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

Doc looked at the window. There was grief in his gold eyes.



Chapter 2

A MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD


FALLING rain strewed the outer side of the windowpane with water. Far below, very pallid in the soaking murk, were street lights. Over on the Hudson River, a steamer was tooting a foghorn. The frightened, mooing horn was hardly audible inside the room.

Some blocks away, the skyscraper under construction loomed a darksome pile, crowned with a spidery labyrinth of steel girders. Only the vaguest outlines of it were discernible.

Impossible, of course, to glimpse the strange, crimson-fingered servant of death in that wilderness of metal!

Doc Savage said slowly: "I was far away when my father died."

He did not explain where he had been, did not mention his "Fortress of Solitude," his rendezvous built on a rocky island deep in the arctic regions. He had been there.

It was to this spot that Doc retired periodically to brush up on the newest developments in science, psychology, medicine, engineering. This was the secret of his universal knowledge, for his periods of concentration there were long and intense.

The Fortress of Solitude had been his father's recommendation. And no one on earth knew the location of the retreat. Once there, nothing could interrupt Doc's studies and experiments.

Without taking his golden eyes from the wet window, Doc asked: "Was there anything strange about my father's death?"

"'We're not certain," Renny muttered, and set his thin lips in an expression of ominousness.

"I, for one, am certain!" snapped Littlejohn. He settled more firmly on his nose the glasses which had the extremely thick left lens.

"What do you mean, Johnny?" Doc Savage asked.

"I am positive your father was murdered!" Johnny's gauntness, his studious scientist look, gave him a profoundly serious expression.

Doc Savage swung slowly from the window His bronze face had not changed expression. But under his brown business coat, tensing muscles had made his arms inches farther around.

"Why do you say that, Johnny?"

Johnny hesitated. His right eye narrowed, the left remaining wide and a little blank behind the thick spectacle lens. He shrugged.

"Only a hunch," he admitted, then added, almost shouting: "I'm right about it! I know I am!"

That was Johnny's way. He had absolute faith in what he called his hunches. And nearly always he was right. On occasions when he was wrong, though, he was very wrong indeed.

"Exactly what did the doctors say caused death?" Doc asked. Doc's voice was low, pleasant, but a voice capable of great volume and changing tone.

Renny answered that. Renny's voice was like thunder gobbling out of a cave. "The doctors didn't know. It was a new one on them. Your father broke out with queer circular red patches on his neck. And he lasted only a couple of days."

"I ran all kinds of chemical tests, trying to find if it was poison or germs or what it was caused the red spots," Monk interposed, slowly opening and closing his huge, red-furred fists. "I never found out a thing!"