Dent Lester - Trouble On Parade

Smith — his fists flailing — got 2 men down almost immediately. His terror wasn't simulated. At least not until he caught the reassuring drop of an eyelid which Doc gave him. 3 men captured handfuls of Smith's redwhiskers and he began to howl in rage and pain. Mix peeled shins, gouged, and bit. Finally they got her down by force and rolled her in a blanket, which they tied.

“Take them to the basement,” Foreman said coldly.

The basement proved to be exactly like any other hotel basement and Doc — looking about — had to fight down his alarm. He was afraid his scheme had flopped.

“What are you pulling off?” he asked Foreman angrily.

“Keep your shirt on. There was a smaller hotel here before this one was built. It used to be a rum-running station back in Prohibition days. They dug a liquor cellar under the place, and that's where I'm keeping the prisoners. Watch.”

2 men set their shoulders against a coal bin and pushed with the result that the entire bin rolled inward slowly … then swung, revealing a considerable opening. Beyond were stone-walled passages, darkness, and an unpleasant odor .

They traveled perhaps a hundred feet down a passage — following flashlight beams — and came to an iron door.

“Open up,” Foreman called.

The iron door was opened by an armed man from the other side. Doc saw a second door beyond — this one made of crudely welded bars.

In a large cave, dimly lighted by electric bulbs, there were about a dozen prisoners. The captives had obtained some semblance of privacy by rigging partitions of blankets. And there was furniture of a sort — wicker stuff that could not very handily be made into weapons.

Foreman took some keys from his pocket and began examining them. He found the key he wanted and inserted it in a padlock which secured the iron-barred inner door.

Doc made sure Smith, Mix, and Hedges were looking at him.

He said, “Drop the marbles.”

Foreman wheeled nervously. “What did you say?”

Shouting angrily — he hoped this would distract the guards so they wouldn't observe Smith, Mix, and Hedges closely — Doc bellowed, “Listen, I don't have to account for everything I say around here!”

Foreman scowled. “What the hell?”

Doc drew his lungs full of air and held it there. He saw that Smith had dropped both his liquid-filled glass balls and that they had squashed on the floor. Smith had been carrying them in his mouth. Mix had hers concealed in her hair. She shook her head violently and they fell to the floor. Hedges was carrying his in his handkerchief which he had been using to blot his eyes.

The broken glass globules made oily-looking wet stains on the floor. These evaporated swiftly like liquefied butane gas which had been exposed to the air, except that the vapor was not visible.

Foreman leveled an angry arm at Doc and said, “I may be buying you off. But I don't have to take any of your back-talk!”

Doc said nothing and did not breathe. He was trying to count off the seconds … thousand and twenty, thousand and twenty-one, thousand and twenty-two…

2 of the little gas grenades would have been sufficient. He began to worry lest 6 of them might over-saturate the air in the passage so that the stuff would not — as it normally did — mix with the air and — because of the reaction of the oxygen in the air upon the chemical — become impotent in about 60 seconds.

“For 2 bits,” continued Foreman wrathfully, “I'd throw you in here too and take my chances with your pal Mayfair and his …”

He became silent … closed his eyes … then opened them, gazing down at the floor as if seeking a soft place; before he could possibly have found a comfortable spot … he sagged down and stretched out and began a continual-but feeble-clawing at the floor as if trying to rise again.

Doc watched him, not liking the way the man kept moving. He should have become still. The reaction of the gas — usually violent and instantaneous — was not up to what Doc considered to be par. He frowned at some of the other men, noticing that most of them moved feebly after they fell. He'd better — he thought with alarm — be more careful when he mixed the next batch of the stuff.

He saw a prisoner on the other side of the bars go down. Leaping to the bars, Doc used the breath in his lungs to shout:

“Gas! Hold your breath! It'll be harmless in a minute!”

He didn't breathe in after he yelled but held his breath again. He had, he discovered, used almost all the air in his lungs to shout. He began to suffer intolerably.

“All right,” he said finally. “Start breathing. And let's finish this thing up right now!”

- — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

The key which Foreman had been about to use on the padlock had become mixed with the others on the ring. Doc began trying all the likely-looking keys in the lock.

“Smith, collect their guns,” he ordered. “Let's hope they're carrying enough of them to arm a mop-up squad.”

“Jane!” Mix Walden cried and seized the bars in a frenzy of relief.

Doc Savage glanced up and saw Jane Walden. She was pale. But she looked considerably less quarrelsome than when he had met her on the Zipper. Jane seized Mix's hands through the bars. Doc noticed that she was looking at Disappointed Smith with substantially more than admiration.

The lock jumped open with an angry snap! Doc threw back the barred door, which moved reluctantly.

“You've got to fight your way from here on,” he told the prisoners. “Get your guns from this big fellow with the whiskers.”

There was a rush for the door and Smith bellowed indignantly, “Stop shoving! There's not enough guns to go around. There's only 7!”

He looked over the group and added, “If you don't know how to shoot, don't take a gun which somebody else can use to good advantage.”

He finally got his squad armed, then turned to Doc. “All right, what's the procedure?”

Doc said, “I want 2 men who are armed — and all the rest who have no weapons — to bring up the rear as a mop-up squad. Whenever you find a crook that has been shot-or-disabled, appropriate his weapons.”

A lean young sailor said, “This begins to sound like Tarawa.”

“Give that revolver to one of the men, Mix,” Doc ordered.

Mix exclaimed, “Darned if I …”

“I haven't got time to quarrel with you now,” Doc declared … then went over, took the gun away from her, and handed it to a man.

“You big bum! I don't like you again!” Mix said.

Doc announced, “We're going up against tough customers. So don't be afraid to shoot them. But try to shoot them in the legs if possible.”

“Are we going to just fight our way out?” Disappointed Smith demanded. “Or are we going to take over this buzzard's roost?”

“We're going to take it over,” Doc said. “Let's go!”

- — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

They reached the basement without incident.

Smith asked uneasily, “What about Foreman and the rest of those guys who got the gas? Won't they…”

“Don't worry about them,” Doc said. “That stuff will knock them out for more than an hour.”

They mounted the concrete steps to the hotel lobby, gathered in a compact group, and burst into the lobby at a signal. The lobby — to their discomfiture — was uninhabited.

In a moment, however, they grew aware of sounds of merriment from the bar.

“Oh oh. They're celebrating our downfall in the bar,” said Disappointed Smith. “Let's go in and help them.”