The Man of Bronze by Kenneth Robeson Page A

whole vile plot!
    And for probably the first time in his career, Doc had failed to get his man. Rage at the leader of the revolutionists, the murderer of his father, had momentarily blinded Doc. A tiny gasp had escaped from his great chest—and the man had heard.
    A bandit drew a pistol. Another doused the lights. Guns roared deafeningly. Blows smacked. Terrific blows that tore flesh and bone! Blows such as only Doc Savage could deliver!
    The window burst with a glassy rattle as somebody leaped through, heedless of the fact that it was three floors to the earth. A second man took the same leap.
    The fight within the room was over in a matter of thundering seconds.
    Doc Savage turned on the lights. Ten bandits in various stages of stupor and unconsciousness and even death, were strewed on the floor. Three of them would never murder again. And the Blanco Grande police, already clamoring in the corridor outside, would make short shift of the rest.
    To the window, Doc swept. Poising a moment easily, he took the three-story drop as lightly as if he were leaping off a table.
    Under the window, he found another cutthroat. The man had broken his neck in the plunge.
    There was no trace of the leader. The man had survived the jump and escaped.
    Doc stood there, rage tingling all through his powerful bronze frame. The murderer of his father! And he didn’t even know who the man was!
    For Doc, in following the fellow to the hotel, had not once been able to glimpse the master villain’s face. Up there in the room, the curtain had enveloped the fiend until the lights went out.
    Doc slowly quitted the vicinity of the hotel with its holocaust of death. In that hostelry room, he had left something that would become a legend in Hidalgo. A dozen men whipped in a matter of seconds!
    For days, the Blanco Grande police puzzled over what manner of fighter had overpowered these worst of Hidalgo’s bandits in a hand-to-hand fray.
    Every cutthroat had a reward on his unkempt head. The reward went unclaimed. Finally, by decree of President Avispa, it was turned over to charity.
    Doc Savage, with hardly a thought about what he had done, had gone to his camp and to bed.

Chapter 11
VALLEY OF THE VANISHED
    B Y the time the sun had crawled off one of Hidalgo’s spike like mountaintops, Doc and his men were ready for departure.
    Doc had taken his usual two-hour exercise long before dawn, while the others still slept.
    After that, Doc had awakened his men, and they had all seized brushes and quick-drying blue paint, and gone over their entire plane. The ship was now blue, the sacred color of the Mayans!
    “If the inhabitants of this mysterious Valley of the Vanished think we’re riding in a holy chariot,” Doc had commented, “they may let us hang around long enough to make friends.”
    Ham, waspish and debonair, carrying his inevitable sword cane—for he had several of them—offered jocosely: “And if they believe in evolution, we can arouse their interest by passing Monk off as the missing link.”
    “Oh, yeah?” Monk grinned. “Some day you’re gonna find yourself in a pile that will pass for hamburger steak, and you won’t know any more about who done it than you do about who framed that ham-stealing charge on you.”
    Red-necked, Ham twiddled his cane and had nothing more to say.
    Gasoline for twenty hours’ flying reposed in the tanks of the big tri-motor speed plane.
    Doc, in the control bucket, turned the radial motors over with the electro-inertia starting mechanism. He let the cylinders warm so there would be no such unpleasantness as a cold motor stopping at a critical moment in the take-off.
    Out across the lake, Doc ruddered the plane. He rocked the deperdussin type control wheel. The floats went on step—skimming the lake surface. Then they were off. Doc banked about and headed directly for the most rugged interior region of Hidalgo.
    It was Doc’s own idea, borne out by Johnny’s intensive study of the country’s