THE SPIDER-City of Doom Read Online Free PDF

strode from the building.
    The commissioner's heavy private car made swift speed through the thickening traffic. The wind whipped past the closed windows with a thin whining, and though there was a heater in the tonneau, their breath made small wavering puffs before their mouths as they talked.
    "If they bothered to carry Ram Singh away," Kirkpatrick mused. "It's likely he was only wounded."
    "Probably," Wentworth agreed. He stared out at the stone buildings, gray in the early morning light as they slid past. The car had swept up Lafayette now, spun west to Fifth Avenue and was stepping north along the broad thoroughfare. Men and women struggled against the wind as against a savage undertow, coats whipping about their thighs.
    "The tail end of that Hatteras gale is hitting here today," Kirkpatrick said absently. "The Sky Building will be rocking like a tree."
    Wentworth nodded again, wordlessly. He was trying to think what Ram Singh could have meant by that last shout about the Sky Building. "They are pl . . ." he had got out just before the shot. Perhaps that last word had been "planning," but planning what? Wentworth could not guess at Ram Singh's fearful secret, at the horror that tortured the faithful Hindu now, wounded and a prisoner of tight ropes, as he struggled for freedom high in the groaning Sky Building.
    How could Wentworth guess that the Sky Building was slated for destruction, that even now its weakened steel girders were yielding beneath the lash of the rising wind? He knew, of course, of the steel-eater, but why would anyone wish to raze the building? Even Devil Hackerson, who had carried out the orders for the Master and put the "stuff" on the girders, had not been able to understand why it should be destroyed.
    As they sped farther north, the sidewalks were thick with crowds of people going to work. It was a little after nine, the height of the rush hour. Girls ducked their heads into the wind, pulled their coats tight about their hips and plunged across the street on their high heels. Men ploughed doggedly into the rising gale's thrust clasping hats to their heads with freezing hands. Even from the car, the cherry red of cold-burnt ears could be seen, but Wentworth beheld the tapestry of New York going to work only subconsciously. His mind was still busy with the problem of Ram Singh and the Sky building.
    The squat broad base of the building came into sight, hinting even in the briefly truncated view below the auto roof of the majesty that soared above. Wentworth, alighting from the car, paused on the sidewalk, holding his derby firmly in place while he leaned back to peer up at the heights that rose a fifth of a mile into the sky. Sunlight glinted coldly on the strips of chromium that streaked its sides, but bustling gray clouds would soon blot that out. The gale was on the way. It would soon be blowing sixty miles an hour and better up there where the rounded dome of the dirigible mooring-mast met the clouds.
    Wentworth frowned, walked into the elaborate lobby with Kirkpatrick at his side. Kirkpatrick looked sideways at him curiously. It was rarely that his friend was so preoccupied, engrossed though he might be in the battles of mankind, in the defense of humanity against the underworld.
    "Just what do we do now that we're here?" he asked.
    "I'm not quite sure," Wentworth confessed.
     
    He asked some apparently aimless questions of the elevator starter and learned that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred in the building. He knew already that there had been no robbery reports from the vicinity the night before. He turned away abruptly, stalked to Kirkpatrick's side. He had a feeling that the answer to his bewilderment was within reach, but that he could not fathom it. It was within reach all right, no farther away than the thick walls that encased the steel basic supports of the building, eaten by the Master's "stuff" until they would crack when the strain of the gale came . . .
    "Let's go up