Chapter 8. THE TRAIL

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I’M afraid, brothers, that Kar has got his hands on Monk," Doc Savage said slowly.

"Nothing less could have kept the big ape from showing up here," agreed Ham, the waspish, quick-thinking lawyer. He made an angry, baffled gesture with his innocent-looking black swordcane.

Below the eighty-sixth floor window of the skyscraper office, the inspiring panorama of New York City spread. They were beautiful, impressive things, those gigantic, gleaming spires of office buildings. From that height, automobiles on the street looked like little, sluggish bugs moving along.

Doc lifted a bronze hand. He got instant attention. Ham, Renny, Long Tom, and Johnny knew this signal meant Doc was about to start his campaign of action.

To Long Tom, the electrical wizard, came the first commands.

Doc gave Long Tom the address of that tenth house in a row of dwellings that were all alike. He told the exact secret wall recess.

"I want you to trace that phone wire," Doc explained. "It was not installed by the regular telephone company. Kar must have put it in himself. It leads to some secret lair of Kar’s. I want you to follow it to that lair."

"Sure," said Long Tom. "I’ll use a — "

"I know what you’ll use," Doc interposed. "The apparatus is right here in my laboratory. You can find it!"

Long Tom hurried into the great laboratory room. He selected two boxes. They were replete with vacuum tubes, dials and intricate coils. They might have been radio sets, because one was equipped with head phones. But they weren’t.

One box held an apparatus which created a high-frequency electric current. When this current was placed upon a telephone wire, it would make no sound audible to the human ear. But it would throw an electrical field about the wire. This field extended a considerable distance.

The other box was an "ear" for detecting this field. Using it, Long Tom could walk about with the head phones upon his head. The phones would give a loud squeal when he brought the "ear" within proximity of the wire charged with his peculiar current.

The wire might be buried yards underground, but the "ear" would detect its presence anyway. Nor would brick walls interfere with the sensitive detector.

Long Tom hurried out with his equipment. He took a taxi for the tenth house in the row of similar houses uptown.

"NEXT, Johnny!" Doc addressed the tall, emaciated geologist and archaeologist. "There is an island in the South Seas, some distance from New Zealand. It is known as Thunder Island."

Johnny nodded. He took off the glasses he wore and fiddled with them excitedly. These glasses were peculiar in that the left lens was extremely thick. This left lens was in reality a powerful magnifying glass which Johnny carried there for convenience. Johnny’s left eye was virtually useless since an injury he had received in the World War.

"Go to the largest college of geology in New York City," Doc directed Johnny. "You will find there a collection of rock specimens from Thunder Island. They were turned over to the institution by Jerome Coffern, after an expedition he recently made to Thunder Island. I want those specimens."

"Mind telling me why you want them?" Johnny inquired.

"Of course not!"

In a few quick sentences, Doc Savage told of the existence of the horrible stuff called Smoke of Eternity.

"I am not sure what the Smoke of Eternity is," Doc explained. "But I have an idea what it could be. When the substance dissolves anything, there is a weird electrical display. This leads me to believe it operates through the disintegration of atoms. In other words, the dissolving is simply a disruption of the atomic structure."

"I thought it was generally believed there would be a great explosion once the atom was shattered!" Johnny murmured.

"That was largely disproved by recent accomplishments of scientists who have succeeded in cracking the atom," Doc corrected. "I have experimented extensively along that line myself. There is no explosion, for the very simple reason that it takes as much energy to shatter the atom as is released."

"But why the specimens from Thunder Island?" persisted Johnny.

"The basis of this Smoke of Eternity must be some hitherto undiscovered element or substance," Doc elaborated. "In other words, it is possible Gabe Yuder discovered on Thunder Island such an element.

"The man is a chemist and electrical engineer. From that element, he might have developed this Smoke of Eternity. I want to examine the rock specimens from Thunder Island in hopes they may give me some clew as to what this unknown element or substance is."

"I’ll get the specimens!" Johnny declared.

He hurried out.

"Hm-m-m — Renny!" Doc addressed his other two friends. "I want you two to hurry down to Monk’s penthouse place. See if you can find him."

These two also departed, Renny moving lightly as a mouse in spite of his elephantine bulk; Ham twirling his sword cane.

Doc Savage tarried only to enter the laboratory. From his clothing he removed the crumpled capsule of metal that had contained the Smoke of Eternity which had wiped out the body of poor Jerome Coffern.

Doc concealed the capsule by sticking it to the bottom of a microscope stand with a bit of adhesive wax.

Quitting his headquarters, Doc journeyed the eighty-six floors downward in an elevator. He got into a taxicab. The driver, he directed to take him to a point on Riverside Drive near where an ancient pirate ship was tied up.

Doc Savage intended to examine the old corsair bark at his leisure. His suspicions were aroused. The fact that the ill-savored Squint and his companions had found modern guns aboard, the familiarity they had shown with the strange craft, indicated they had been there before.

Aboard the buccaneer vessel, Doc hoped to find something that would lead him to the master fiend, Kar.

THE moment he came in sight of the Jolly Roger, Doc’s golden eyes noted something a bit puzzling.

Some distance down the river drifted a smudge of particularly vile black smoke. No factory smokestacks along the river were disgorging such stuff. Nor were any water craft, which might have thrown it off, to be seen.

The slight breeze was such that this darksome pall might have been swept from the vicinity of the Jolly Roger.

Too, far up the river, was a seaplane. It taxied along the surface, receding.

Doc strained the telescopic quality of his vision. He recognized the seaplane as the same which had attempted his life in Central Park!

Doc was thoughtful. His suspicions were now stronger.

But he had no way of knowing he was viewing the after-signs of Monk’s being taken aboard the submersible tank hiding place!

Down to the pirate vessel, Doc hurried. A springy leap from the ramshackle wharf put his bronze form aboard. A leaf settling on the deck planks would have made more noise than he did in landing.

Doc glided to the superstructure. Pausing, he listened. A stray rope end, swinging in the breeze, made brushing noises up in the labyrinth of rigging.

Another sound, too! A man muttering in the vicinity of the galley!

Doc backed a pace. His sharp gaze rested on the galley stovepipe. The faintest wisp of dark smoke drifted out. The smoke was like that pall hanging downriver.

Instantly, Doc became a wary, stalking bronze hunter. He slid aft, then went down a companion. He made for the galley. He was shortly framed in the galley door.

Beside a rusty old cook oven stood a strange contrivance.

This was larger than the oven, but built along similar lines. It seemed to be a furnace for burning resinous, smoke-making material. A big pipe from this led the smoke to the galley flue.