The Man of Bronze by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online Page B

menace of that knife, he formulated a plan of action.
    He simply let go completely of the silken cord!
    This, in spite of the sheer fall of more than eighty stories directly below him—with not a possible chance of saving himself by clutching a projecting piece of masonry. This building was of the modernistic architecture which does not go in for trick balconies and carved ledges.
    But Doc knew what he was doing. And it was a thing that called for iron nerve and stupendous strength and quickness of movement.
    The silken cord, going abruptly slack before the chair the man above pushed against it nearly caused the would-be murderer to pitch headlong out of the window. The fellow dropped both the chair and his knife and by a wild grab, saved himself from the fall he had meant for Doc.
    Doc, with a maneuver little short of marvelous, caught the end of the silken cord as it snaked past. A drop of a few feet, which his remarkable arm muscles easily cushioned, and he was swinging close to a window sill, none the worse for his narrow escape.
    Doc stepped easily to the window ledge.
    Not a moment too soon! The man above had recovered and, desperate, had employed a small penknife to cut the silken line. It slithered down past Doc, writhing and twisting into fantastic shapes as it dropped those eighty stories to the street.
    The window on the ledge of which Doc found himself was locked. He popped the pane inward, and sprang into the office. He lunged across the room.
    The door literally jumped out of its casing, lock and all, when he took hold of it. He halted in the corridor, stumped.
    His attuned ear could detect the windy noise of an elevator dropping downward. He knew it was his quarry in flight!
    A couple of floors above, Renny was yelling, his voice more than ever like thunder deep in a cave. “Doc—what’s become of you?”
    Doc paid no attention. He ran across the corridor to the elevator doors. So quickly that he seemed to spring directly to it he found the cage shaft that was in operation. His fist came back, jumped forward so swiftly as to defy the eye.
    The sound as Doc’s knuckles hit the sheet-steel elevator door was like the boom of a hard-swung sledge. An onlooker would have sworn the blow would shatter every bone in his fist. But Doc had learned how to tighten the muscles and tendons in his hands until they were like cushioned steel, capable of withstanding the most violent shock.
    As a matter of fact, it was part of Doc’s daily two-hour routine of exercises to subject all parts of his great body to terrific blows in order that he might be able always to steel himself against them.
    The sheet-metal elevator door caved in like a kicked tin can. In a moment Doc had thrown the safety switch which the door, closing, ordinarily operated. Such safety switches are a part of all elevator doors, so the cage cannot move up or down and leave a door open for some child or careless person to fall through into the shaft. They controlled the motor current.
    Many floors below, the elevator car halted, motor circuit broken.
    Doc thrust his head in and looked down the shaft. He was disappointed. The elevator car was nearly at the street level.
    Five minutes elapsed before the lackadaisical elevator operator got a cage up and ferried Doc and his friends down to the street.
    By that time, their quarry was hopelessly gone.
    The indifferent elevator chauffeur could not even give them a description of the would-be killer who had fled the building.

    THERE was considerable uproar around to the side of the skyscraper, when a sleepy pedestrian got the shock of his life by failing over the body of the Mayan who had jumped from the window.
    Doc Savage told a straightforward story to the police, explaining exactly how the Mayan had come to his death. And such was the power of Doc, and the esteem in which his departed father was held, that the New York police corninissioner gave instant orders that Doc be not molested, and, moreover, that his