Background of the Study:
Introduction:
Lester Dent 1904-1959 – American pulp fiction writer, author. Best known as the creator and main author of the series of novels about the Superhuman scientist adventurer, “Doc Savage.” The 159 novels written over 16 years were credited to the house name “Kenneth Robeson.” In 1904 Dent started out life in a place called LaPlata, MO., with roots in Wyoming. The only child of Bernard (rancher) and Alice Norfolk Dent. Alice was a teacher before her marriage. Dent’s early years were spent in the lonely hills of Wyoming. He attended a local one-room school house, often paying for tuition with furs that he had caught. He had few companions or friends; this early loneliness may have helped develop his talents as a novelist. In 1919 the Dent family returned to LaPlata for good, completing his elementary and secondary education. In 1923 our subject enrolled at Chillicothe Business College in Missouri, his original goal was to become a banker. However while standing in the application line, he chatted with a fellow about career options, learning a telegraph operator earned more than a aspiring banker. He changed his major at CBC to telegraphy, after completing his course he worked for CBC temporarily. In 1924 began a series of opportunities with Western Union, then Oil and gas. Finally for Associated Press in Oklahoma. One of Dents fellow workers had published a story for a pulp magazine earning the huge sum for the time of 450 dollars. Dent a voracious reader thought he would try his hand at it and his first professional sale was in 1929. In 1940 the Dents returned to LaPlata for good. Our subject continued to write for Doc Savage, but also found time to work in the other genres. The Dents traveled extensively as well, enough so to earn Lester a membership in the Explorers Club. Mr. Dent suffered a heart attack in February 1959. He was hospitalized but subsequently expired 11 March 1959. Since his death, Lester Dent has lived on in reprints and new stories discovered and marketed by his literary agent, Will Murray. There is a formula in the name of Lester Dent; The Master Fiction Plot, often referred to as the Lester Dent formula, widely circulated guide to writing a salable 6K word pulp story, it has been recommended to aspiring authors. By summarizing the formula “split your six thousand word story into four fifteen hundred word parts. Part one, hit your hero with a heap of trouble, Part two double it. Part three, put him in so much trouble there’s no way he could ever possibly get out of it..All your main characters have to be in the first third. All your main themes and everything else has to be established in the first third, developed in the second third and resolved in the last third.” – TL lives again for the N.E. Missouri ARC.
https://www.oldqslcards.com/
Significance of the Study
This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words.
The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.
Here’s how it starts:
- A DIFFERENT MURDER METHOD FOR VILLAIN TO USE
- A DIFFERENT THING FOR VILLAIN TO BE SEEKING
- A DIFFERENT LOCALE
- A MENACE WHICH IS TO HANG LIKE A CLOUD OVER HERO
One of these DIFFERENT things would be nice, two better, three swell. It may help if they are fully in mind before tackling the rest.
A different murder method could be–different. Thinking of shooting, knifing, hydrocyanic, garroting, poison needles, scorpions, a few others, and writing them on paper gets them where they may suggest something. Scorpions and their poison bite? Maybe mosquitos or flies treated with deadly germs?
If the victims are killed by ordinary methods, but found under strange and identical circumstances each time, it might serve, the reader of course not knowing until the end, that the method of murder is ordinary. Scribes who have their villain’s victims found with butterflies, spiders or bats stamped on them could conceivably be flirting with this gag.
Probably it won’t do a lot of good to be too odd, fanciful or grotesque with murder methods.
The different thing for the villain to be after might be something other than jewels, the stolen bank loot, the pearls, or some other old ones.
Here, again one might get too bizarre.
Unique locale? Easy. Selecting one that fits in with the murder method and the treasure–thing that villain wants–makes it simpler, and it’s also nice to use a familiar one, a place where you’ve lived or worked. So many pulpateers don’t. It sometimes saves embarrassment to know nearly as much about the locale as the editor, or enough to fool him.
Here’s a nifty much used in faking local color. For a story laid in Egypt, say, author finds a book titled “Conversational Egyptian Easily Learned,” or something like that. He wants a character to ask in Egyptian, “What’s the matter?” He looks in the book and finds, “El khabar, eyh?” To keep the reader from getting dizzy, it’s perhaps wise to make it clear in some fashion, just what that means. Occasionally the text will tell this, or someone can repeat it in English. But it’s a doubtful move to stop and tell the reader in so many words the English translation.
The writer learns they have palm trees in Egypt. He looks in the book, finds the Egyptian for palm trees, and uses that. This kids editors and readers into thinking he knows something about Egypt.
Here’s the second installment of the master plot.
Divide the 6000 word yarn into four 1500 word parts. In each 1500 word part, put the following:
FIRST 1500 WORDS
1–First line, or as near thereto as possible, introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble. Hint at a mystery, a menace or a problem to be solved–something the hero has to cope with.
2–The hero pitches in to cope with his fistful of trouble. (He tries to fathom the mystery, defeat the menace, or solve the problem.)
3–Introduce ALL the other characters as soon as possible. Bring them on in action.
4–Hero’s endevours land him in an actual physical conflict near the end of the first 1500 words.
5–Near the end of first 1500 words, there is a complete surprise twist in the plot development.
SECOND 1500 WORDS
1–Shovel more grief onto the hero.
2–Hero, being heroic, struggles, and his struggles lead up to:
3–Another physical conflict.
4–A surprising plot twist to end the 1500 words.
NOW: Does second part have SUSPENSE?
Does the MENACE grow like a black cloud?
Is the hero getting it in the neck?
Is the second part logical?
THIRD 1500 WORDS
1–Shovel the grief onto the hero.
2–Hero makes some headway, and corners the villain or somebody in:
3–A physical conflict.
4–A surprising plot twist, in which the hero preferably gets it in the neck bad, to end the 1500 words.
DOES: It still have SUSPENSE?
The MENACE getting blacker?
The hero finds himself in a hell of a fix?
It all happens logically?
These outlines or master formulas are only something to make you certain of inserting some physical conflict, and some genuine plot twists, with a little suspense and menace thrown in. Without them, there is no pulp story.
These physical conflicts in each part might be DIFFERENT, too. If one fight is with fists, that can take care of the pugilism until next the next yarn. Same for poison gas and swords. There may, naturally, be exceptions. A hero with a peculiar punch, or a quick draw, might use it more than once.
The idea is to avoid monotony.
ACTION:
Vivid, swift, no words wasted. Create suspense, make the reader see and feel the action.
ATMOSPHERE:
Hear, smell, see, feel and taste.
DESCRIPTION:
Trees, wind, scenery and water.
THE SECRET OF ALL WRITING IS TO MAKE EVERY WORD COUNT.
FOURTH 1500 WORDS
1–Shovel the difficulties more thickly upon the hero.
2–Get the hero almost buried in his troubles. (Figuratively, the villain has him prisoner and has him framed for a murder rap; the girl is presumably dead, everything is lost, and the DIFFERENT murder method is about to dispose of the suffering protagonist.)
3–The hero extricates himself using HIS OWN SKILL, training or brawn.
4–The mysteries remaining–one big one held over to this point will help grip interest–are cleared up in course of final conflict as hero takes the situation in hand.
5–Final twist, a big surprise, (This can be the villain turning out to be the unexpected person, having the “Treasure” be a dud, etc.)
6–The snapper, the punch line to end it.
HAS: The SUSPENSE held out to the last line?
The MENACE held out to the last?
Everything been explained?
It all happen logically?
Is the Punch Line enough to leave the reader with that WARM FEELING?
Did God kill the villain? Or the hero?
https://myweb.uiowa.edu/jwolcott/Doc/pulp_plot.htm
Literature Review
Synopsis:
Doc Savage returns to his New York headquarters, located on the 86th floor of a prominent building, to learn that his father has died mysteriously. While conferring with his five associates, an assassination attempt is made on Doc. Apprehending the shooter, Doc’s men are surprised to find that the man is a Mayan who speaks an extinct language. Doc attempts to hypnotize the man and interrogate him but the native jumps to his death rather than reveal any knowledge. Doc Savage locates important papers his father hid before his death. These documents reveal that Doc Savage has a land grant in the Central American republic of Hidalgo. Doc and his men travel to Hidalgo and from there into the remote jungle interior where the land grant is located. They discover a lost tribe of the Mayan Empire. Throughout their journey they encounter resistance and attacks from some unknown malefactor. These obstacles continue even in the remote jungle valley. The criminal mastermind utilizes a deadly disease as a weapon. This is the same disease which was used to murder Doc’s father. Doc Savage develops a cure which heals the sickened people. Doc and his men are adopted into the tribe. They then learn that the legacy is an enormous golden treasure to be used by Doc Savage and his men in their quest against evil. The tribe is attacked by the villain who is using the Mayan warrior sect as his agents. Events culminate with the defeat of the warriors and the death of the villain.
Literature Sample Collection:
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 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 utter 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.
The finger tips 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.
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.
These men came toward Doc. There was wild delight in their manner. But for some sober reason, they did not shout boisterous greetings. It was as though Doc bore a great grief, and they sympathized deeply with him, but didn’t know what to say.
The first of the five men was a giant who towered four inches over six feet. He weighed fully two fifty. His face was severe, his mouth thin and grim, and compressed tightly, as though he had just finished a disapproving, “tsk! tsk!” sound. His features had a most puritanical look.
This was “Renny,” or Colonel John Renwick. His arms were enormous, his fists bony monstrosities. His favorite act was to slam his great fists through the solid panel of a heavy door. He was known throughout the world for his engineering accomplishments, also.
Behind Renny came William Harper Littlejohn, very tall, very gaunt. Johnny wore glasses with a peculiarly thick lens over the left eye. He looked like a half-starved, studious scientist. He was probably one of the greatest living experts on geology and archaeology.
Next was Major Thomas J. Roberts, dubbed “Long Tom.” Long Tom was the physical weakling of the crowd, thin, not very tall, and with a none-too-healthy-appearing skin. He was a wizard with electricity.
“Ham” trailed Long Tom. “Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks,” Ham was designated on formal occasions. Slender, waspy, quick-moving, Ham looked what he was—a quick thinker and possibly the most astute lawyer Harvard ever turned out. He carried a plain black cane—never went anywhere without it. This was, among other things, a sword cane.
Last came the most remarkable character of all. Only a few inches over five feet tall, he weighed better than two hundred and sixty pounds. He had the build of a gorilla, arms six inches longer than his legs, a chest thicker than it was wide. His eyes were so surrounded by gristle as to resemble pleasant little stars twinkling in pits. He grinned with a mouth so very big it looked like an accident.
“Monk!” No other name could fit him!
He was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, but he heard the full name so seldom he had about forgotten what it sounded like.
The men entered the sumptuously furnished reception room of the office suite. After the first greeting, they were silent, uncomfortable. They didn’t know what to say.
Doc Savage’s father had died from a weird cause since they last saw Doc.
The elder Savage had been known throughout the world for his dominant bearing and his good work. Early in life, he had amassed a tremendous fortune—for one purpose.
That purpose was to go here and there, from one end of the world to the other, looking for excitement and adventure, striving to help those who needed help, punishing those who deserved it.
To that creed he had devoted his life.
His fortune had dwindled to practically nothing. But as it shrank, his influence had increased. It was unbelievably wide, a heritage befitting the man.
Greater even, though, was the heritage he had given his son. Not in wealth, but in training to take up his career of adventure and righting of wrongs where it left off.
Clark Savage, Jr., had been reared from the cradle to become the supreme adventurer.
Hardly had Doc learned to walk, when his father started him taking the routine of exercises to which he still adhered. Two hours each day, Doc exercised intensively all his muscles, senses, and his brain.
As a result of these exercises, Doc possessed a strength superhuman. There was no magic about it, though. Doc had simply built up muscle intensively all his life.
Doc’s mental training had started with medicine and surgery. It had branched out to include all arts and sciences. Just as Doc could easily overpower the gorilla-like Monk in spite of his great strength, so did Doc know more about chemistry. And that applied to Renny, the engineer; Long Tom, the electrical wizard; Johnny, the geologist and the archaeologist; and Ham, the lawyer.
Doc had been well trained for his work.
Grief lay heavily upon Doc’s five friends. The elder Savage had been close to their hearts.
“Your father’s death—was three weeks ago,” Renny said at last.
Doc nodded slowly. “So I learned from the newspapers—when I got back today.”
Renny groped for words, said finally: “We tried to get you in every way. But you were gone—as if you had been off the face of the earth.”
Doc looked at the window. There was grief in his gold eyes.
II
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!”
Monk’s looks were deceiving. His low forehead apparently didn’t contain room for a spoonful of brains. Actually, Monk was in a way of being the most widely known chemist in America. He was a Houdini of the test tubes.
“We have no facts upon which to base suspicion!” clipped Ham, the waspish Harvard lawyer whose quick thinking had earned him a brigadier generalship in the World War. “But we’re suspicious anyway.”
Doc Savage moved abruptly across the room to a steel safe. The safe was huge, reaching above his shoulders. He swung it open.
It was instantly evident explosive had torn the lock out of the safe door.
A long, surprised gasp swished around the room.
“I found it broken into when I came back,” Doc explained. “Maybe that has a connection with my father’s death. Maybe not.”
Doc’s movements were rhythmic as he swung over and perched on a corner of the big, inlaid table before the window. His eyes roved slowly over the beautifully furnished office. There was another office adjoining, larger, which contained a library of technical books that was priceless because of its completeness.
Adjoining that was the vast laboratory room, replete with apparatus for chemical and electrical experiments.
This was about all the worldly goods the elder Savage had left behind.
“What’s eating you, Doc?” asked the giant Renny. “We all got the word from you to show up here tonight. Why?”
Doc Savage’s strange golden eyes roved over the assembled men; from Renny, whose knowledge of engineering in all its branches was profound, to Long Tom, who was an electrical wizard, to Johnny, whose fund of information on the structure of the earth and ancient races which had inhabited it was extremely vast, to Ham, the clever Harvard lawyer and quick thinker, and finally to Monk, who, in spite of his resemblance to a gorilla, was a great chemist.
In these five men, Doc knew he had five of the greatest brains ever to assemble in one group. Each was surpassed in his field by only one human being—Doc Savage himself.
“I think you can guess why you are here,” Doc said.
Monk rubbed his hairy hands together. Of the six men present, Monk’s skin alone bore scars. The skin of the others held no marks of their adventurous past, thanks to Doc’s uncanny skill in causing wounds to heal without leaving scars.
But not Monk. His tough, rusty iron hide was so marked with gray scars that it looked as if a flock of chickens with gray-chalk feet had paraded on him. This was because Monk refused to let Doc treat him. Monk gloried in his tough looks.
“Our big job is about to start, huh?” said Monk, vast satisfaction in his mild voice.
Doc nodded. “The work to which we shall devote the rest of our lives.”
At that statement, great satisfaction appeared upon the face of every man present. They showed eagerness for what was to come.
Doc dangled a leg from the corner of the table. Unwittingly—for he knew nothing of the red-fingered killer lurking in the distant skyscraper that was under construction—Doc had placed his back out of line with the window. In fact, since the men had entered, he had not once been aligned with the window.
“We first got together back in the War,” he told the five slowly. “We all liked the big scrap. It got into our blood. When we came back, the humdrum life of an ordinary man was not suited to our natures. So we sought something else.”
Doc held their absolute attention, as if he had been hypnotized. Undeniably this golden-eyed man was the leader of the group, as well as leader of anything he undertook. His very being denoted a calm knowledge of all things, and an ability to handle himself under any conditions.
“Moved by mutual admiration for my father,” Doc continued, “we decided to take up his work of good wherever he was forced to leave off. We at once began training ourselves for that purpose. It is the cause for which I had been reared from the cradle, but you fellows, because of a love of excitement and adventure, wish to join me.”
Doc Savage paused. He looked over his companions, one by one, in the soft light of the well-furnished office, one of the few remaining evidences of the wealth that once belonged to his father.
“Tonight,” he went on soberly, “we begin carrying out the ideals of my father—to go here and there, from one end of the world to the other, looking for excitement and adventure, striving to help those who need help, and punishing those who deserve it.”
There was a somber silence after that immense pronunciation.
It was Monk, matter-of-fact person that he was, who shattered the quiet.
“What flubdubs me is who broke into that safe, and why?” he grumbled. “Doc, could it have any connection with your father’s death?”
“It could, of course,” Doc explained. “The contents of the safe had been rifled. I do not know whether my father had anything of importance in it. But I suspect there was.”
Doc drew a folded paper from inside his coat. The lower half of the paper had been burned away, it was evident from the charred edges. Doc continued speaking.
“Finding this in a corner of the safe leads me to that belief. The explosion which opened the safe obviously destroyed the lower part of the paper. And the robber probably overlooked the rest. Here, read it!”
He passed it to the five men. The paper was covered with the fine, almost engraving-perfect writing of Doc’s father. They all recognized the penmanship instantly. They read:
Dear Clark: I have many things to tell you. In your whole lifetime, there never was an occasion when I desired you here so much as I do now. I need you, son, because many things have happened which indicate to me that my last journey is at hand. You will find that I have nothing much to leave you in the way of tangible wealth.
I have, however, the satisfaction of knowing that in you I shall live.
I have developed you from boyhood into the sort of man you have become, and I have spared no time or expense to make you just what I think you should be.
Everything I have done for you has been with the purpose that you should find yourself capable of carrying on the work which I so hopefully started, and which, in these last few years, has been almost impossible to carry on.
If I do not see you again before this letter is in your hands, I want to assure you that I appreciate the fact that you have lacked nothing in the way of filial devotion. That you have been absent so much of the time has been a secret source of gratification to me, for your absence has, I know, made you self-reliant and able. It was all that I hoped for you.
Now, as to the heritage which I am about to leave you:
What I am passing along to you may be a doubtful heritage. It may be a heritage of woe. It may even be a heritage of destruction to you if you attempt to capitalize on it. On the other hand, it may enable you to do many things for those who are not so fortunate as you yourself, and will, in that way, be a boon for you in carrying on your work of doing good to all.
Here is the general information concerning it:
Some twenty years ago, in company with Hubert Robertson, I went on an expedition to Hidalgo, in Central America, to investigate the report of a prehistoric—
There the missive ended. Flames had consumed the rest.
“The thing to do is get hold of Hubert Robertson!” clipped the quick-thinking Ham. Waspish, rapid-moving, he swung over to the telephone, scooped it up. “I know Hubert Robertson’s phone number. He is connected with the Museum of Natural History.”
“You won’t get him!” Doc said dryly.
“Why not?”
Doc got off the table and stood beside the giant Renny. It was only then that one realized what a big man Doc was. Alongside Renny, Doc was like dynamite alongside gunpowder.
“Hubert Robertson is dead,” Doc explained. “He died from the same thing that killed my father—a weird malady that started with a breaking out of red spots. And he died at about the same time as my father.”
Renny’s thin mouth pinched even tighter at that. Gloom seemed to settle on his long face. He looked like a man disgusted enough with the evils of the world to cry.
Strangely enough, that somber look denoted that Renny was beginning to take interest. The tougher the going got, the better Renny functioned—and the more puritanical he looked.
“That flooeys our chances of finding out more about this heritage your father left you!” he rumbled.
“Not entirely,” Doc corrected. “Wait here a moment!”
He stepped through another door, crossed the room banked with the volumes of his father’s great technical library. Through a second door, and he was in the laboratory.
Cases laden with chemicals stood thick as forest trees on the floor. There were electrical coils, vacuum tubes, ray apparatus, microscopes, retorts, electric furnaces, everything that could go into such a laboratory.
From a cabinet Doc lifted a metal box closely resembling an old-fashioned magic lantern. The lens, instead of being ordinary optical glass, was a very dark purple, almost black. There was a cord for plugging into an electric-light socket.
Doc carried this into the room where his five men waited, placed it on a stand, aiming the lens at the window. He plugged the cord into an electric outlet.
Before putting the thing in operation, he lifted the metal lid and beckoned to Long Tom, the electrical wizard.
“Know what this is?”
“Of course.” Long Tom pulled absently at an ear that was too big, too thin and pale. “That is a lamp for making ultra-violet rays, or what is commonly called black light. The rays are invisible to the human eye, since they are shorter than ordinary light. But many substances when placed in the black light will glow, or fluoresce after the fashion of luminous paint on a watch dial. Examples of such substances are ordinary vaseline, quinine——”
“That’s plenty,” interposed Doc. “Will you look at the window I’ve pointed this at. See anything unusual about it?”
Johnny, the gaunt archaeologist and geologist, advanced to the window, removing his glasses as he went. He held the thick-lensed left glass before his right eye, inspecting the window.
In reality, the left side of Johnny’s glasses was an extremely powerful magnifying lens. His work often required a magnifier, so he wore one over his left eye, which was virtually useless because of an injury received in the World War.
“I can find nothing!” Johnny declared. “There’s nothing unusual about the window!”
“I hope you’re wrong,” Doc said, sobriety in his wondrously modulated voice. “But you could not see the writing on that window, should there be any. The substance my father perfected for leaving secret messages was absolutely invisible. But it glows under ultra-violet light.”
“You mean——” hairy Monk rumbled.
“That my father and I often left each other notes written on that window,” Doc explained. “Watch!”
Doc crossed the room, a big, dynamic man, light on his feet as a kitten for all his size, and turned out the lights. He came back to the black-light box. His hand, supple despite its enormous tendons, clicked the switch that shot current into the apparatus.
Instantly, written words sprang out on the darkened windowpane. Glowing with a dazzling, electric blue, the effect of their sudden appearance was uncanny.
A split second later came a terrific report! A bullet knocked the glass into hundreds of fragments, wiping out the sparkling blue message before they could read it. The bullet passed entirely through the steel-plate inner door of the safe! It embedded in the safe back.
The room reeked silence. One second, two! Nobody had moved.
And then a new sound was heard. It was a low, mellow, trilling sound, like the song of some strange bird of the jungle, or the sound of the wind filtering through a jungled forest. It was melodious, though it had no time; and it was inspiring, though it was not awesome.
The amazing sound had the peculiar quality of seeming to come from everywhere within the room rather than from a definite spot, as though permeated with an eerie essence of ventriloquism.
A purposeful calm settled over Doc Savage’s five men as they heard that sound. Their breathing became less rapid, their brains more alert.
For this weird sound was part of Doc—a small, unconscious thing which he did in moments of utter concentration. To his friends it was both the cry of battle and the song of triumph. It would come upon his lips when a plan of action was being arranged, precoursing a master stroke which made all things certain.
It would come again in the midst of some struggle, when the odds were all against his men, when everything seemed lost. And with the sound, new strength would come to all, and the tide would always turn.
And again, it might come when some beleaguered member of the group, alone and attacked, had almost given up all hope of survival. Then that sound would filter through, some way, and the victim knew that help was at hand.
The whistling sound was a sign of Doc, and of safety, of victory.
“Who got it?” asked Johnny, and he could be heard settling his glasses more firmly on his bony nose.
“No one,” said Doc. “Let us crawl, brothers, crawl. That was no ordinary rifle bullet, from the sound of it!”
At that instant, a second bullet crashed into the room. It came, not through the window, but through some inches of brick and mortar which comprised the wall! Plaster sprayed across the thick carpet.
III
THE ENEMY
Doc Savage was the last of the six to enter the adjoining room. But he was inside the room in less than ten seconds. They moved with amazing speed, these men.
Doc flashed across the big library. The speed with which he traversed the darkness, never disturbing an article of furniture, showed the marvelous development of his senses. No jungle cat could have done better.
Expensive binoculars reposed in a desk drawer, a highpower hunting rifle in a corner cabinet. In splits of seconds, Doc had these, and was at the window.
He watched, waited.
No more shots followed the first two.
Four minutes, five, Doc bored into the night with the binoculars. He peered into every office window within range, and there were hundreds. He scrutinized the spidery framework of the observation tower atop the skyscraper under construction. Darkness packed the labyrinth of girders, and he could discern no trace of the bushwhacker.
“He’s gone!” Doc concluded aloud.
No sound of movement followed his words. Then the window shade ran down loudly in the room where they had been shot at. The five men stiffened, then relaxed at Doc’s low call. Doc had moved soundlessly to the shade and drawn it.
Doc was beside the safe, the lights turned on, when they entered.
The window glass had been clouted completely out of the sash. It lay in glistening chunks and spears on the luxuriant carpet.
The glowing message which had been on it seemed destroyed forever.
“Somebody was laying for me outside,” Doc said, no worry at all in his well-developed voice. “They evidently couldn’t get just the aim they wanted at me through the window. When we turned out the light to look at the writing on the window, they thought we were leaving the building. So they took a couple of shots for wild luck.”
“Next time, Doc, suppose we have bulletproof glass in these windows!” Renny suggested, the humor in his voice belying his dour look.
“Sure,” said Doc. “Next time! We’re on the eighty-sixth floor, and it’s quite common to be shot at here!”
Ham interposed a sarcastic snort. He bounced over, waspish, quick-moving, and nearly managed to thrust his slender arm through the hole the bullet had tunneled in the brick wall.
“Even if you put in bulletproof windows, you’d have to be blame careful to set in front of them!” he clipped dryly.
Doc was studying the hole in the safe door, noting particularly the angle at which the powerful bullet had entered. He opened the safe. The big bullet, almost intact, was embedded in the safe rear wall.
Renny ran a great arm into the safe, grasped the bullet with his fingers. His giant arm muscles corded as he tried to pull it out. The fist that could drive bodily through inch-thick planking with perfect ease was defied by the embedded metal slug.
“Whew!” snorted Renny. “That’s a job for a drill and cold chisels.”
Saying nothing, merely as if he wanted to see if the bullet was stuck as tightly as Renny said, Doc reached into the safe.
Great muscles popping up along his arm suddenly split his coat sleeve wide open. He glanced at the ruined sleeve ruefully, and brought his arm out of the safe. The bullet lay loosely in his palm.
Renny could not have looked more astounded had a spiketailed devil hopped out of the safe. The expression on his puritanical face was ludicrous.
Doc weighed the bullet in his palm. The lids were drawn over his golden eyes. He seemed to be giving his marvelous brain every chance to work—and he was. He was guessing the weight of that bullet within a few grains, almost as accurately as a chemist’s scale could weigh it.
“Seven hundred and fifty grains,” he decided. “That makes it a .577-caliber Nitro-Express rifle. Probably the gun that fired that shot was a double-barreled rifle.”
“How d’you figure that?” asked Ham. Possibly the most astute of Doc’s five friends, Doc’s reasoning nevertheless got away from even Ham.
“There were only two shots,” Doc clarified. “Also, cartridges of this tremendous size are usually fired from double-barreled elephant rifles.”
“Let’s do somethin’ about this!” boomed Monk. “The bushwhacker may get away while we’re jawin’!”
“He’s probably fled already, since I could locate no trace of him with the binoculars,” Doc replied. “But we’ll do something about it, right enough!”
With exactly four terse sentences, one each directed at Renny, Long Tom, Johnny, and Monk, Doc gave all the orders he needed to. He did not explain in detail what they were to do. That wasn’t necessary. He merely gave them the idea of what he wanted, and they set to work and got it in short order. They were clever, these men of Doc’s.
Renny, the engineer, picked a slide rule from the drawer of a desk, a pair of dividers, some paper, a length of string. He probed the angle at which the bullet had passed through the inner safe door, calculated expertly the slight amount the window had probably deflected it. In less than a minute, he had his string aligned from the safe to a spot midway in the window, and was sighting down it.
“Snap out of it, Long Tom!” he called impatiently.
“Just keep your shirt on!” Long Tom complained. He was doing his own share as rapidly as the engineer.
Long Tom had made a swift swing into the library and laboratory, collecting odds and ends of electrical material. With a couple of powerful light bulbs he unscrewed from sockets, some tin, a pocket mirror he borrowed from—of all people—Monk, Long Tom rigged an apparatus to project a thin, extremely powerful beam of light. He added a flashlight lens, and borrowed the magnifying half of Johnny’s glasses before he got just the effect he desired.
Long Tom sighted his light beam down Renny’s string, thus locating precisely in the gloomy mass of skyscrapers, the spot from whence the shots had come.
In the meantime, Johnny, with fingers and eye made expert by years of assembling bits of pottery from ancient ruins, and the bones of prehistoric monsters, was fitting the shattered windowpane together. A task that would have taken a layman hours, Johnny accomplished in minutes.
Johnny turned the black-light apparatus on the glass. The message in glowing blue sprang out. Intact!
Monk came waddling in from the laboratory. In the big furry hands that swung below his knees, he carried several bottles, tightly corked. They held a fluid of villainous color.
Monk, from the wealth of chemical formulas within his head, had compounded a gas with which to fight their opponents, should they succeed in cornering whoever had fired that shot. It was a gas that would instantly paralyze anyone who inhaled it, but the effects were only temporary, and not harmful.
They all gathered around the table on which Johnny had assembled the fragments of glass. All but Renny, who was still calculating his angles. And as Doc flashed the light upon the glass, they read the message written there:
Important papers back of the red brick——
Before the message could mean anything to their minds, Renny shouted his discovery.
“It’s from the observation tower, on that unfinished skyscraper,” he cried. “That’s where the shot came from—and the sharpshooter must still be somewhere up there!”
“Let’s go!” Doc ordered, and the men surged out into the massive, shining corridor of the building, straight to the battery of elevators.
If they noticed that Doc tarried behind several seconds, none of them remarked the fact. Doc was always doing little things like that—little things that often turned out to have amazing consequences later.
The men piled into the opened elevator with a suddenness that startled the dozing operator. He wouldn’t be able to sleep on the job the rest of the night!
With a whine like a lost pup, the cage sank.
Grimly silent, Doc and his five friends were a remarkable collection of men. They so impressed the elevator operator that he would have shot the lift past the first floor into the basement, had Doc not dropped a bronze, long-fingered hand on the control.
Doc led out through the lobby at a trot. A taxi was cocked in the curb, driver dreaming over the wheel. Four of the six men piled into the machine. Doc and Renny rode the running board.
“Do a Barney Oldfield!” Doc directed the cab driver.
The hack jumped away from the curb as if stung.
Rain sheeted against Doc’s strong, bronzed face, and his straight, close-lying bronze hair. An unusual fact was at once evident. Doc’s bronze skin and bronze hair had the strange quality of seeming impervious to water. They didn’t get appreciably wet; he shed water like the proverbial duck’s back.
The streets were virtually deserted in this shopping region. Over toward the theater district, perhaps, there would be a crowd.
Brakes giving one long squawk, the taxi skidded sidewise to the curb and stopped. Doc and Renny were instantly running for the entrance of the new skyscraper. The four passengers came out of the cab door as if blown out. Ham still carried his plain black cane.
“My pay!” howled the taxi driver.
“Wait for us!” Doc flung back at him.
In the recently finished building lobby, Doc yelled for the watchman. He got no answer. He was puzzled. There should be one around.
They entered an elevator, sent it upward to the topmost floor. Still no watchman! They sprang up a staircase to where all construction but steel work ceased. There they found the watchman.
The man, a big Irishman with cheeks so plump and red they looked like the halves of Christmas apples, was bound and gagged. He was indeed grateful when Doc turned him loose—but quite astounded. For Doc, not bothering with the knots, simply freed the Irishman by snapping the stout ropes with his fingers as easily as he would cords.
“Begorra, man!” muttered the Irishman. “’Tis not human yez can be, with a strength like that!”
“Who tied you up?” Doc asked compellingly. “What did he look like?”
“Faith, I dunno!” declared the son of Erin. “’Twas not a single look or a smell I got of him, except for one thing. The fingers of the man were red on the ends. Like he had dipped ’em in blood!”
On up into the wilderness of steel girders, the six men climbed. They left the Irishman behind, rubbing spots where the ropes had hurt him, and mumbling to himself about a man who broke ropes with his fingers, and another man who had red fingertips.
“This is about the right height!” said the gaunt Johnny, bounding at Doc’s heels. “He was shooting from about here.”
Johnny was hardly breathing rapidly. A tall, poorly looking man, Johnny nevertheless exceeded all the others, excepting Doc, in endurance. He had been known to go for three days and three nights steadily with only a slice of bread and a canteen of water.
Doc veered right. He had taken a flashlight from an inside pocket.
It was not like other flashlights, that one of Doc’s. It employed no battery. A tiny, powerful generator, built into the handle and driven by a stout spring and clockwork, supplied the current. One twist of the flash handle would wind the spring and furnish light current for some minutes. A special receptacle held spare bulbs. There was not much chance of Doc’s light playing out.
The flash spiked a white rod of luminance ahead. It picked up a workman’s platform of heavy planks.
“The shot came from there!” Doc vouchsafed.
A steel girder, a few inches wide, slippery with moisture, offered a short cut to the platform. Doc ran along it, surefooted as a bronze spider on a web thread. His five men, knowing they would be flirting with death among the steel beams hundreds of feet below, decided to go around, and did it very carefully.
Doc had picked two empty cartridges off the platform, and was scrutinizing them when his five friends put relieved feet on the planks.
“A cannon!” Monk gulped, after one look at the great size of the cartridges.
“Not quite,” Doc replied. “They are cartridges for the elephant rifle the sniper used.”
“What makes you so sure, Doc?” asked big, sober-faced Renny.
Doc pointed at the plank surface of the platform. Barely visible were two tiny marks, side by side. Now that Doc had called their attention to the marks, the others knew they had been made by the muzzle of a double-barreled elephant rifle rested for a moment on the boards.
“He was a short man,” Doc added. “Shorter, even, than Long Tom, here. And much wider.”
“Huh?” This was beyond even quick-thinking Ham.
Seemingly unaware of their great height, and the certain death the slightest misstep would bring, Doc swung around the group and back the easy route they had come. He pointed to a girder which, because of the roof effect of another girder above, was dry on one side. But there was a damp smear on the dry steel.
“The sniper rubbed it with his shoulder in passing,” Doc explained. “That shows how tall he is. It also shows he had wide shoulders, because only a wide-shouldered man would rub the girder. Now——”
Doc fell suddenly silent. As rigid as if he were the hard bronze he so resembled, he poised against the girder. His glittering golden eyes seemed to grow luminous in the darkness.
“What is it, Doc?” asked Renny.
“Someone just struck a match—up there in the room where we were shot at!” He interrupted himself with an explosive sound. “There! He’s lighted another!”
Doc instantly whipped the binoculars—he had brought them along from the office—from his pocket. He aimed them at the window.
He got but a fragmentary glimpse. The match was about burned out. Only the tips of the prowler’s fingers were clearly lighted.
“His fingers—the ends are red!” Doc voiced what he had seen.
References :
https://www.oldqslcards.com/
https://bronzeicon.com/stories/1-the-man-of-bronze/