The speaker suddenly emitted a frenzied scream and sprang forward, taking the curtain with him. He plunged head over heels across the floor.
The stunned bandits saw, towering in the door back of the curtain, a great bronze, frightsome figure of a man.
“Doc Savage!” one squawked.
DOC Savage it was, right enough. Doc, when he had seen that knife in the street, had a moment later heard footsteps approaching. He had followed the man who had picked up the knife to this hotel room.
Doc had heard the 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.
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 topography, to use pontoons instead of landing wheels on the plane. Due to the wildly rank jungle and the unbelievably craggy nature of the region, chances were one in a thousand of finding a clearing large enough for a set-down.
On the other hand, Hidalgo was in a sphere of great rainfall, of tropical downpours. The streams were small rivers, and here and there in a mountain chasm lay a tiny lake. Hence the floats on the plane.
While Doc lifted the plane to ten thousand feet to find a favorable air current, and thus cut gasoline consumption, his five friends used binoculars through the cabin windows.
They hoped to find trace of their enemy, the blue monoplane. But not a glimpse of its hangar did they catch in the nodular, verdurous carpet of jungle. It must be concealed, they reasoned, somewhere very near the capital city of Blanco Grande. But they didn’t sight it.
Below was an occasional patch of
milpa
, or native corn, growing in jungle clearings. Through the glasses, they could see natives carrying burdens in
macapals
, or netting bags suspended by a strap about the forehead. These became scarcer. Where had once been
milpa
patches was only a thick growth of
uamiz
bushes ten to twenty feet high. They were leaving civilization behind. Hours passed.
Great
barrancas
, or gorges, began to split the terrain. The earth seemed to tumble and writhe and pile atop itself in inconceivable derangement. Mountains lurched up, gigantic, made black and ominous by the jungle growth. From above, the flyers could look down into canyons so deep their floors were nothing but gloomy space.
“There’s not a level place down there big enough to stick a stamp on!” Renny declared in an awed voice.
Johnny laughed. “I told Monk that Columbus tackling the Atlantic Ocean had a pipe compared to this.”
Monk snorted. “You’re crazy. Us settin’ in comfortable seats in this plane, and you call it somethin’ hard! I don’t see nothin’ dangerous about it.”
“You wouldn’t!” Ham said dryly. “If we should be forced down, you could take to the trees. The rest of us would have to walk. And a half mile a day is good walking in that country under us!”
Renny, up in the pilot’s well with Doc, called: “Heads up, you eggs! We’re getting close!”
RENNY had checked their course figures again and again. He had calculated angles and inscribed lines on the map. And they were nearing their destination, the tract of land that was Doc’s legacy! It lay directly ahead.
And ahead was a mountain range more nodular and sheer than any they had sighted yet. Its foothill peaks were like stone needles. To the rampant sides of the mountains clung stringy patches of jungle, fighting for existence.
The great speed plane bucked like a plains cayuse as it encountered the tremendous air currents set up by the precipitous wastes of stone below. This in spite of Doc’s masterful hand at the controls. An ordinary pilot would have succumbed to such treacherous currents, or prudently turned back.
It was as though they were flying the tumultuous heart of a vast cyclone.
Monk, hanging tightly to a wicker seat, which was in turn strapped with metal to the plane fuselage, had become somewhat green under his ruddy brick complexion. Plainly, he had changed his ideas about the ease of their exploration method. Not that he was scared. But he was about as seasick as man ever became.
“These devilish air currents explain why this region has not been mapped by plane,” Doc offered.
Four or five minutes later, he leveled an arm. “Look! That canyon should lead to the center of this tract of land we’re hunting!”
The eyes, all of them, followed Doc’s pointing arm.
A narrow-walled gash that seemed to sink a limitless depth into the mountain met their gaze. This cut was of bare stone, too steep and too flintlike in hardness to support even a trace of green growth.
The plane careened closer.
So deep was the gash of a canyon that twilight swathed the lower recesses. Renny, keen of eye and using binoculars, advised: “There is quite a stream of water running in the bottom of the canyon.”
Fearlessly, Doc nosed the plane down. Another pilot would have banked away in terror from those malicious air currents. Doc, however, knew just how much his plane could stand. Although the craft might be tossed about a great deal, they were all as yet quite safe—as long as Doc’s hand was on the controls.
Into the monster slash of a chasm, the plane rumbled its way. The motor thunder was tossed back in waves from the frowning walls. Suddenly air, cooled by the small river rushing through the cut and thus contracting and forming a down current, seemed to suck the plane into the depths. Wheeling, twisting, the speed ship plummeted among murky shadows.
Monk was now a striking example of the contention that sudden danger will cure seasickness—for he was entirely normal again.
Doc had the throttles against the wide-open pins. The three radial motors moaned and labored, and the exhaust pipes lipped blue flame.
The progress of the craft along the chasm was a procession of leaps and drops and side-whippings, as though they were riding an amusement-park jack rabbit, or roller coaster.
“It’ll be a long old day before another gang of white explorers penetrate into this place!” Renny prophesied.
Doc’s arm suddenly leveled like a bronze bar.
“
The Valley of the Vanished!
” he cried.
QUITE suddenly, it had appeared before them—the Valley of the Vanished!
A widening in the strange, devilish chasm formed it. The valley had roughly the shape of an egg. The floor was sloping, of such a steepness that to land a wheel-equipped plane on it would be an impossibility.
There was only one spot of comparative levelness, and that was no greater than an acre or two in area.
It was on this level spot that the eyes of Doc and his five men instantly focused. They stared, unbelieving.
“Good Heaven!” gasped Johnny, the archaeologist.
From the little flat towered a pyramid! It adhered in a general way to the architecture of the Egyptian type of pyramids, but there were differences.
For one thing, the sides, instead of drawing inward in a series of steplike shelves, were smoothed as glass from top to bottom. Only in the front was there a flight of steps. Not more than twenty feet wide was this flight, and the steps were less high and deep than those in an American home. The stairway was like a ribbon up the glittering, sleek side of the pyramid.
The top of the structure was flat, and on this stood a sort of temple, a flat stone roof supported by square, wondrously carved pillars. Except for the pillars, this was open at the sides, permitting glimpses of fantastically wrought idols of stone.
Strangest of all, perhaps, was the color of the pyramid. Of a grayish-brownstone, yet it glowed all over with a strange yellow, metallic aurora of tiny lights caught and cast back.
“Priceless!” murmured Johnny, the archaeologist.
“You said it!” grunted Renny, the engineer.
“From a historical standpoint, I mean!” corrected Johnny.
“I meant from a pocketbook standpoint!” Renny snorted. “If I ever saw quartz absolutely full of wire gold, I see it now. I’ll bet the stone that pyramid is made of would mill fifty thousand dollars to the ton in free gold!”
“Forget the gold!” snapped Johnny. “Don’t you realize you’re looking at a rare sample of ancient Mayan architecture? Something any archaeologist would give both hands and a leg to inspect!”
As the plane dived closer, another thing about the pyramid became noticeable. This was a sizable volume of water which poured steadily down the pyramid side, coursing in a deep trough inlaid near the steps.
This water came out of the pyramid top by some artesian effect. Continuing away from the structure, it fed a long, narrow lake. This body of water in turn emptied into the stream that ran down the chasm up which Doc and his friends had flown.
Upon the sides of the egg-shaped valley, not far from the pyramid, stood rows of impressive stone houses. These were lavishly carved, strange of architecture. It was as though the flyers had slipped back into an age before history.
There were people—many of them. They were garbed weirdly.
Doc dropped the plane pontoons on the narrow lake surface.
IT was an awed group of men who peered from the plane as it grounded floats on the clean white sand of the tiny beach.
The natives of this Valley of the Vanished were running down the steep sides to meet them. It was difficult to tell whether their reception was going to be warlike or not.
“Maybe we’d better unlimber a machine gun?” Renny suggested. “I don’t like the looks of that gang getting together in front!”
“No!” Doc shook his head. “After all, we haven’t any moral right here. And I’ll get out rather than massacre some of them!”
“But this land is all yours.”
“In the eyes of civilized law, probably so,” Doc agreed. “But there’s another way of looking at it. It’s a lousy trick for a government to take some poor savage’s land away from him and give it to a white man to exploit. Our own American Indians got that kind of a deal, you know. Not that these people look so savage, though.”
“They’ve got a pretty high type of civilization, if you ask me!” Renny declared “That’s the cleanest little city I ever saw!”
The men fell to watching the on-coming natives.
“They’re every one a pure Mayan!” Johnny declared. “No outside races have intermarried with these people!”
The approaching Mayans were going through a strange maneuver. The bulk of the populace was holding back to let a group of men, all of whom were garbed alike, come ahead.