Doc Savage 1 - The Man of Bronze

I -- 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 80th floor. Some offices were in use.

Above the 80th floor, an ornamental observation tower jutted up a full 150 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 and 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! Tonight! Tonight 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 and leather-covered. It was about 4 inches deep and 4 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.

The fingertips were a brilliant red! They might have been dipped an inch of their length in a scarlet dye.

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.

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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 86th 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, and 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!"