Then Ham, Renny and Mindoro joined the fray. Their super-firing machine guns made frightful bull-fiddle sawings. Before those terrific blasts of lead, men fell.

It was too much for the corsairs. Those able to do so, fled.

Continuing on, Doc and his men descended a companionway to the forward deck. Doc wrenched open a hatch which gave access to the hold. He descended.

The Orientals caught sight of them. They fired a coughing volley. Slivers jumped out of the deck. Slugs tapped the iron hatch. A bullet hit Ham's sword cane and sent it cartwheeling across the deck.

Ham howled angrily, risked almost certain death to dive over and retrieve his sword cane, then popped down the hatch. By a miracle, he was unscratched.

"You lucky cuss!" Renny told him.

"That's what comes of leading a righteous life!" Ham grinned.

They were in the luggage room of the hold. Trunks and valises were heaped about them. Doc dived into this stuff, hunting his own luggage, which had been put aboard in San Francisco.

At the same time, Doc kept a watch on the hatch.

Grimacing in aversion, Ham ripped off his flashy coat and vest. He had already lost the villainous green hat. He took off the blood-colored shoes and flung them out of the hatch.

"I'll go barefooted before I'll wear them another minute!" he snapped.

Renny snorted mirthfully as, an instant later, the red shoes came flying back down the hatch, hurled by some Oriental.

Chapter 13

WATER ESCAPE

SILENCE now fell. This was broken by singsonged orders. Ham and Renny listened to these with interest. The yellow men seemed to be speaking a half dozen tongues from Hindustani, Mongol dialects, and Mandarin, to Kwangtungese and pidgin English.

"There must be riffraff from every country in the Far East up there!" Renny boomed.

"I'm surprised at that," Ham clipped "Tom Too's men in New York were all Mongols or half-castes with Mongol blood."

Mindoro explained this. "The rumors have it that Tom Too's most trusted men are of Mongol strain. Those were naturally the men he took to New York."

Doc Savage had found his trunks. He wrenched one open. Two cases of the high-powered little cartridges for the compact machine guns toppled out.

Doc grasped the edge of one box. He pulled. The wood tore away under his steel-thewed fingers as though it were so much rotten cork.

Mindoro, who was watching, drew in a gasp of wonder. He was still subject to dumfoundment at the incredible strength in those huge bronze hands of Doc's.

"Keep your eye peeled, Renny!" Doc warned. "They're talking about throwing a hand grenade down that hatch!"

It was Renny's turn to be amazed. How Doc had managed to pick the information out of the unintelligible tumult overhead was beyond him.

Renny strained his eyes upward until they ached.

Sure enough, a hand grenade came sailing down the hatch.

Renny's machine gun blared. The burst of lead caught the grenade, exploded it. Renny was probably one of the most expert machine gunners ever to hold back a trigger. The noisy little weapons of Doc's invention, by no means easy to hold upon a target while operating, were steady as balanced pistols in his big paws.

There was quite a concussion as the grenade detonated. It harmed nobody, although a fragment hit Renny's bullet-proof

vest so hard it set him coughing. Doc, Ham, and Mindoro had dived to cover in the baggage.

"We can play that game with them!" Doc said dryly. He opened a second trunk, took out iron grenades the size of turkey eggs, and flirted two up through the hatch.

The twin roars brought a yowling, agonized burst of Oriental yells. The attackers withdrew a short distance and began pouring a steady stream of bullets at the hatch.

This continued some minutes. Then the hatch suddenly flopped shut. Chains rattled. The links were being employed to make the cover fast.

A flashlight appeared in Doc's hand. It lanced the darkness which now saturated the hold. Rapidly he tried all the exits.

"They've locked us in!" he told the others grimly.

MINDORO, lapsing into Spanish in his excitement, babbled expletives. "This is incredible!" he fumbled. "Imagine such a thing as this happening on one of the finest liners plying the Pacific! It feels unnatural!"

"I'll bet it feels natural to the pirates on deck," Renny grunted. "This is the way they work it on the China coast. The devils ship aboard as passengers and in the crew, then take over the craft at a signal."

Comparative calm now settled upon the Malay Queen. The engines had not stopped; they continued to throb. They were modern and efficient, those engines. Up on deck they could not be heard. Down here in the hold they were barely audible.

"What are we going to do, Doc?" Ham wanted to know.

"Wait."

"What on? They've got us locked in."

"Which is probably fortunate for us," Doc pointed out. "We can hardly take over the ship, even if we whipped the whole gang. And they're slightly too many for us. We'll wait for — well, anything."

"But what about Monk, Long Tom, and Johnny?"

Fully a minute ticked away before Doc answered.

"We shall have to take the chance that they'll be kept alive as long as I'm living — provided they haven't been eliminated already."

"I don't think they have been killed," Ham said optimistically. "Tom Too is smart. He knows his three prisoners will be the price of his life should he fall into our hands. He won't throw away such a valuable prize."

"My thought, too," Doc admitted.

Mindoro was moved to put a delicate question. Perhaps the strain under which he was laboring made him blunt, for he ordinarily would have couched the query in the most diplomatic phraseology, or not have asked it at all.

"Would you turn Tom Too loose to save your friends?" he quizzed.

Doc's reply came with rapping swiftness.

"I'd turn the devil loose to save those three men!" He was silent the space of a dozen heartbeats, then added: "And you can be sure that when they joined me, they'd turn around and catch the devil again."

The others were silent. Mindoro wished he hadn't asked the question. There was something terrible about the depth of concern the big bronze man felt over the safety of his three friends — a concern which had hardly showed in his manner, but which was apparent here in the darkness of the hold, where they could not see him, but only hear his vibrant voice.

Minutes passed, swiftly at first, then slowly. They dragged into hours.

THE engines finally stopped. A rumble came from forward.

"The anchor dropping!" Doc declared.

"Any idea where we are?" Ham wanted to know.

"We've about had time to reach the harbor of Mantilla."

The four men listened. The great liner whispered with faint sound, noises too vague for Ham, Renny, and Mindoro to identify. But Doc's highly tuned ears, his greater powers of concentration, fathomed the meaning of the murmurings.

"They're lowering the boats."

"But this craft was supposed to tie up at the wharf in Mantilla," said Mindoro.

Silence fell. They continued to strain their eardrums until they crackled protest.

This continued fully half an hour.

"The liner anchored in about seventy feet of water," Doc stated.

"How can you tell?" Ham asked surprised.

"By the approximate number of anchor-chain links that went overboard. If you had listened carefully, you'd have noted each link made a jar as it went through the hawse hole.

Ham grinned. He had not thought of that. He gave their flashlight a fresh wind. This light used no battery, current being supplied by a spring-driven generator within the handle.