"Susan!" exclaimed this young man with dignity. "Susan, this is wonderful!"

  "Bernard Perling!" screamed Susie.

  Monk muttered, "Who's this guy?"

  They were not long revising two or three first impressions about Perling. First, he was older than he had at first seemed--between thirty-five and forty, probably. He was a rather small man, hardly taller than Susan Lane, of dark complexion with a wisp of a black moustache.

  "Right out of a movie," Ham muttered.

  Susie and Bernard Perling were squealing and shaking hands and exchanging hugs, Susie doing most of the squealing and Perling, in a dignified fashion, taking care of the hugging.

  Susie performed introductions.

  "Perlie," she told Monk and Ham, "is an old pal. I cabled him I was coming down here and going exploring. Perlie, like a nice boy, is going to help me get started."

  "Friends of yours," Mr. Perling asked, looking vaguely at Monk and Ham.

  "Oh, lovely boys," Susie explained. "They're down here on a--on a--" She looked blankly at Monk and Ham, said, "I don't believe I know why you are down here, do I?"

  "Vacation trip," Monk explained blandly.

  "They work for Doc Savage," Susie told Perling. "Mr. Savage is a very important man in New York. He's a kind of detective, isn't he?"

  Monk said that if he had ever heard Doc Savage called a detective before, he couldn't recall it, and that he didn't think the term quite fit. He said that he and Ham would like to see the town after they got located in a nice hotel, and wouldn't it be great if they and Miss Susan Lane put up at the same hotel.

  "Oh, but Susan is staying at my estate," said the somewhat foppish Mr. Perling. "However," he conceded, "I will be glad to have my car drop you at a hotel, since you are Miss Lane's friends."

  MR. PERLING had an impressive limousine complete with uniformed chauffeur. The chauffeur put everyone's luggage in the back, held the door open for them, and they got going.

  It developed that the limousine was first going to take Mr. Perling and Susie to the Perling estate, then continue on to a hotel with Monk and Ham, a procedure they were not against, since they were curious about Perling. He was, they found during the ride, evidently quite wealthy, owning considerable property of a commercial nature, and a good bit of real estate--city buildings and ranches.

  If the estate was any indication of Perling's financial standing, he was as rich as Croesus. The estate made Monk and Ham stare in breathless astonishment; the sweep of landscaped drives, the castle-like grandeur of the buildings, was more like a big California resort hotel than a home.

  Monk and Ham were discouraged when the car continued onward, Perling and Susie having been left at the estate.

  "You see that place?" Monk muttered.

  "It would take a tour to see it," Ham said.

  "Big."

  "Bad taste. Worse than Hollywood."

  "Yeah," Monk grumbled. "That guy is liable to be stiff competition. You see the way he rolls his eyes at her?"

  Their driver, an erect dignified Argentinian, had been driving with stiff-necked composure, but now he snapped his head forward, yelled out of the window. "Dios!" he bawled. "El automovil--"

  He didn't complete whatever comments he had to make, because the other car, which had pulled up alongside and was crowding them off the road, suddenly whipped in ahead. A tree seemed to leap at them; the crash that followed was violent, and the front of the car changed its shape considerably.

  Monk yelled, "By God! Who are those guys...?"

  Out of the other machine men were piling, more men than it appeared possible to jam into the car. They converged on the wrecked limousine from both sides. Monk and Ham barely had time to get the door open--it was somewhat jammed by the crash--and out into the road before the fighting started. There were no guns. The lack of firearms encouraged Ham to say, "It looks like this is a shellacking somebody has fixed up for us."

  Monk said, "Okay, let's see what we can do about it."

  The street--road, really, for the spot was isolated--filled with tumult. The limousine driver, nose flattened and leaking crimson, got out, looked at the battle, and decided to leave there. He took half a dozen steps, there was a shot, and he went down. One of the attackers had calmly stepped out of the battle, aimed and fired; the man went to the fallen chauffeur, shot him again, this time in the temple. The killer then came back to the fight, said, in Spanish, "Give to them a thorough beating. It will soften them up."

  Occasionally Monk or Ham would partially emerge from the mêlée in a sort of volcanic upheaval; now and then a yelling figure would fly out of the huddle at a tangent. Mostly there were blow sounds, curses, scufflings, grunts, the sounds that men make when badly hurt. It subsided, finally, with Monk and Ham beaten into insensibility.

  The man who had shot the chauffeur gave an order, and a commendation. "Load them in the car and let's go," he said. "You did a good job on them."

  MONK revived in complete darkness and his first impression, a horrified one, was that he was blind. That idea frightened him into trying to sit up, and he gasped in agony; he felt as if he'd been put through a meat grinder, and that somebody was leading an elephant back and forth over what remained. He realized, presently, that his body was actually rolling back and forth, and hitting metal braces on either side. Occasionally, for variety, his feet would hit the floor a solid bump, then he'd tumble again, and the elephant would take another trip over him. The elephant, he finally made out, was just plain pain, nothing else.

  "Ham!" he croaked.

  He got silence. Horrified, he settled down to the grim business of getting enough consciousness organized to do something constructive. There was, on the back of his head, a lump like a misplaced egg, and it had brothers elsewhere; even his teeth hurt as if they were being drilled upon.

  He was tied, he found. But not tied very securely, for the knots were easy to untangle, and he tried to get to his feet. The floor rocked and rolled--it actually did; this was no phenomena perpetrated by his head. He stood up with difficulty, hanging on to anything he could reach, which seemed to be exclusively iron plates making up a wall or bulkhead. Standing made him quite ill, and his head flew off somewhere and was gone for quite a while before, with angry effort, he seemed to take it back and restore it to his shoulders.

  "Boat," he decided.

  When he was able to hear sounds, he decided the boat was driven by a diesel engine... Let's see, what had happened? The last thing he could recall was hearing somebody say something about softening them up. Them? Oh, yes, Ham--

  "Ham!" he yelled.

  He felt around over the floor for Ham, but it was a rusty steel cubicle he was in, and Ham was not there. If there was a porthole, he couldn't find it, and the same went for ventilation. He decided there wasn't any ventilation; the place didn't smell as if there was. It smelled, he concluded, as if raw hides had been hauled in it frequently.

  Monk had absolutely no intention of going to sleep at this point, which was what he did. His body simply gave up; it had taken a hard beating. He slid down on the floor and slept, if it could be called that.

  THE door had opened. Very briefly, letting in a bone-colored chink of light; then the door had closed, but someone had been tossed, or had stepped, inside.

  Monk listened. He was awake, could hear, see; he didn't feel much better than he had earlier, but he wanted to fight somebody, which was a sign of improvement. Feet were slipping slowly and cautiously over the metal plates, and seemed to be approaching him. His face split in a painful grimace--his captors must have decided to do away with him; the killer was coming toward him, in the belief that Monk was helpless.

  His leg muscles gathered, his ears strained to catch the whispering shuffle of feet, and he leaped; he launched his short, solid body, desperately; his long arms whipped out. He misjudged somewhat, but made contact with the foe, and came down on the steel plates of the floor with a thud, tangled with someone. He got a fist in the midriff. A hand took his throat; he gasped for breath, kicked, and did some damage, because he got a gasp of pain and a "Damn you!"

  "Ugh--uh--ugh!" Monk croaked past the fingers around his throat.

  The other released him.

  "I'll be damned!" said Ham's voice.

  "Ham!"

  "Monk!"

  Monk said, "I thought it was somebody gonna cut my throat?"

  "In the dark?" Ham sneered. "If they had sent a man in here to kill you, he would have had a light. What were you trying to do, beat me up just for the pleasure of it?"

  Monk said this wasn't so. "If you felt as lousy as I do, you'd know better." "You were damned active there for a minute."

  "I don't think I got any arms and legs left," Monk complained. "Where have you been?" "I have been their personal guest on deck," Ham explained.

  "Having it soft, eh?"

  "Not exactly. I think they broke my nose. Maybe not, but it feels like it."

  "Huh?"

  "They want to know what we're doing in Argentina."

  "And you told them that?"

  "The truth--we're on a vacation."

  "A hell of a vacation!" Monk growled. He realized that Ham must suspect there was a microphone hidden somewhere, or some other eavesdropping device. So he added a build-up to Ham's statement, untrue, that they were on a vacation. He said, "Ain't this a fine note! We come to a place to really take a vacation, and a bunch of guys think we're up to something. Now I ask you, don't that beat all hell! What are we on? A boat?"

  Ham said it was a boat. "About seventy feet long, some kind of a coastwise cargo boat."

  "Where are we?"

  "How do I know? It's getting kinda cold outside, though."

  "Cold? Up north, eh?"

  "Down south, you dope. It gets colder down here as you go south."

  "Oh."

  "We're following the coastline, as nearly as I can tell," Ham said.

  "Know our hosts?"

  "They're all strangers to me," Ham said.

  IT must have been nearly an hour later when they heard the first of what was to be a series of agonized shrieks. The sounds came from close at hand. Instinctively, both Monk and Ham came to their feet; they had heard men in pain before, but hardly anything that contained more suffering than these cries.

  Ham whispered that it sounded right next door. "Let's see if we can find some sort of an opening in the wall--those sounds seem a little clear to be coming through a bulkhead."

  They began going over the bulkhead, and presently Ham grunted softly. "An opening," he whispered. "It's got a few planks over it from the other side." Ham continued working with the opening, using his fingers, shoving and asking, once, "Got a belt buckle?"

  Presently he opened up a narrow slit of light. They jammed their eyes to the opening.

  The adjoining compartment seemed somewhat larger than their own, and it was lighted. Spread-eagled against a bulkhead was a small man, almost nude, leaking blood from the nostrils, and from several minor wounds, evidently whip-made.

  Ham breathed, "Good God!" The man was suspended by his thumbs.

  Two men stood before the hanging man. They were saying nothing, but both had whips--hideous whips made of two-foot lengths of wire hawser, with the ends unlaid. From time to time, one or the other would use his whip, striking vulnerable spots.

  The complete silence of the two whip-wielders was hair-raising. Ham's features became--he could tell from the way they felt--chalky in the darkness. He could hear rage straining at Monk's breathing, hear Monk's efforts to keep it controlled.

  "I guess," one of the whip-wielders said suddenly, "that will do." "Take him down?" asked the other.

  "Let him hang, unless"--the man stepped close to the hanging man, jabbed the jagged end of the wire hawser into his midriff--"the great man here wishes to change his mind."

  The dangling man said nothing. His mouth gaped, his eyes were slitted, and the crimson from his nostrils had traveled in irregular yarns the length of his body, almost to the toes of his right foot.

  "Want to coöperate?" the whip-wielder demanded. The victim maintained his silence.

  "We'll let him digest that, and come back later with another serving of it," the man said. He jerked his head, and both whip-handlers left the compartment.

  Monk and Ham withdrew from the crack.

  Monk said, "I think I know who that fellow is."

  "So do I," Ham agreed.

  "He answers the description of the fellow that fat man, Orlin Dartlic, said trailed him to New York on the Clipper. Ain't that who he looks like to you?"

  "Yes. Mouse-like face, scar on the lip--you can see the scar--and a kind of a dead-pan look about him." "Paul Cort," Monk said. "Wasn't that his name?"

  "Paul Cort was the name the fat man gave him," Ham agreed.

  Chapter VII

  THEY worked with the planks which covered the opening. "It would be too much to expect to be able to get through here," Ham said. "But there's a chance--say! Say! I believe we're going to get them loose."

  The opening--it was actually a full-length but narrow door--was blocked the full length by hardwood planking, fitting into the opening so that it presented, on the side where Monk and Ham were imprisoned, a fairly smooth surface that accounted, Monk decided, for his not locating it earlier.

  The boat continued to travel rapidly over a choppy sea. The motion was violent, and the ventilation not good; they heard, very infrequently, sounds from the deck, but they were the meaningless sort of noises that were normal to a boat.

  They got through the bulkhead finally.

  "I'll hold him up," Monk said. "You get his thumbs loose."

  The victim groaned faintly, but gave no other sign of life, and Ham decided, "He's fainted." They got him down, spread him out on the floor--then there was nothing to do but wait. They did examine the mans battered features, and concluded there were no bones broken and that, as a whole, he was not near death, granting that his heart was in satisfactory condition.

  They spent some of the time inspecting their steel prison. The door, they found, was fastened on the outside. It was of steel. The porthole--there was only one--was not large enough to admit either Monk or Ham to the outside.

  "Land," Monk said, peering through the porthole.

  The coast was rocky, quite forbidding, a desolate area of cliffs and sharply climbing hills, of surf beating itself to foam on reefs.

  "I didn't know there was country like that close to Buenos Aires," Monk remarked. "What makes you think it has to be close to Buenos Aires?"

  "Eh?"

  "How long do you think we've been on this hooker?"

  "Why, five or six hours, maybe," Monk ventured.

  "Four days."

  "What?" Monk gasped. "Four--boy, I must have been laid out. Four days--listen, I wasn't unconscious that long."

  "They gave us something to knock us out, some kind of pills."

  "Oh. Four days! Whew! We could be anywhere!" Monk shook his head, gasped, felt of the knot on his scalp. "Four days. We been on this boat all that time, you know that?"

  "I don't know."

  THE man grinned at them, entirely without humor, a grimace that twisted his battered features, and the tiny scar, half-hidden by caked blood, flickered on his lower lip.

  "I am Paul Cort," he said. "I hope--in some way--I can return this favor."

  Monk grunted. The idea of the fellow being able to return a favor seemed a bit far-fetched. Ham sank beside the man. "How do you feel?"

  Paul Cort grimaced again. "About, I imagine, as I look."

  "You don't look so hot."

  The man lifted his head slightly, glanced around; he said, "Lean close," and when Ham did so, whispered, "Microphone? They can overhear?"

  Ham shook his head. "We don't know. We looked for a mike, but didn't find any. But let's not be too sure. They've got new mikes--you can attach them to a wall, and they'll pick up what is said on the other side."

  "Ahhhhhh." Cort closed his eyes. "I shall tell you what I can without telling anything they do not already know."

  "That might be a good idea, Cort."

  Paul Cort eyed them sharply. "You know my name? How is that?"

  Ham glanced at Monk; they exchanged nods of agreement that it would be okay to explain about the name. Ham said, "A man named Orlin Dartlic came to Doc Savage in New York--"

 

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