DOC SAVAGE: THE INFERNAL BUDDHA (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) Read Online Free PDF Page A

swam to shore without mishap. She kept all her clothes on. Modern girls do not wear much that will interfere with swimming. Besides, she would need them when she got ashore.
    Singapore Harbor is usually thick with rake-masted junks, canoe-like tambangs, canvas-covered sampans called perahus and other boats that seldom if ever hoist anchor inasmuch as they serve as houseboats. And there is good holding ground farther out for layover docking.
    Mary Chan negotiated between these more sparse anchorages, swimming with a practiced ease that made no more splashing than playful leaping fish. The channel she swam along was suitably dark on an ordinary night, draped as it is in moon shadow.
    The murk accounted for no one seeing Mary Chan.
    Once ashore, she worked down to the waterfront, coming to a wharf where the double-ended little water taxis used by British soldiers and tourists in cruising the harbor were moored. The coolie belonging to the one she hired was not too curious about the water-soaked young lady who was his fare. The unusual often happens in Singapore. Too, Mary Chan spoke perfect Malayan and the darkness made her ivory skin less obvious.
    At the Singapore waterfront, Mary Chan paid him with a bill from a small roll which had been hidden in her hair, and she demanded and got her change, which made the coolie angry.
    This put the coolie in a cooperative frame of mind several hours later, when a Cockney Englishman accosted him with questions.
    “Hi’m lookin’ for a little slip of a Chink girl,” explained the supposed Englishman. “Had kinda pale skin, like a white woman. She’d be likely to be soaked from a swim, she would.”
    The coolie acted thoughtful, and the supposed Englishman greased his palm with silver. The coolie took hold of his jaw and looked up at the moon, as if prodding his memory. He kept his hand extended.
    The Cockney swapped the silver coin for a gold sovereign, the weight of which seemed to have remarkable tongue-loosening properties. Once the coolie had bitten the coin to assure himself it was genuine, his cackling was voluble.
    “Thank you, my man,” said the Cockney. He waited until the coolie had stepped back into his boat before jumping down after him and braining him with the bamboo pole normally employed to propel the awkward craft.
    Kneeling at the almost nonexistent rail, Dang Mi—he looked more like Hen Gooch now—held the slumped form of the insensate coolie out of the foul water while he fished about for his gold coin.
    Once he had it in hand, he let the man slide into the water, and calmly counted the bubbles until they stopped.
    THE girl had by this time secured a fair lead, but the hour was late, and no great number of people were abroad. There had, in recent months, been a reign of curfews with a deadline at midnight, at which hour citizens had to be off the streets. This had somewhat discouraged nocturnal meanderings, and people had not yet resumed the habit.
    Mary Chan understood that she would not be hard to locate by cars cruising the narrow streets, provided she kept moving about. Her wet garments would also attract attention. She chose a dimly-lit restaurant in the business section, one with a lot of ornamental flowers, and ducked into a particularly shadowy cranny without anyone noting anything unusual. Being wise, she ordered food, for she had been without viands for some time. She also bought a local English-language newspaper, intending to pretend to read it while her clothes dried.
    The purchase of that newspaper was an act destined to affect a good many thousands of lives. Men were to die because of it. Others were to live. And it involved the man of miracles, Doc Savage, in an uncanny mystery.

Chapter 4
Big Fists
    THE SIGNIFICANT AND resultful item was on the front page of the Singapore Gazette.
    DOC SAVAGE ASSISTANT ARRIVES
    It has been learned that the American engineer, Colonel John Renwick, has taken up residence in the Raffles Hotel for an indefinite