"001 (B001) - The Man of Bronze (1933-03) - Lester Dent.palmdoc.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

THE MAN OF BRONZE

A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson

(Originally published in "Doc Savage" magazine March 1933. Bantam Books reprint October 1964)


Chapter 1

THE SINISTER ONE

THERE was death afoot in the darkness.

It crept furtively along a steel girder. Hundreds of feet below yawned glass-and-brick-walled cracks - New York streets. Down there, late workers scurried homeward. Most of them carried umbrellas, and did not glance upward.

Even had they looked, they probably would have noticed nothing. The night was black as a cave bat. Rain threshed down monotonously The clammy sky was like an oppressive shroud wrapped around the tops of the tall buildings.

One skyscraper was under construction. It had been completed to the eightieth floor. Some offices were in use.

Above the eightieth floor, an ornamental observation tower jutted up a full hundred and fifty feet more. The metal work of this was in place, but no masonry had been laid. Girders lifted a gigantic steel skeleton. The naked beams were a sinister forest.

It was in this forest that Death prowled.

Death was a man.

He seemed to have the adroitness of a cat at finding his way in the dark. Upward, he crept. The girders were slick with rain, treacherous. The man's progress was gruesome in its vile purpose.

From time to time, he spat strange, clucking words. A gibberish of hate!

A master of languages would have been baffled trying to name the tongue the man spoke. A profound student might have identified the dialect. The knowledge would be hard to believe, for the words were of a lost race, the language of a civilization long vanished!

"He must die!" the man chanted hoarsely in his strange lingo. "It is decreed by the Son of the Feathered Serpent! To-night! To-night death shall strike!"

Each time he raved his paean of hate, the man hugged an object he carried closer to his chest.

This object was a box, black, leather-covered. It was about four inches deep and four feet long.

"This shall bring death to him!" the man clucked, caressing the black case.



The rain beat him. Steel-fanged space gaped below. One slip would be his death. He climbed upward yard after yard.



Most of the chimneys which New Yorkers call office buildings had been emptied of their daily toilers. There were only occasional pale eyes of light gleaming from their sides.



The labyrinth of girders baffled the skulker a moment. He poked a flashlight beam inquisitively. The glow lasted a bare instant, but it disclosed a remarkable thing about the man's hands.