your grandchildren you went through about the worst danger nature can offer," Doc said grimly. "For sheer, terrifying menace, nothing quite equals a storm with the arctic ice pack breaking up under foot."
Victor Vail made no reply. Doc glanced at him sharply.
Tears stood in Victor Vail's eyes.
Doc's chance remark about grandchildren had made Victor Vail think of his long-lost daughter, Roxey.
Doc Savage made it through in safety. He carried Victor Vail under one thewed arm, seeming not to feel the burden at all.
"We licked it," Doc said dryly. "The storm accounts for the thick haze we've had the last few days."
They hurried inland. Their mukluks stilt trod ice. It lay below to a depth of many feet. Occasional ridges of dark, impermeable stone rammed unlovely fangs out of the white waste.
The wind hooted and shrieked. Sometimes it whirled the two men along like crumpled balls of paper.
They mounted higher. The glacier thinned. The dark stone reared in greater profusion.
Doc Savage halted suddenly. He poised, motionless, metallic. No breath steam came from his strong lips.
"What is it?" breathed Victor Vail.
Doc released breath from his mighty lungs. It made a spurting plume that frosted on the fur of his parka. The air was turning colder.
"Something is stalking us!" Doc said dryly.
Victor Vail was astounded. His own senses were very keen — made so by the years when he had been blind, and depended upon them. But he had heard nothing.
"I caught the odor of it," Doc explained.
Amazement gripped Victor Vail. He had not known this strange bronze man, through unremitting exercise, had developed the olfactory keenness of a wild thing.
Doc Savage pressed Victor Vail into a convenient crevasse. "Stay here!" Doc commanded. "Don't leave the spot. You might become lost!"
The void of shrieking wind swallowed Doc's bronze form. He glided to the right. His speed was amazing.
A few flakes of snow came sizzling through the gale. More followed. They were hard as fine hailstones. When Doc flattened close to a rock spine to listen, the snow sounded like sand on the stone. He heard nothing.
He crept on. The snow shut Out visions beyond a few yards. It stuck to his bearskin trousers. It rattled off his metallic face like shot;
Suddenly he caught blurred movement in the whistling abyss. He flashed for it. His hands — hands in which steel bars became plastic as tin strips — were open and ready. His charge was that of a mighty hunter of the wild.
The next instant, Doc became quarry instead of hunter.
It was a polar bear he had rushed!
The animal bounded to meet Doc. It seemed clumsy. The awkwardness was only in its looks, however. Its speed was as tremendous as its size. It was the most terrible killer of the arctic!
Doc sought to veer aside. The footing was too slippery. Straight into the embrace of the polar monster, he skidded!
The truth of the matter is probably covered by the words of a certain famous arctic explorer.
"It depends on the bear," he said.
The bear Doc had met was the attacking type.
It erected on its rear legs. It was far taller than Doc. It flung monster forepaws out to inclose Doc's bronze form. A blow from one of those paws would have crushed down a bull buffalo.
Twisting, half ducking, Doc evaded the paws. His sinewy fingers buried in the fur of the polar monster. A jerk, a lightening flip, put him behind the bear.
Doc's fist swung with explosive force. It seemed to sink inches in the fat flesh of the animal. Doc had struck at a nerve center where his vast knowledge told him there was a chance of stunning the monster.
Bruin was not accustomed to this style of fighting. This small man-thing had looked like an easy quarry. The bear snarled, showing hideous fangs. With a speed that was astounding, considering the size and weight of the beast, it whirled.
Doc had fastened himself to the back of the animal. He clung there solely by the pinching power of his great leg muscles. Both his arms were free.
He struck the polar bear just back of the small head. He slugged again, hitting a more vulnerable spot.
Snarling horribly, the terror of the northern wastes sank to the glacier. The animal had met more than its match.
Doc could have escaped easily. But he did not. They needed food and a sleeping robe. Here were both. Doc's metallic fists pistoned a half dozen more stunning blows. Slavering and snarling, the bear stretched out.
Doc's mighty right arm slipped over the bear's head, just back of the ears. It jerked. A dull pop sounded. A great trembling seized all the great, white monster. The fight was over.
Silence fell, except for the moan of the blizzard.
Was it a low, mellow, trilling sound, remindful of the song of some exotic bird, which mingled with the whine of the wind? Or was it but the melodious note of the gale rushing through the neighboring pinnacles of rock and ice?
A listener could not have told.
Doc's strange sound sometimes came when he had accomplished some tremendous feat. Certainly, there was ample cause for it now.
No man, bare handed, had ever vanquished a more frightful foe.
Doc skidded the huge, hairy animal to a near-by pock in the bleak stone. He searched until he had found boulders enough to cover the cache of potential food and bedding. He did not want other bears to rob him.
He now hurried to get Victor Vail.
He reached the crevasse where he had left the violinist.
Ten feet from it, a gruesome red sprinkling rouged the ice. Blood! It no longer steamed. It was frozen solid, crusted with flakes of snow.
Scoring in the ice, already inlaid with snow, denoted a furious fight.
No sign was to be seen of Victor Vail!
Practically no height for maneuvering lay below. The little flivver, due to small wingspread and not inconsiderable weight, would glide about as well as a brickbat.
The only landing place was the lead which had swallowed the remains of the shabby seaplane flown by Doc's friends. And that had hardly the width of a city street. It was about half a block long.
Had Doc Savage's hand on the controls been a whit less masterful than it was, the rent in the arctic ice would have claimed his life. Nothing short of a miracle was the landing Doc made in the cramped space.
Above one end of the lead — smaller than many a private swimming pool — the plane abruptly turned broadside in the air. As swiftly, it turned to the other side. This fishtail maneuver lowered air speed to near the stalling point. With a sizable splash, the floats dug in the icy water. They plunged so deep the plane wetted its bottom.
Doc had known from the first he was due for a crack-up. He was not wrong. The plane sloughed for the wall of ice. Doc vaulted out of the cockpit
Only fractional seconds elapsed between the time the plane plumped into the water and the instant it smashed into the icy bank of the lead. It taxed even Doc's blinding speed to get out of the control bucket in time. He leaped. His feet landed on the ice. He slid a dozen yards as though on skates.
The plane hit. There was a jangling crash remindful of an armload of tin cans dumped on a concrete walk. Metal rent, crumpled. The plane sank like a monkey wrench.
By the time Doc had ceased sliding and wheeled back, the craft was gone. The repellent water boiled as in a hideous cauldron. Big bubbles climbed to the surface with ghastly glub-glubs. It was as though a living thing was drowning in the depths.
Doc Savage turned away. The valve from the submarine had gone down with the plane. So had the machine gun.
Doc stood on the menacing arctic ice pack armed only with his tremendous muscles and his keen brain. He had no food. He had no tent, no bedding, no boat to cross leads in the ice.
Probably no one could have understood more fully than Doc the meaning of this. He was in a region so rugged, so bleak, that out of countless expeditions traveling on the ice and equipped with the finest of dog teams and food, few escaped a dire fate.
Yet one beholding the quiet composure of the bronze man's features would have thought he didn't realize what he was up against. Doc's giant figure was striking, even swathed as it was in fur garments.
He roamed the vicinity of the wrecked planes for an hour. Nothing did he find to indicate his five friends still lived. So Doc went to meet Victor Vail.
* * *
VICTOR VAIL was above the average physically. In an ordinary group of men, he would have stood out as being rather athletic.He had progressed a scant half mile from where Doc had sighted him from the plane. His breath sobbed through his teeth. He tottered, near exhaustion. He was indeed glad to see the bronze man.
Doc Savage had covered thrice the distance negotiated by Victor Vail. Yet Doc's bronze sinews were unstrained. He breathed normally. He might have been taking a stroll down Park Avenue.
"Your friends!" gasped Victor Vail. "Did you find them safe?"
Doc Savage shook a slow negative. "I found where their plane sank through a hole in the ice. That was all."
Victor Vail sagged down wearily, disconsolately.
"I heard the plane crash," he murmured. "I was making for the spot. I could not see the crash, because of the haze. But Keelhaul de Rosa's hired killers shot them down."
Doc made no sound. Victor Vail nipped his lips, then continued.
"Your five friends forced me to leave the plane by parachute — to save my life," he murmured. "Others of the five could have escaped. Yet they chose to fight together, to the end. They were brave men."
Doc still made no sound. The moment was too pregnant with sorrow to be shattered by cold words.
"What do we do now?" Victor Vail queried at length.
"We'll find the lost liner Oceanic," Doc replied. "And we will find Keelhaul de Rosa."
The chill ferocity in the bronze giant's expressive voice made Victor Vail shiver. At that instant, he wouldn't have traded places with Keelhaul de Rosa for all the wealth in the world, with a safe return to New York City thrown in. Keelhaul de Rosa was going to feel the kind of justice this mighty bronze man dealt.
* * *
THEY SET a course for the uncharted land."What about Ben O'Gard?" questioned Victor Vail. "Do we still have him and his crew of devils to fight?"
"The Helldiver submerged with all aboard," Doc replied. "I had that valve off the tanks with me."
Victor Vail gestured as if tossing something away. "We're rid of them, then. Water will flood the submarine through the hole left by the missing valve."
A vast quaking and rumbling seized the ice pack. They became aware that a wind had sprung up. This gave signs of increasing to a gale. The ice was beginning to shift. It was as though they strode the white, heaving, crusted paunch of a great monster of cold.
A crevice opened unexpectedly. Victor Vail toppled on the brink. He slipped into space. But strong bronze fingers snatched him back.
The crevice closed as swiftly as it had opened. It made a ghastly crunching. Chunks of ice flew high in the air. The frozen monster might have been angry at being cheated of a victim, and was spitting its teeth out in a rage.
It was several minutes before Victor Vail could still the trembling of his knees.
"What a ghastly region!" he muttered.
"There must be a hard storm to the southward," Doc explained. "It is causing a movement of the ice field."
The going was incredibly rough. Sheer blocks of bergs jutted up everywhere. Many were as large as houses. Occasionally these toppled over. Sometimes they piled one atop the other after the fashion of cards shuffled together. These occurrences were without warning.
Twice more, Victor Vail was saved by his giant bronze companion.
"I shall never be able to pay my debt of gratitude to you," the violinist said feelingly.
Doc had a two-word reply to all such protestations.
"Forget it," he said.
As they neared land, the seemingly impossible happened — the going became harder. The arctic ice pack was at its worst. Summer, such as it was, was in full swing. The sun had been shining steadily for two months. This had rotted the ice enough that it broke up under a brisk blow.
Doc now virtually carried Victor Vail. Time after time, ice pinnacles crashed upon the very spot where they stood. But in some magic manner, the mighty bronze man always managed to get himself and the violinist in the clear.
The air was filled with a cracking and rumbling so loud as to almost produce deafness. They might have been in the midst of a raging battle.
"You can tell your grandchildren you went through about the worst danger nature can offer," Doc said grimly. "For sheer, terrifying menace, nothing quite equals a storm with the arctic ice pack breaking up under foot."
Victor Vail made no reply. Doc glanced at him sharply.
Tears stood in Victor Vail's eyes.
Doc's chance remark about grandchildren had made Victor Vail think of his long-lost daughter, Roxey.
* * *
THEY BRAVED an inferno for the next few minutes; an inferno of ice and wind. Pressure was forcing the pack ice high on the shore of the uncharted land. Frozen death crashed and lurched everywhere.Doc Savage made it through in safety. He carried Victor Vail under one thewed arm, seeming not to feel the burden at all.
"We licked it," Doc said dryly. "The storm accounts for the thick haze we've had the last few days."
They hurried inland. Their mukluks stilt trod ice. It lay below to a depth of many feet. Occasional ridges of dark, impermeable stone rammed unlovely fangs out of the white waste.
The wind hooted and shrieked. Sometimes it whirled the two men along like crumpled balls of paper.
They mounted higher. The glacier thinned. The dark stone reared in greater profusion.
Doc Savage halted suddenly. He poised, motionless, metallic. No breath steam came from his strong lips.
"What is it?" breathed Victor Vail.
Doc released breath from his mighty lungs. It made a spurting plume that frosted on the fur of his parka. The air was turning colder.
"Something is stalking us!" Doc said dryly.
Victor Vail was astounded. His own senses were very keen — made so by the years when he had been blind, and depended upon them. But he had heard nothing.
"I caught the odor of it," Doc explained.
Amazement gripped Victor Vail. He had not known this strange bronze man, through unremitting exercise, had developed the olfactory keenness of a wild thing.
Doc Savage pressed Victor Vail into a convenient crevasse. "Stay here!" Doc commanded. "Don't leave the spot. You might become lost!"
The void of shrieking wind swallowed Doc's bronze form. He glided to the right. His speed was amazing.
A few flakes of snow came sizzling through the gale. More followed. They were hard as fine hailstones. When Doc flattened close to a rock spine to listen, the snow sounded like sand on the stone. He heard nothing.
He crept on. The snow shut Out visions beyond a few yards. It stuck to his bearskin trousers. It rattled off his metallic face like shot;
Suddenly he caught blurred movement in the whistling abyss. He flashed for it. His hands — hands in which steel bars became plastic as tin strips — were open and ready. His charge was that of a mighty hunter of the wild.
The next instant, Doc became quarry instead of hunter.
It was a polar bear he had rushed!
The animal bounded to meet Doc. It seemed clumsy. The awkwardness was only in its looks, however. Its speed was as tremendous as its size. It was the most terrible killer of the arctic!
Doc sought to veer aside. The footing was too slippery. Straight into the embrace of the polar monster, he skidded!
* * *
SOME MEN acquainted with the arctic regions maintain the polar bear will flee from a human being, rather than attack. Others cite instances when the bruins were known to have taken the aggressive.The truth of the matter is probably covered by the words of a certain famous arctic explorer.
"It depends on the bear," he said.
The bear Doc had met was the attacking type.
It erected on its rear legs. It was far taller than Doc. It flung monster forepaws out to inclose Doc's bronze form. A blow from one of those paws would have crushed down a bull buffalo.
Twisting, half ducking, Doc evaded the paws. His sinewy fingers buried in the fur of the polar monster. A jerk, a lightening flip, put him behind the bear.
Doc's fist swung with explosive force. It seemed to sink inches in the fat flesh of the animal. Doc had struck at a nerve center where his vast knowledge told him there was a chance of stunning the monster.
Bruin was not accustomed to this style of fighting. This small man-thing had looked like an easy quarry. The bear snarled, showing hideous fangs. With a speed that was astounding, considering the size and weight of the beast, it whirled.
Doc had fastened himself to the back of the animal. He clung there solely by the pinching power of his great leg muscles. Both his arms were free.
He struck the polar bear just back of the small head. He slugged again, hitting a more vulnerable spot.
Snarling horribly, the terror of the northern wastes sank to the glacier. The animal had met more than its match.
Doc could have escaped easily. But he did not. They needed food and a sleeping robe. Here were both. Doc's metallic fists pistoned a half dozen more stunning blows. Slavering and snarling, the bear stretched out.
Doc's mighty right arm slipped over the bear's head, just back of the ears. It jerked. A dull pop sounded. A great trembling seized all the great, white monster. The fight was over.
Silence fell, except for the moan of the blizzard.
Was it a low, mellow, trilling sound, remindful of the song of some exotic bird, which mingled with the whine of the wind? Or was it but the melodious note of the gale rushing through the neighboring pinnacles of rock and ice?
A listener could not have told.
Doc's strange sound sometimes came when he had accomplished some tremendous feat. Certainly, there was ample cause for it now.
No man, bare handed, had ever vanquished a more frightful foe.
Doc skidded the huge, hairy animal to a near-by pock in the bleak stone. He searched until he had found boulders enough to cover the cache of potential food and bedding. He did not want other bears to rob him.
He now hurried to get Victor Vail.
He reached the crevasse where he had left the violinist.
Ten feet from it, a gruesome red sprinkling rouged the ice. Blood! It no longer steamed. It was frozen solid, crusted with flakes of snow.
Scoring in the ice, already inlaid with snow, denoted a furious fight.
No sign was to be seen of Victor Vail!
Chapter 14
CORPSE BOAT
LIKE A hound in search of a scent, Doc set off. He ran in widening circles. He found faint marks that might have been a trail. They led inland. They were lost beyond the following within two rods.
Doc positioned himself in the lee of a boulder the size of a box car. Standing there, sheltered a little from the blizzard, he considered.
An animal would have devoured Victor Vail on the spot! There had been no bits of cloth scattered about, no gory patches on the ice, such as certainly would have accompanied such a cannibalistic feast.
Something else loomed large in Doc's mind, too. The odor his supersensitive nostrils had detected at first!
Doc's mighty bronze form came as near a shiver as it ever came.
There had been a bestial quality about that scent. Yet it had hardly been that of an animal! Nor was it human, either. It had been a revolting tang, reminiscent of carrion.
One thing he began to realize with certainty. It had not been the polar bear!
Doc shrugged. He stepped out into the squealing blizzard. Inland, he journeyed.
The terrain sloped upward. The glacier became but scattered smears of ice. Even the snow did not linger, so great was the wind velocity.
Doc crossed a ridge.
From now on, the way led down. Progress was largely a matter of defying the propulsion of the gale.
Snow was drifting here. This was a menace, for it covered crevasses, a fall into which meant death. Doc trod cautiously.
In a day or two, perhaps in a week, when the blizzard had blown itself out, the haze above would disperse, and let the everlasting sun of the arctic summer beat down upon the snow. This would become slush. Cold would freeze it. A little more would be added to the thickness of the glacier. For thus are glaciers made.
Warily, Doc sidled along. He let the wind skid him ahead when he dared. Had he been a man addicted to profanity, he would have been consigning all glaciers to a place where their coolness probably would be a welcome change.
A hideous cracking and rumbling began to reach his ears. He could hear it plainly when he laid his head to the ice under foot.
It was the noise of the icepack piling on the shore. This uncharted land must be but a narrow ridge projecting from the polar seas.
Doc neared the shore.
An awesome sound brought him up sharp. It split through the banshee howl of the blizzard. It put the hairs On Doc's nape on edge.
A woman's shrieking!
He ran on as though he had not just shaken the clammy claw of the Reaper.
A white mass hulked up before his searching golden eyes. It looked like a gigantic iceberg cast upon the shore. But it had a strangely man-made look.
A ship!
The ice-crusted hulk of the lost liner Oceanic!
Doc raced along the hull. It canted over his head, for the liner was obviously heeled slightly. A hundred feet, he ran. Another!
He came to an object which might have been a long icicle hanging down from the rail of the liner. But he knew it was an ice-coated chain. The links were a procession of knobs.
These knobs enabled Doc to climb. But the mounting was not easy. A greased pole would have been a stairway in comparison. The blizzard moaned and hooted and sought to pick him bodily from his handhold.
The woman was no longer shrieking.
Doc topped the rail. A scene of indescribable confusion met his eyes. Capstans, hatches, bitts, all were knots of ice. The rigging had long ago been torn down by the polar elements. Masts and wire-rope stays and cargo booms made a tangle on the deck. Ice had formed on these.
The forward deck, it was. A frozen, hideous wilderness! The gale whined in it like a host of ravenous beasts.
Doc reached a hatch. It defied even his terrific strength. The years had cemented it solidly.
The deck did not slope as much as he had thought. It was not quite level, though. He glided for the stern.
An open companion lured him. Snow was pouring in. Half inside, he saw the floor was seven feet deep in ice — snow which had formed a glacial mass through the years.
Doc tried another companion. The door was closed. It resisted his shove. His fist whipped a blow which traveled a scant foot. The door caved as though dynamite had let loose against it.
Doc pitched inside.
A wave of pungent aroma met his nostrils.
It was the smell of the thing which had stalked them on the glacier! It was horrible — yet there was a flowerlike quality to it.
Gloom lurked in the recesses of the cabin where he stood. Formerly, it had been a lounge. But the once luxuriant furniture was now but a rubble on the floor. Some fantastic monster might have torn it to bits, as though to line a nest.
Bones lay in the litter. Bones of polar bear, of seal. Flesh still clung to some. Others were half-eaten carcasses.
Doc sped ahead. He shoved through a door.
There was a squealing noise, ratlike, eerie. A door slammed. Doc hit the panel. It was metal. It smashed him back. His fists could not knock down an inch of steel. He wrenched at the lock. That defied him, too.
Doc sought another route for pursuit A companionway deposited him on a lower deck. He went forward.
It was more gloomy here. Doc's capable bronze fingers searched inside his parka. They brought out a flashlight of a type Doc himself had perfected.
This flash had no battery. A tiny, powerful generator, built into the handle and driven by a stout spring, supplied the current. One twist of the flash handle would wind the spring and furnish light current for some minutes. A special receptacle held spare bulbs in felt beds. There was not much chance of this light going out of commission.
The flash sprayed a slender, white-hot rod. Doc twisted the lens adjustment to widen the beam.
Doc went on. His flashlight cast a funnel of white. He stopped often to listen.
The derelict liner seemed alive with sinister shufflings and draggings. Once a bulkhead door banged. Again, there came another of the ratlike squeals.
Even Doc's sensitive ears could not tell whether that squeal was human! The flowerlike odor was stronger.
He came to a long passage. It was painted white. It might have been used but yesterday. For wood does not decay in the bitter cold of the arctic.
He reached the third-class dining room.
Here his eyes met a sight that would make any man cringe. It was the explanation of the loss of the Oceanic.
The room was filled with bodies — bodies of the passengers and crew of the ill-fated ship. Bullets had done their work, and the northern cold had kept this tableau of carnage inviolate!
Doc thought of Victor Vail.
So this was what had happened during the time the blind man was unconscious!
Pirates, human fiends, had taken over the Oceanic. They were as bloodthirsty a gang as ever swung a cutlass or dangled a victim from a yardarm on the Spanish Main. Wholesale murder, they had committed.
Keelhaul de Rosa, Ben O'Gard, Dynamite Smith — greater villains never trod a deck. And, like the corsairs they were, they had fallen out over the loot.
The whole thing might have been lifted from the parchment chronicles of another century and transplanted to our time.
Doc quitted the hall of murder.
Uncanny whisperings and shufflings still crept through the lost liner. Yet Doc saw nothing. it was as though the tormented souls of those butchered here were holding spectral conclave.
Like that except for the flowery odor of living things. It was present everywhere.
Doc stepped out into another lounge.
His light picked up movement!
What it was, his sharp eyes failed to detect. The thing dropped behind the massive furniture before more than the backglow of Doc's light found it.
Warily, Doc sidled along the lounge wall. This was no animal confronting him.
What happened next came without the slightest sound.
Something touched Doc's bronze neck. It was warm. It was soft, yet it possessed a corded strength.
It encircled Doc's throat!
He wrenched at it.
Chug! A hard object hit him in the back with terrific force.
Only the sprung steel of cushioning muscles kept his spine from being snapped. He was knocked to all fours. But he did not drop his flashlight.
He sprayed the beam on the lounge. A dozen frothing, hideous figures were leaping toward him.
It was seldom that Doc felt an impulse to hug an enemy. But he could have hugged these.
For their appearance dispelled the sinister air of supernatural foes which hung over the lost liner.
These were but Eskimos!
Doc doused his light. This was something he could cope with. He glided sidewise.
An avalanche of bodies piled onto the spot he had vacated. Clubs — it was a thrown club which had hit Doc's backbeat vigorously. An Innuit or two squealed painfully as he was belabored by a fellow. They seemed to use the squeals to express both excitement and pain.
Silence fell.
The Eskimos were puzzled. Their breathing was gusty, wheezing.
"Tarnuk!" whined one of the cowering Innuits.
This gave Doc a clew to the dialect they spoke. Roughly translated, the word meant "the soul of a man." So swiftly had Doc evaded their charge that one of the Eskimos had remarked he must be but a ghost!
"Chinzo!" Doc told them in their own lingo. "Welcome! You are my friends! But you have a strange way of greeting me."
This friendship business was undoubtedly news to everybody concerned. But Doc figured it wouldn't hurt to try that angle on them.
He spoke several variations of Eskimo dialect, among scores of other lingos he had mastered in his years of intensive study.
He might as well have saved his breath.
In a squealing knot, the Innuits bore down upon him. Again, they found themselves beating empty space, or whacking each other by accident.
From a position thirty feet away, Doc planted his flash beam on them. They were in a nice, tight bunch. A great chair stood at Doc's elbow. No doubt it would have been a load for any single steward who had long ago sailed on the ill-fated Oceanic.
It lifted in Doc's mighty hand as lightly as though it were a folding camp stool. It slammed into the midst of the Eskimos. They were bowled over, practically to a man.
Those able to, raised a terrific squawling.
They were calling upon more of their fellows outside for help.
Doc saw no object in standing up and fighting an army. If there had been some reason for it, that would be different.
He made swiftly for the forward staircase out of the lounge.
His thoughts flickered for an instant to the strange thing which had touched his neck. It had been none of these queer-smelling Innuits.
He forgot that puzzle speedily.
The staircase he was making for erupted warlike, greasy Eskimos. His retreat was cut off!
There was nothing to do now but make a fight of it.
"You are making a mistake, my children," Doc told them in their lingo. "I come in peace!"
"You are a tongak, an evil spirit sent to harm us by the chief of all evil spirits!" an oily fellow clucked at him.
Doc sneezed. He had never smelled an Eskimo as aromatic as these fellows — and Eskimos are notoriously malodorous.
"You are wrong!" he argued with them. "I come only to do you good."
They threw gutturals back and forth at each other. All the while, they kept closing in on the giant bronze man.
"Where you come from?" demanded one.
"From a land to the south, where it is always warm."
Doc could see they didn't believe this.
One waved an arm expressively.
'"There is no such land," he said with all the certainty of a very ignorant man. "The only land besides this is nakroom, the great space beyond the sky."
They had never heard of Greenland, or any country to the south, Doc gathered.
"Very well, I come from nakroom," Doc persisted. "And I come to do good."
"You speak with a split tongue," he was informed. "Only tongaks, evil spirits, come from nakroom."
Doc decided to drop the subject. He didn't have time to convert their religious beliefs.
Doc took stock of their weapons. They carried harpoons with lines of hair seal thong bent in the detachable tips. Some held oonapiks, short hunting spears. Quite a few bayonets were in evidence. These had evidently been garnered from the Oceanic. No firearms were to be seen.
Not the least dangerous were ordinary dog whips. These had lashes fully eighteen feet long. From his vast knowledge, Doc knew an Eskimo could take one of these whips and cut a man's throat at five paces. Flicking at distant objects with the dog whips bordered on being the Eskimo national pastime.
"Kill him!" clucked the Eskimo leader. "He is only one man! It will be easy!"
The Innuit was underestimating, a mistake Doc's enemies quite often made.
He seized a chair, flung it as though it were a chip. Three Innuits were bowled over. They hadn't had time to dodge.
A flight of harpoons and short hunting spears chugged into the table. Doc threw two more chairs. He retreated to a spot far from the nearest flickering blubber lamp. He lowered the table, making sure they all saw he was behind it. Then he flattened to the lounge floor and glided away, unnoticed.
The Eskimos rushed the table, bent on murder. They howled in dismay when they found no one there. The howls turned to pain as hunters in the rear began dropping from bronze fists that exploded like nitro on their jaws.
An Innuit lunged at Doc with a harpoon. Doc picked the harpoon out of the fellow's hands and broke it over his head. A tough walrus lash on a dog whip slit the hood of Doc's parka like a knife stroke.
The bronze giant retreated. Thrown spears and bayonets seemed to whizz through his very body, so quickly did he dodge.
His uncanny skill began to have its effect. The greasy fellows rolled their little eyes at each other. Fear distorted their pudgy faces.
"Truly, he is a tongak, an evil one!" they muttered. "None other could be so hard to kill."
"All gather together!" commanded their leader. "We will rush him in a group!"
The words were hardly off the leader's lips when he dropped, his blank and senseless face looking foolishly through the rungs of the chair which had hit him.
The harm had been done. The Innuits grouped. They took fresh holds on their weapons.
They charged.
They had hit upon the only chance they had of coping with Doc. There were nearly fifty of them. Despite their short stature and fat, they were stout, fierce fighters.
With mad, bloodthirsty squeals, they closed upon the mighty bronze man. For a moment, they covered him completely. A tidal wave of killers!
Then a bronze arrow of a figure shot upward from the squirming pile.
The ceiling of the lounge was criss-crossed with elaborately decorated beams. Doc's sinewy hands grasped these, clinging to a precarious handhold as he moved away.
He dropped to the floor, clear of the fight, before he was hardly missed.
But the Eskimos still had him cut off from the exits. They closed in again. They threw spears and knives and an occasional club, all of which Doc dodged. They shrieked maledictions, largely to renew their own faltering nerve.
The situation was getting desperate. Doc put his back to a bulkhead.
He did not pay particular attention to the fact that he was near the spot where the strange, warm, soft object had touched his neck.
With hideous yells, the killing horde of Innuits charged.
A door opened beside Doc. A soft, strong hand came out. It clutched Doc's arm.
It was a woman's hand.
Doc positioned himself in the lee of a boulder the size of a box car. Standing there, sheltered a little from the blizzard, he considered.
An animal would have devoured Victor Vail on the spot! There had been no bits of cloth scattered about, no gory patches on the ice, such as certainly would have accompanied such a cannibalistic feast.
Something else loomed large in Doc's mind, too. The odor his supersensitive nostrils had detected at first!
Doc's mighty bronze form came as near a shiver as it ever came.
There had been a bestial quality about that scent. Yet it had hardly been that of an animal! Nor was it human, either. It had been a revolting tang, reminiscent of carrion.
One thing he began to realize with certainty. It had not been the polar bear!
Doc shrugged. He stepped out into the squealing blizzard. Inland, he journeyed.
The terrain sloped upward. The glacier became but scattered smears of ice. Even the snow did not linger, so great was the wind velocity.
Doc crossed a ridge.
From now on, the way led down. Progress was largely a matter of defying the propulsion of the gale.
Snow was drifting here. This was a menace, for it covered crevasses, a fall into which meant death. Doc trod cautiously.
In a day or two, perhaps in a week, when the blizzard had blown itself out, the haze above would disperse, and let the everlasting sun of the arctic summer beat down upon the snow. This would become slush. Cold would freeze it. A little more would be added to the thickness of the glacier. For thus are glaciers made.
Warily, Doc sidled along. He let the wind skid him ahead when he dared. Had he been a man addicted to profanity, he would have been consigning all glaciers to a place where their coolness probably would be a welcome change.
A hideous cracking and rumbling began to reach his ears. He could hear it plainly when he laid his head to the ice under foot.
It was the noise of the icepack piling on the shore. This uncharted land must be but a narrow ridge projecting from the polar seas.
Doc neared the shore.
An awesome sound brought him up sharp. It split through the banshee howl of the blizzard. It put the hairs On Doc's nape on edge.
A woman's shrieking!
* * *
DOC SPED for the sound. The snow collapsed under him unexpectedly. Only a flip of his Herculean body kept him from dropping to death on the snaggled icy bottom of the wide crevasse far below.He ran on as though he had not just shaken the clammy claw of the Reaper.
A white mass hulked up before his searching golden eyes. It looked like a gigantic iceberg cast upon the shore. But it had a strangely man-made look.
A ship!
The ice-crusted hulk of the lost liner Oceanic!
Doc raced along the hull. It canted over his head, for the liner was obviously heeled slightly. A hundred feet, he ran. Another!
He came to an object which might have been a long icicle hanging down from the rail of the liner. But he knew it was an ice-coated chain. The links were a procession of knobs.
These knobs enabled Doc to climb. But the mounting was not easy. A greased pole would have been a stairway in comparison. The blizzard moaned and hooted and sought to pick him bodily from his handhold.
The woman was no longer shrieking.
Doc topped the rail. A scene of indescribable confusion met his eyes. Capstans, hatches, bitts, all were knots of ice. The rigging had long ago been torn down by the polar elements. Masts and wire-rope stays and cargo booms made a tangle on the deck. Ice had formed on these.
The forward deck, it was. A frozen, hideous wilderness! The gale whined in it like a host of ravenous beasts.
Doc reached a hatch. It defied even his terrific strength. The years had cemented it solidly.
The deck did not slope as much as he had thought. It was not quite level, though. He glided for the stern.
An open companion lured him. Snow was pouring in. Half inside, he saw the floor was seven feet deep in ice — snow which had formed a glacial mass through the years.
Doc tried another companion. The door was closed. It resisted his shove. His fist whipped a blow which traveled a scant foot. The door caved as though dynamite had let loose against it.
Doc pitched inside.
A wave of pungent aroma met his nostrils.
It was the smell of the thing which had stalked them on the glacier! It was horrible — yet there was a flowerlike quality to it.
Gloom lurked in the recesses of the cabin where he stood. Formerly, it had been a lounge. But the once luxuriant furniture was now but a rubble on the floor. Some fantastic monster might have torn it to bits, as though to line a nest.
Bones lay in the litter. Bones of polar bear, of seal. Flesh still clung to some. Others were half-eaten carcasses.
Doc sped ahead. He shoved through a door.
* * *
A SHUFFLING movement came from across the room. Doc charged the sound.There was a squealing noise, ratlike, eerie. A door slammed. Doc hit the panel. It was metal. It smashed him back. His fists could not knock down an inch of steel. He wrenched at the lock. That defied him, too.
Doc sought another route for pursuit A companionway deposited him on a lower deck. He went forward.
It was more gloomy here. Doc's capable bronze fingers searched inside his parka. They brought out a flashlight of a type Doc himself had perfected.
This flash had no battery. A tiny, powerful generator, built into the handle and driven by a stout spring, supplied the current. One twist of the flash handle would wind the spring and furnish light current for some minutes. A special receptacle held spare bulbs in felt beds. There was not much chance of this light going out of commission.
The flash sprayed a slender, white-hot rod. Doc twisted the lens adjustment to widen the beam.
Doc went on. His flashlight cast a funnel of white. He stopped often to listen.
The derelict liner seemed alive with sinister shufflings and draggings. Once a bulkhead door banged. Again, there came another of the ratlike squeals.
Even Doc's sensitive ears could not tell whether that squeal was human! The flowerlike odor was stronger.
He came to a long passage. It was painted white. It might have been used but yesterday. For wood does not decay in the bitter cold of the arctic.
He reached the third-class dining room.
Here his eyes met a sight that would make any man cringe. It was the explanation of the loss of the Oceanic.
The room was filled with bodies — bodies of the passengers and crew of the ill-fated ship. Bullets had done their work, and the northern cold had kept this tableau of carnage inviolate!
Doc thought of Victor Vail.
So this was what had happened during the time the blind man was unconscious!
Pirates, human fiends, had taken over the Oceanic. They were as bloodthirsty a gang as ever swung a cutlass or dangled a victim from a yardarm on the Spanish Main. Wholesale murder, they had committed.
Keelhaul de Rosa, Ben O'Gard, Dynamite Smith — greater villains never trod a deck. And, like the corsairs they were, they had fallen out over the loot.
The whole thing might have been lifted from the parchment chronicles of another century and transplanted to our time.
Doc quitted the hall of murder.
Uncanny whisperings and shufflings still crept through the lost liner. Yet Doc saw nothing. it was as though the tormented souls of those butchered here were holding spectral conclave.
Like that except for the flowery odor of living things. It was present everywhere.
Doc stepped out into another lounge.
His light picked up movement!
What it was, his sharp eyes failed to detect. The thing dropped behind the massive furniture before more than the backglow of Doc's light found it.
Warily, Doc sidled along the lounge wall. This was no animal confronting him.
What happened next came without the slightest sound.
Something touched Doc's bronze neck. It was warm. It was soft, yet it possessed a corded strength.
It encircled Doc's throat!
* * *
DOC MADE one of the quickest moves of his career. He ducked and whirled. But he did not get the beam of his flashlight lifted in time. All he saw was the blank panel of a tightly shut door.He wrenched at it.
Chug! A hard object hit him in the back with terrific force.
Only the sprung steel of cushioning muscles kept his spine from being snapped. He was knocked to all fours. But he did not drop his flashlight.
He sprayed the beam on the lounge. A dozen frothing, hideous figures were leaping toward him.
It was seldom that Doc felt an impulse to hug an enemy. But he could have hugged these.
For their appearance dispelled the sinister air of supernatural foes which hung over the lost liner.
These were but Eskimos!
Doc doused his light. This was something he could cope with. He glided sidewise.
An avalanche of bodies piled onto the spot he had vacated. Clubs — it was a thrown club which had hit Doc's backbeat vigorously. An Innuit or two squealed painfully as he was belabored by a fellow. They seemed to use the squeals to express both excitement and pain.
Silence fell.
The Eskimos were puzzled. Their breathing was gusty, wheezing.
"Tarnuk!" whined one of the cowering Innuits.
This gave Doc a clew to the dialect they spoke. Roughly translated, the word meant "the soul of a man." So swiftly had Doc evaded their charge that one of the Eskimos had remarked he must be but a ghost!
"Chinzo!" Doc told them in their own lingo. "Welcome! You are my friends! But you have a strange way of greeting me."
This friendship business was undoubtedly news to everybody concerned. But Doc figured it wouldn't hurt to try that angle on them.
He spoke several variations of Eskimo dialect, among scores of other lingos he had mastered in his years of intensive study.
He might as well have saved his breath.
In a squealing knot, the Innuits bore down upon him. Again, they found themselves beating empty space, or whacking each other by accident.
From a position thirty feet away, Doc planted his flash beam on them. They were in a nice, tight bunch. A great chair stood at Doc's elbow. No doubt it would have been a load for any single steward who had long ago sailed on the ill-fated Oceanic.
It lifted in Doc's mighty hand as lightly as though it were a folding camp stool. It slammed into the midst of the Eskimos. They were bowled over, practically to a man.
Those able to, raised a terrific squawling.
They were calling upon more of their fellows outside for help.
Doc saw no object in standing up and fighting an army. If there had been some reason for it, that would be different.
He made swiftly for the forward staircase out of the lounge.
His thoughts flickered for an instant to the strange thing which had touched his neck. It had been none of these queer-smelling Innuits.
He forgot that puzzle speedily.
The staircase he was making for erupted warlike, greasy Eskimos. His retreat was cut off!
There was nothing to do now but make a fight of it.
* * *
FOUR OF the five Innuits carried lighted blubber lamps. Doc wondered where they had conjured them from. They Illuminated the lounge."You are making a mistake, my children," Doc told them in their lingo. "I come in peace!"
"You are a tongak, an evil spirit sent to harm us by the chief of all evil spirits!" an oily fellow clucked at him.
Doc sneezed. He had never smelled an Eskimo as aromatic as these fellows — and Eskimos are notoriously malodorous.
"You are wrong!" he argued with them. "I come only to do you good."
They threw gutturals back and forth at each other. All the while, they kept closing in on the giant bronze man.
"Where you come from?" demanded one.
"From a land to the south, where it is always warm."
Doc could see they didn't believe this.
One waved an arm expressively.
'"There is no such land," he said with all the certainty of a very ignorant man. "The only land besides this is nakroom, the great space beyond the sky."
They had never heard of Greenland, or any country to the south, Doc gathered.
"Very well, I come from nakroom," Doc persisted. "And I come to do good."
"You speak with a split tongue," he was informed. "Only tongaks, evil spirits, come from nakroom."
Doc decided to drop the subject. He didn't have time to convert their religious beliefs.
Doc took stock of their weapons. They carried harpoons with lines of hair seal thong bent in the detachable tips. Some held oonapiks, short hunting spears. Quite a few bayonets were in evidence. These had evidently been garnered from the Oceanic. No firearms were to be seen.
Not the least dangerous were ordinary dog whips. These had lashes fully eighteen feet long. From his vast knowledge, Doc knew an Eskimo could take one of these whips and cut a man's throat at five paces. Flicking at distant objects with the dog whips bordered on being the Eskimo national pastime.
"Kill him!" clucked the Eskimo leader. "He is only one man! It will be easy!"
The Innuit was underestimating, a mistake Doc's enemies quite often made.
* * *
DOC PICKED up a round-topped table. This would serve as a shield against any weapon his foes had.He seized a chair, flung it as though it were a chip. Three Innuits were bowled over. They hadn't had time to dodge.
A flight of harpoons and short hunting spears chugged into the table. Doc threw two more chairs. He retreated to a spot far from the nearest flickering blubber lamp. He lowered the table, making sure they all saw he was behind it. Then he flattened to the lounge floor and glided away, unnoticed.
The Eskimos rushed the table, bent on murder. They howled in dismay when they found no one there. The howls turned to pain as hunters in the rear began dropping from bronze fists that exploded like nitro on their jaws.
An Innuit lunged at Doc with a harpoon. Doc picked the harpoon out of the fellow's hands and broke it over his head. A tough walrus lash on a dog whip slit the hood of Doc's parka like a knife stroke.
The bronze giant retreated. Thrown spears and bayonets seemed to whizz through his very body, so quickly did he dodge.
His uncanny skill began to have its effect. The greasy fellows rolled their little eyes at each other. Fear distorted their pudgy faces.
"Truly, he is a tongak, an evil one!" they muttered. "None other could be so hard to kill."
"All gather together!" commanded their leader. "We will rush him in a group!"
The words were hardly off the leader's lips when he dropped, his blank and senseless face looking foolishly through the rungs of the chair which had hit him.
The harm had been done. The Innuits grouped. They took fresh holds on their weapons.
They charged.
They had hit upon the only chance they had of coping with Doc. There were nearly fifty of them. Despite their short stature and fat, they were stout, fierce fighters.
With mad, bloodthirsty squeals, they closed upon the mighty bronze man. For a moment, they covered him completely. A tidal wave of killers!
Then a bronze arrow of a figure shot upward from the squirming pile.
The ceiling of the lounge was criss-crossed with elaborately decorated beams. Doc's sinewy hands grasped these, clinging to a precarious handhold as he moved away.
He dropped to the floor, clear of the fight, before he was hardly missed.
But the Eskimos still had him cut off from the exits. They closed in again. They threw spears and knives and an occasional club, all of which Doc dodged. They shrieked maledictions, largely to renew their own faltering nerve.
The situation was getting desperate. Doc put his back to a bulkhead.
He did not pay particular attention to the fact that he was near the spot where the strange, warm, soft object had touched his neck.
With hideous yells, the killing horde of Innuits charged.
A door opened beside Doc. A soft, strong hand came out. It clutched Doc's arm.
It was a woman's hand.
Chapter 15
THE ARCTIC GODDESS
DOC SAVAGE whipped through the door. He caught a brief glimpse of the girl.
She was tall. Nothing more than that could be told about her form, since she was muffled in the garb of the arctic — moccasins reaching above her knees, and with the tops decorated with the long hair of the polar bear, trousers of the skin of the arctic hare, a shirt-like garment of auk skins, and an outer parka of a coat fitted with a hood.
But her face! That was different. He could see enough of that to tell she was a creature of gorgeous beauty. Enthralling eyes, an exquisite little upturned nose, lips as inviting as the petals of a red rose — they would have made most men forget all about the fight.
Had there been light to disclose Doc's features, however, an onlooker would have been surprised to note how little the giant bronze man was affected by this entrancing beauty.
Doc worked at the prosaic, but by no means unimportant, task of securing the door. He got it fast.
He turned his flashlight on the girl. He had noted something he wanted to verify. The gaze he bent upon her was the same sort he would give any stranger he might be curious about.
Her hair was white; it was a strange, warm sort of white, like old ivory. The girl was a perfect blonde.
Doc thought of Victor Vail. The violinist had this same sort of hair — a little more white, perhaps.
"You did me a great favor, Miss Vail," Doc told the girl.
She started. She put her hands over her lips. She wore no mittens. Her hands were long, shapely, velvet of skin.
"How did — ?"
"Did I know you were Roxey Vail?" Doc picked up her question. "You could be no one else. You are the image of your father."
"My father!" She said the word softly, as if it were something sacred. "Did you know him?"
Doc thought of that smear of scarlet on the ice near the spot where Victor Vail had disappeared. He changed the subject.
"Did any one besides you escape the massacre aboard this liner?"
The girl hesitated.
Doc turned his flash on his own face. He knew she was uncertain whether to trust him. Doc was not flattering himself when he felt that a look at his strong features would reassure her. He had seen it work before.
"My mother survived," said the girl.
"Is she alive?"
"She is."
Enraged Eskimos beat on the bulkhead door. They hacked at the stout panel with bayonets. They yelled like Indians.
"You won't let them — kill me?" she choked.
Doc slipped a corded bronze arm around her — and he didn't often put his arm around young women.
"What a question!" he chided her. "Haven't you any faith in men?"
She shivered. "Not the ones I've seen — lately."
"What do you mean?"
"Do you know why those Eskimos attacked you?" she countered.
"No," Doc admitted. "It surprised me. Eskimos are noted as an unwarlike people. When they get through fighting the north for a living, they've had enough scrapping."
"They attacked you because of — "
A slab breaking out of the door stopped her. The Innuits were smashing the panel!
"We'd better move!" Doc murmured.
He swept the girl up in one arm. She struck at him, thinking he meant her harm. Then, realizing he was only carrying her because he could make more speed in that fashion, she desisted.
Doc glided sternward.
"You haven't visited this death ship often in the passing years, have you?" he hazarded.
She shook her head. "No. You could count the number of times on the fingers of one hand."
They reached a large, rather barren room amidships. Doc knew much of the construction of ships. He veered abruptly to the left, descended a companion, wheeled down a passage.
He was now face to face with the liner's strong room.
He took one look at the great vault. He dropped the girl.
The treasure trove was empty!
"I'm sorry," Doc apologized. He pointed at the strong room. "Has that been empty long?"
"Ever since I can remember."
"Who got the gold, and the diamonds?"
She was plainly surprised. "What gold and diamonds?"
Doc smiled dryly. "You've got me! But fifty millions dollars' worth of gold and diamonds is at the bottom of this mess. If it was carried aboard this liner, it would have been stored in the strong room. It's not there. So that means — Hm-m-m!" He shifted his great shoulders. "I'm not sure what it means.
He glanced about. Here seemed to be as good a spot as any to linger. It would take the Eskimos some minutes to find them.
"You started to tell me why the Innuits attacked me," he prompted the girl. "What was the reason?"
"I'll tell you my story from the first — I think there's time," she said swiftly. Her voice was pleasant to listen to. "My mother and myself escaped the wholesale slaughter of the others aboard the Oceanic, because we slid overboard by a rope. We were apart from the other passengers, hunting father — he had disappeared mysteriously the day before.
She was tall. Nothing more than that could be told about her form, since she was muffled in the garb of the arctic — moccasins reaching above her knees, and with the tops decorated with the long hair of the polar bear, trousers of the skin of the arctic hare, a shirt-like garment of auk skins, and an outer parka of a coat fitted with a hood.
But her face! That was different. He could see enough of that to tell she was a creature of gorgeous beauty. Enthralling eyes, an exquisite little upturned nose, lips as inviting as the petals of a red rose — they would have made most men forget all about the fight.
Had there been light to disclose Doc's features, however, an onlooker would have been surprised to note how little the giant bronze man was affected by this entrancing beauty.
Doc worked at the prosaic, but by no means unimportant, task of securing the door. He got it fast.
He turned his flashlight on the girl. He had noted something he wanted to verify. The gaze he bent upon her was the same sort he would give any stranger he might be curious about.
Her hair was white; it was a strange, warm sort of white, like old ivory. The girl was a perfect blonde.
Doc thought of Victor Vail. The violinist had this same sort of hair — a little more white, perhaps.
"You did me a great favor, Miss Vail," Doc told the girl.
She started. She put her hands over her lips. She wore no mittens. Her hands were long, shapely, velvet of skin.
"How did — ?"
"Did I know you were Roxey Vail?" Doc picked up her question. "You could be no one else. You are the image of your father."
"My father!" She said the word softly, as if it were something sacred. "Did you know him?"
Doc thought of that smear of scarlet on the ice near the spot where Victor Vail had disappeared. He changed the subject.
"Did any one besides you escape the massacre aboard this liner?"
The girl hesitated.
Doc turned his flash on his own face. He knew she was uncertain whether to trust him. Doc was not flattering himself when he felt that a look at his strong features would reassure her. He had seen it work before.
"My mother survived," said the girl.
"Is she alive?"
"She is."
Enraged Eskimos beat on the bulkhead door. They hacked at the stout panel with bayonets. They yelled like Indians.
* * *
BEAUTIFUL ROXEY Vail suddenly pressed close to Doc Savage. He could feel the trembling in her rounded, firm body."You won't let them — kill me?" she choked.
Doc slipped a corded bronze arm around her — and he didn't often put his arm around young women.
"What a question!" he chided her. "Haven't you any faith in men?"
She shivered. "Not the ones I've seen — lately."
"What do you mean?"
"Do you know why those Eskimos attacked you?" she countered.
"No," Doc admitted. "It surprised me. Eskimos are noted as an unwarlike people. When they get through fighting the north for a living, they've had enough scrapping."
"They attacked you because of — "
A slab breaking out of the door stopped her. The Innuits were smashing the panel!
"We'd better move!" Doc murmured.
He swept the girl up in one arm. She struck at him, thinking he meant her harm. Then, realizing he was only carrying her because he could make more speed in that fashion, she desisted.
Doc glided sternward.
"You haven't visited this death ship often in the passing years, have you?" he hazarded.
She shook her head. "No. You could count the number of times on the fingers of one hand."
They reached a large, rather barren room amidships. Doc knew much of the construction of ships. He veered abruptly to the left, descended a companion, wheeled down a passage.
He was now face to face with the liner's strong room.
He took one look at the great vault. He dropped the girl.
The treasure trove was empty!
* * *
THE YOUNG woman picked herself up from the floor."I'm sorry," Doc apologized. He pointed at the strong room. "Has that been empty long?"
"Ever since I can remember."
"Who got the gold, and the diamonds?"
She was plainly surprised. "What gold and diamonds?"
Doc smiled dryly. "You've got me! But fifty millions dollars' worth of gold and diamonds is at the bottom of this mess. If it was carried aboard this liner, it would have been stored in the strong room. It's not there. So that means — Hm-m-m!" He shifted his great shoulders. "I'm not sure what it means.
He glanced about. Here seemed to be as good a spot as any to linger. It would take the Eskimos some minutes to find them.
"You started to tell me why the Innuits attacked me," he prompted the girl. "What was the reason?"
"I'll tell you my story from the first — I think there's time," she said swiftly. Her voice was pleasant to listen to. "My mother and myself escaped the wholesale slaughter of the others aboard the Oceanic, because we slid overboard by a rope. We were apart from the other passengers, hunting father — he had disappeared mysteriously the day before.