The Man of Bronze Read Online Free PDF

blocks. He stopped it one floor below the eighty-sixth, quitted it there, crept furtively up the stairs and to the suite of offices which had been his father’s, but which was now Doc’s own.
    The suite door gaped ajar. Inside was sepia blackness that might hold anything.
    Doc popped the corridor lights off as a matter of safety. He feared no encounter in the dark. He had trained his ears by a system of scientific sound exercises which was a part of the two hours of intensive physical and mental drill Doc gave himself daily. So powerful and sensitive had his hearing become that he could detect sounds absolutely inaudible to other people. And ears were all important in a scrimmage in the dark.
    But a quick round of the three rooms, a moment of listening in each, convinced Doc the quarry had fled.
    His men arrived in the corridor with a great deal of racket. Doc lighted the offices, and watched them come in. Monk was absent.
    “Monk remained downstairs on guard,” Renny explained. Doc nodded, his golden eyes flickering at the table. On that table, where none had been before, was propped a blood-red envelope!
    Crossing over quickly, Doc picked up a book, opened it and used it like pincers to pick up the strange scarlet missive. He carried it into the laboratory, and dunked it in a bath of concentrated disinfectant fluid, stuff calculated to destroy every possible germ.
    “I’ve heard of murderers leaving their victims an envelope full of the germs of some rare disease,” he told the others dryly. “And remember, it was a strange malady that seized my father.”
    Carefully, he picked the crimson envelope apart until he had disclosed the missive it held. Words were lettered on scarlet paper with an odious black ink. They read:

    SAVAGE,
    Turn back from your quest, lest the red death strike once again.

    There was no signature.
    A silent group, they went back to the room where they had found the vermilion missive.

    IT was Long Tom who gave voice to a new discovery. He leveled a rather pale hand at the box which held the ultraviolet light apparatus.
    “That isn’t sitting where we left it!” he declared.
    Doc nodded. He had already noticed that, but he did not say so. He made it a policy never to disillusion one of his men who thought he had been first to notice something or get an idea, although Doc himself might have discovered it far earlier. It was this modesty of Doc’s which helped endear him to everybody he was associated with.
    “The prowler who came in and left the red note used the black-light apparatus,” he told Long Torn. “It’s a safe guess that he inspected the window Johnny put together.”
    “Then he read the invisible writing on the glass!” Renny rumbled.
    “Very likely.”
    “Could he make heads or tails of it?”
    “I hope he could,” Doc said dryly.
    They all betrayed surprise at that, but Doc, turning away, indicated he wasn’t ready to amplify on his strange statement. Doc borrowed the magnifying glass Johnny wore in his left spectacle, lens, and inspected the door for finger prints.
    “We’ll get whoever it was!” Ham decided. The waspish lawyer made a wry smile. “One look at Monk’s ugly phiz and nobody would try to get out of here.”
    But at that instant the elevator doors rolled back, out in the corridor.
    Monk waddled from the lift like a huge anthropoid.
    “What d’you want?” he asked them.
    They stared at him, puzzled.
    Monk’s big mouth crooked a gigantic scowl. “Didn’t one of you phone downstairs for me to come right up?”
    Doc shook his bronze head slowly. “No.”
    Monk let out a bellow that would have shamed the beast he resembled. He stamped up and down. He waved his huge, corded arms that were inches longer than his legs.
    “Somebody run a whizzer on me!” he howled. “Whoever if was, I’ll wring his neck! I’ll pull off his ears! I’ll give—”
    “You’ll be in a cage at the zoo if you don’t learn the manners of a man!” waspish Ham said