Chapter 9

KEL AVERY’S STORY

THE CAR bearing the kidnapers and their two women prisoners was a long blue phaeton. It had gone toward New York. These two bits of information were forthcoming from members of the crowd who had seen the snatching.

Da Clima piled into Doc’s streamlined car with the rest.

“Da Clima, he go along,” he growled. “We catch them and Da Clima, he do them like this!” His muscular hands made pantomime of breaking things.

“How about that, Doc?” Monk questioned.

“Let him come, of course. We want to ask him questions.” The big engine came to life under the tapered hood, but only sudden animation of ammeter and oil gauge showed that. The machine was fitted with an automatic shifting device, and Doc thrust the lever which meshed the gears, after which the shifting required no further attention.

Tires threw gravel all the way out of the flying field, shrieked on concrete as they swerved to the pavement, and then there was only the hiss of exhausts and the wail of air past the streamlined curves.

The speedometer arm jumped around to seventy. Doc touched a switch, and a siren started a banshee wail.

Doc spoke to Da Clima without taking his eyes off the scudding concrete.

“What do you know about this?” he demanded.

“Me, I not know the much,” Da Clima disclaimed.

“Tell us what you do know.”

“Yesterday, I read about it in the papers, the kidnap what is tried on Maureen Darleen,” said Da Clima. “I am in this Florida then. Maybe you read about that, no? The kidnap what is try on Maureen Darleen

“Call her Miss Avery so there will be no confusion,” Doc suggested. “Yes. We read about the attempted kidnaping.”

“I go to her, to Mees Avery,” Da Clima continued. “I am once the fighter, not so hot. Now, the nickel I pick up where I can. I fight. I shoot. I’m plenty the tough guy, me.”

“Don’t brag,” Monk growled. “You’re with guys who are tough, now.”

“But you not so good in the head, no?” Da Clima queried. “You run to the wrong fight while them fellows, they get Maureen — Mees Avery. They make of you the sap, no?”

Monk scowled. “Say, you funny-talkin’ bundle of beef, are you huntin’ a scrap?”

“Stop it,” Doc put in quietly. “Da Clima, you went to Miss Avery after you heard of the attempt to kidnap her and offered your services as a bodyguard — is that it?”

“That’s her, the idea,” Da Clima nodded. “I put up the talk and tell her that me, I am the one she need. So she hire me to watch out for her.”

“A swell job you done,” Monk snorted.

Da Clima started to answer, but caught sight of the speedometer and his eyes opened wide and black. He wet his lips uneasily and muttered, “Boy, we travel — no?”

The speedometer read eighty-five. Buildings went by like pickets and cars, frightened to the curb by the siren, were blurred.

“What else do you know?” Doc asked.

“Me, nothing,” said Da Clima.

“Don’t you know anything about Santini, Hallet, Leaking, or a white-bearded man named Dan Thunden, who claims he is a hundred and thirty-one years old, or a company which calls itself Fountain of Youth, Inc.?”

“Nope,” said Da Clima. “Never heard of any of them, no.,,

“What an information mine he turned out to be!” Monk growled.

Da Clima scowled at the homely chemist and said, “Da Clima, he not like you, not much.”

“Brother, the affection is returned,” Monk rapped.

“Look!” pale Long Tom shrieked.

DOC SAVAGE had already applied the power brakes. The heavy streamlined car squatted a little, slithered, straightened, slithered again, then, as the bronze man alternately stamped and released the brake pedal, the machine spun with tires screaming and stopped with its radiator pointing hack the way it had come.

Da Clima was pale, frightened by the wildness of their stop, and his hands were clenched, his breath coming and going rapidly.

Under the tread of the accelerator the big car lunged back upon their course, then slackened speed and swerved off the pavement, bounding over the packed shoulder, and stopped.

A woman was standing in the ditch beside the road, in water to her knees. She was disheveled, mud spattered, her frock was torn at the shoulder, as if she had pitched into the ditch from a rapidly-moving car. She came toward them, wiping mud off her face.

“Maureen — Mees Avery!” Da Clima cried in astonishment. Kel Avery was a tall young woman, blonde, blue-eyed, and even though she was swathed in mud and roadside grime, it was not hard to see why, as Maureen Darleen, she was considered one of the up-and-coming young movie actresses.

She got in the car and said, “Back the way you were going, gentlemen! And step on it!”

Monk grinned as if he liked that and made room for her, while Doc jockeyed the car around skillfully. They resumed their cometlike progress, siren a-howl.

“Which one of you is Doc Savage?” Kel Avery asked.

Monk pointed at the front seat, but said nothing.

Kel Avery took in the bronze man’s remarkable head, his expanse of shoulders, the metallic texture of his skin.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t get a look at him, or I would have known.”

“Ask her questions, Monk,” Doc directed. “This driving takes a lot of attention. We’re getting into the city limits.”

On the floorboards, where he had been throughout, the pig Habeas Corpus sniffed of the movie actress’s drenched, shapely ankles until Monk kicked him lightly in the ribs.

“They threw me out,” said Kel Avery.

“After they went to all that trouble to seize you?” Monk asked incredulously.

“Oh, they thought I was my maid,” explained the blonde actress. “The other girl made them think she was Kel Avery.”

“What other girl?”

“The one who rushed to my side and acted as if she was one of my party, when the trouble started hack at the airport. Say, that young lady would go great in the movies. She’s got looks, and how she can act! She made them think she was Kel Avery, and when she got her chance, whispered to me to begin to scream and they might throw me out, and if they did, I should find Doc Savage and tell him my story. So I screamed and they did throw me out.”

Doc tooled the plunging car past an intersection, then threw a question over his shoulder.

“What did this other girl look like?”

“She was beautiful, as I said,” advised Kel Avery. “And she had bronze-colored hair-hair like your own, Mr. Savage.”

“It was Pat!” Monk groaned.

THERE WAS unpleasant silence for a while-silence, if the whooping noise of the big car’s progress could be excepted.

Doc Savage himself showed little expression, for his command of his facial muscles was complete, but his five men showed that the thought of Patricia Savage being in the hands of Santini’s crew was anything but pleasant.

Da Clima held on, face white, and seemed to shrink each time the speeding car careened.

“I was coming to New York by plane to get your help, Mr. Savage,” volunteered blonde Kel Avery.

“Did you tell that to any one?” Doc questioned.

“Nobody. Why?”

“Because Santini and his outfit learned you were coming to me and tried to grab me and put me where you could not find me,” Doc told her. “Or that’s how it seems.”

“Santini?” Kel Avery sounded puzzled.

“Ever hear of him?”

“Or of Fountain of Youth, Inc.?”

“What about Hallet or Leaking?”

“Never heard the names that I recall.” The blonde’s voice had a ring of genuineness.

“What about a whitehaired man named Dan Thunden who says he is a hundred and thirty-one years old?”

“Oh!”

Doc lifted his eyes from the road and turned his head for a quick glance. The girl looked startled. “You have heard of Dan Thunden?” Doc asked.

“Yes,” said Kel Avery. “He is my greatgrandfather, according to the letter I got from him. My greatgrandfather on my mother’s side, his letter said.”

“What else did his letter say?” Doc asked grimly.

“It said for me to take the package that was with the letter and guard it with my life, to be sure not to open it, and to come to Florida and I would be worth fifty million dollars within thirty days,” the blonde said all in one breath.

“Holy cow!” Renny rumbled.

Doc inquired. “You obeyed instructions?”

“Oh, it sounds silly, but I did,” Kel Avery sighed. “You see, the press agent of the movie company I work for thought it would be a great idea to get some newspaper space. The company even paid me a salary to go to Florida as instructed, and the press agent was going to meet me there. But before he came, I was kidnaped. That scared me. I came North.”

“Why come North?”

The actress smiled. “To put the thing into your hands.”

“Was that the press agent’s idea?” Doc asked.

Kel Avery looked blank, then color crept up in her cheeks under the mud and she glared indignantly at the back of Doc’s head.

“Those men threatened to kill me and I was scared!” she snapped. “They told me they would kill me unless I got the package. As a matter of fact, I didn’t escape. They turned me loose to get the parcel. And the press agent does not know where I am. The press agent hadn’t even gotten to Florida.”

Doc was silent after the sharp answer, his metallic features expressionless. He made no movements, except suck as were necessary in controlling the car.

A corner loomed ahead. Kel Avery screamed softly; Da Clima groaned and put big hands over his face; the car reeled, rubber shrieked, then they were around the corner, straightened out and going on safely.

“Where is the parcel now?” Doc asked, his great voice calm.

“In the plane on which I arrived, back at the airport,” said Kel Avery. “You see, I sent it by air mail, knowing it would come on the same plane.”

“Why that precaution?”

“I was afraid to carry it. Maybe I’m not very brave.”

“You’re brave enough,” Doc assured her.

“This is what I call a deep, black mystery,” Monk muttered.

Doc slowed the streamlined car abruptly, much to the relief of Da Clima, who swelled proportionately as the machine slackened speed, so that, when they were traveling forty, his chest was out, his chin up, his eyes bright and brave.

“It’s no use,” Doc said. “The car carrying Pat has given us the slip.”

Bony Johnny absently fitted his monocle into his left eye, where it gave his optic a grotesque appearance, for the monocle was in reality a powerful magnifying glass which the gaunt geologist and archaeologist found occasion to use in the course of his work.

“This thing about Pat is appalling,” he said. “Appalling!”