"Doc Savage Adventure 1933-03 Man of_Bronze" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

The red-fingered man scuttled onto a workmen's platform. The planks were thick. The platform was near the outside of the wilderness of steel.

The man lowered his black case. His inner pocket disgorged compact, powerful binoculars.


ON the lowermost floor of a skyscraper many blocks distant, the crimson-fingered man focused his glasses. He started counting stories upward.

The building was one of the tallest in New York. A gleaming spike of steel and brick, it rammed upward nearly a hundred stories.

At the eighty-sixth floor, the sinister man ceased to count. His glasses moved right and left until they found a lighted window. This was at the west corner of the building.

Only slightly blurred by the rain, the powerful binoculars disclosed what was in the room.

The broad, polished top of a massive and exquisitely inlaid table stood directly before the window.

Beyond it was the bronze figure!

This looked like the head and shoulders of a man, sculptured in hard bronze. It was a startling sight, that bronze bust. The lines of the features, the unusually high forehead, the mobile and muscular, but not too-full mouth, the lean cheeks, denoted a power of character seldom seen.

The bronze of the hair was a little darker than the bronze of the features. The hair was straight, and lay down tightly as a metal skullcap. A genius at sculpture might have made it.

Most marvelous of all were the eyes. They glittered like pools of flake gold when little lights from the table lamp played on them. Even from that distance they seemed to exert a hypnotic influence through the powerful binocular
lenses, a quality that would cause the most rash individual to hesitate.

The man with the scarlet-tipped fingers shuddered.

"Death!" he croaked, as if seeking to overcome the unnerving quality of those strange, golden eyes. "The Son of the Feathered Serpent has commanded. It shall be death!"

He opened the black box. Faint metallic clickings sounded as he fitted together parts of the thing it held. After that, he ran his fingers lovingly over the object.

"The tool of the Son of the Feathered Serpent!" he chortled. "It shall deliver death!"

Once more, he pressed the binoculars to his eyes and focused them on the amazing bronze statue.

The bronze masterpiece opened its mouth, yawned - for it was no statue, but a living man!


The bronze man showed wide, very strong-looking teeth, in yawning. Seated there by the immense desk, he did not seem to be a large man. An onlooker would have doubted his six feet height - and would have been astounded to learn he weighed every ounce of two hundred pounds.

The big bronze man was so well put together that the impression was not of size, but of power. The bulk of his great body was forgotten in the smooth symmetry of a build incredibly powerful.

This man was Clark Savage, Jr.

Doc Savage! The man whose name was becoming a byword in the odd corners of the world!

Apparently no sound had entered the room. But the big bronze man left his chair. He went to the door. The hand he opened the door with was long-fingered. supple. Yet its enormous tendons were like cables under a thin film of bronze lacquer.

Doc Savage's keenness of hearing was vindicated. Five men were getting out of the elevator cage, which had come up silently.