Chapter 15

THE ARCTIC GODDESS

DOC SAVAGE whipped through the door. He caught a brief glimpse of the girl.

She was tall. Nothing more than that could be told about her form, since she was muffled in the garb of the arctic — moccasins reaching above her knees, and with the tops decorated with the long hair of the polar bear, trousers of the skin of the arctic hare, a shirt-like garment of auk skins, and an outer parka of a coat fitted with a hood.

But her face! That was different. He could see enough of that to tell she was a creature of gorgeous beauty. Enthralling eyes, an exquisite little upturned nose, lips as inviting as the petals of a red rose — they would have made most men forget all about the fight.

Had there been light to disclose Doc's features, however, an onlooker would have been surprised to note how little the giant bronze man was affected by this entrancing beauty.

Doc worked at the prosaic, but by no means unimportant, task of securing the door. He got it fast.

He turned his flashlight on the girl. He had noted something he wanted to verify. The gaze he bent upon her was the same sort he would give any stranger he might be curious about.

Her hair was white; it was a strange, warm sort of white, like old ivory. The girl was a perfect blonde.

Doc thought of Victor Vail. The violinist had this same sort of hair — a little more white, perhaps.

"You did me a great favor, Miss Vail," Doc told the girl.

She started. She put her hands over her lips. She wore no mittens. Her hands were long, shapely, velvet of skin.

"How did — ?"

"Did I know you were Roxey Vail?" Doc picked up her question. "You could be no one else. You are the image of your father."

"My father!" She said the word softly, as if it were something sacred. "Did you know him?"

Doc thought of that smear of scarlet on the ice near the spot where Victor Vail had disappeared. He changed the subject.

"Did any one besides you escape the massacre aboard this liner?"

The girl hesitated.

Doc turned his flash on his own face. He knew she was uncertain whether to trust him. Doc was not flattering himself when he felt that a look at his strong features would reassure her. He had seen it work before.

"My mother survived," said the girl.

"Is she alive?"

"She is."

Enraged Eskimos beat on the bulkhead door. They hacked at the stout panel with bayonets. They yelled like Indians.

BEAUTIFUL ROXEY Vail suddenly pressed close to Doc Savage. He could feel the trembling in her rounded, firm body.

"You won't let them — kill me?" she choked.

Doc slipped a corded bronze arm around her — and he didn't often put his arm around young women.

"What a question!" he chided her. "Haven't you any faith in men?"

She shivered. "Not the ones I've seen — lately."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you know why those Eskimos attacked you?" she countered.

"No," Doc admitted. "It surprised me. Eskimos are noted as an unwarlike people. When they get through fighting the north for a living, they've had enough scrapping."

"They attacked you because of — "

A slab breaking out of the door stopped her. The Innuits were smashing the panel!

"We'd better move!" Doc murmured.

He swept the girl up in one arm. She struck at him, thinking he meant her harm. Then, realizing he was only carrying her because he could make more speed in that fashion, she desisted.

Doc glided sternward.

"You haven't visited this death ship often in the passing years, have you?" he hazarded.

She shook her head. "No. You could count the number of times on the fingers of one hand."

They reached a large, rather barren room amidships. Doc knew much of the construction of ships. He veered abruptly to the left, descended a companion, wheeled down a passage.

He was now face to face with the liner's strong room.

He took one look at the great vault. He dropped the girl.

The treasure trove was empty!

THE YOUNG woman picked herself up from the floor.

"I'm sorry," Doc apologized. He pointed at the strong room. "Has that been empty long?"

"Ever since I can remember."

"Who got the gold, and the diamonds?"

She was plainly surprised. "What gold and diamonds?"

Doc smiled dryly. "You've got me! But fifty millions dollars' worth of gold and diamonds is at the bottom of this mess. If it was carried aboard this liner, it would have been stored in the strong room. It's not there. So that means — Hm-m-m!" He shifted his great shoulders. "I'm not sure what it means.

He glanced about. Here seemed to be as good a spot as any to linger. It would take the Eskimos some minutes to find them.

"You started to tell me why the Innuits attacked me," he prompted the girl. "What was the reason?"

"I'll tell you my story from the first — I think there's time," she said swiftly. Her voice was pleasant to listen to. "My mother and myself escaped the wholesale slaughter of the others aboard the Oceanic, because we slid overboard by a rope. We were apart from the other passengers, hunting father — he had disappeared mysteriously the day before.

"We hid on land. We saw the mutineers depart over the ice, hauling the fur-wrapped figure of a man on a sledge. We did not realize until it was too late that the man they hauled was my father."

She stopped. She bit her lips. Her eyes swam in moisture. They were very big, enthralling blue eyes.

Doc made an impatient gesture for her to go on. "Oh — I'm neglecting to tell you it was the crew who murdered those aboard the liner. Men named Ben O'Gard, Dynamite Smith, and Keelhaul de Rosa, were ring leaders — "

"I know all that," Doc interposed. "Tell your side of it."

"My mother and I got food from the liner after the mutineers had gone," she continued. "We built a crude hut inland. We didn't — we couldn't stay on the liner, although it was solidly aground. The mutineers might return. And all those murdered bodies — it was too horrible. We couldn't have borne the sight — "

"When did the Eskimos come?" Doc urged her along.

"Within a month after the mutineers had departed. This spit of land was their home. They had been away on a hunting trip."

She managed a faint, trembling smile. "The Eskimos treated us wonderfully. They thought we were good white spirits who had brought them a great supply of wood and iron, in the shape of the liner. They looked upon myself and my mother as white goddesses, and treated us as such — but refused to let us leave. In a way, we were prisoners. Then, a few days ago — the white men came!"

"Oh, oh!" Doc interjected. "I begin to see the light."

"These men were part of the mutineer crew," Roxey Vail said. "Keelhaul de Rosa was in command. They came in a plane. They visited this wrecked liner. After that, they seemed very angry."

"Imagine their mortification" — Doc chuckled — "when they found the treasure gone!"

"They gave the Eskimos liquor," Roxey Vail went on. "And they gave them worse stuff, something that made them madmen — a white powder!"

"Dope — the rats!" Doc growled.

"My mother and I became frightened," said the girl. "We retreated to a tiny hideaway we had prepared against just such an emergency. None of the Eskimos know where it is.

"An hour or so ago, I came to the liner. We needed food. There are supplies still aboard, stuff preserved by the intense cold.

"I heard the Eskimos come aboard. I spied on them. They had a white man prisoner. A white man with hair like cotton. There was something strange about this man. It was as though I had seen him before."

"You were very small when you were marooned here, Weren't you?" Doc inquired softly.

"Yes. Only a few years old. Anyway, the Eskimos talked of killing this white-haired man. I do not quite understand why, but it filled me with such horror I went completely mad. I screamed. Then you — you came."

"I heard your scream." Doc eyed her steadily. Then he spoke again.

"The white-haired man was your father," he said.

Without a sound, Roxey Vail passed out. Doc caught her.

AS HE stood there, with the soft, limp form of the exquisitely beautiful girl in his arm, Doc wondered if it could have been the fact that white-haired Victor Vail had been murdered which had caused her swoon. She was not the type of young woman, from what he had seen of her, who fainted easily.

He heard the search of the Eskimos drawing near. They did not have sense enough to hunt quietly. Or perhaps they wanted to flush him out like a wild animal, so he wouldn't be in their midst before they knew it.

Doc quitted the strong room. He sped down a passage, bearing the unconscious girl in his arms. He was soundless as a wraith. He came to a large clothes hamper. It was in perfect shape. It still held some crumpled garments.

Doc dumped the clothes out. The hamper held Roxey Vail nicely as the big bronze man lowered her into it. He closed the lid. The hamper was of open wickerwood. It would conceal her, yet she could breathe through it.

Directly toward the oncoming Innuits, Doc strode.

His hand drew a small case from inside his parka. With the contents of this, he made his preparations.

He stepped into a cabin and waited.

The first Eskimo passed. Like a striking serpent, Doc's bronze hand darted from the cabin door. His finger tips barely stroked the greasy cheek of the Innuit. Yet the man instantly fell on his face!

Doc flashed out of the cabin. His fingers touched the bare skin of a second Eskimo, another — another. He got five of them before the fat fellows could show anything like action.

All five men who felt Doc's eerie touch seemed to go suddenly to sleep on their feet.

It was the same brand of magic Doc had used on the gangsters in New York City.

Murderous Eskimo with his harpoon, or pasty-cheeked New York rat, with his fists full of high-power automatics — both are the same breed. Doc's magic worked in the same fashion.

The Innuits saw their fellows toppling mysteriously. They realized the very touch of this mighty bronze man was disastrous. They forgot all about fighting. They fled.

Ignominiously, they piled out on deck. Rigging tripped them. After the fashion of superstitious souls, the instant they turned their back on danger, their peril seemed to grow indescribably greater. They were like scared boys running from a graveyard at night — each jump made them want to go faster.

Two even committed unwilling suicide by leaping over the rail of the lost liner to the hard glacier far below.

In a matter of minutes, the last Innuit was sucked away into the screaming blizzard.

Chapter 16

THE REALM OF COLD

The lost liner Oceanic lay like something that had died.

Wind still boomed and squealed in the forest of ice-coated, collapsed rigging, it was true. The sand-hard snow still made a billion tiny tinklings as the gale shotted it against the derelict hulk. But gone were the uncanny whisperings and shufflings which had been so unnerving.

Doc Savage went below, moving silently, as had become his habit when he trod the trails of danger. His flashlight beam dabbed everywhere. Sharp, missing nothing, his golden eye took stock of his surroundings. He was seeing everything, yet speeding along at a pace that for another man would have been a lung-tearing sprint.

A squarish, thick-walled little bottle chanced to meet his gaze. He did not pick it up. Yet the printing on the label yielded to his near-telescopic scrutiny.

It was a perfume bottle. Two more like it reposed a bit farther down the passage.

Here was the explanation of the flowery odor of the Eskimos which had so baffled description. To the characteristic stench of blubber, perspiration and plain filth which accompanied them, they had added perfume. The whole had been an effluvium which was unique.

Doc opened the clothes hamper where he had left unconscious Roxey Vail.

Emptiness stared at him.

Doc dropped to a knee. His flashlight beam narrowed, becoming intensely brilliant. The luminance spurted across the carpet on the passage floor. This looked as though it had been laid down yesterday. But the years had taken the springiness out of the nap, so that it would retain footprints.

The girl had gone forward-alone. This told Doc some of the Eskimos had not remained behind and seized her.

"Roxey!" he called.

Doc's shout penetrated the caterwauling of the blizzard in surprising fashion. A sound expert could have explained why. It is well known that certain horn tones, not especially loud, will carry through the noise of a factory better than any others. Doc, because of the perfect control he exercised over his vocal cords, could pitch his voice so as to waft through the blizzard in a manner nearly uncanny.

"Here!" came the girl's faint voice. "I'm hunting my father!"

Doc hurried to her. She was pale. Terror lay like a garish mask on her exquisite features.

"My father — they took him with them!" she said in a small, tight voice.

"They didn't have him when they fled a moment ago," Doc assured her. "I watched closely."

Her terror gave way to amazement.

"They fled?" she murmured wonderingly. "Why?"

Doc neglected to answer. How he produced that mysterious unconsciousness with his mere touch was a secret known only to himself and his five friends.

But no. Doc shivered. His five friends had met their end in the burning plane. So the secret was now known to but one living man — Doc Savage himself.

"The Eskimos must have removed your father before they attacked me," Doc told Roxey Vail.

He wheeled quickly away. The glow of his flashlight reflected off the paneling of the lost liner, and made his bronze form seem even more gigantic than it was. Fierce little lights played in his golden eyes.

"Where are you going?" questioned his entrancing companion.

"To get Victor Vail," Doc replied grimly. "They took him away, and that shows he was alive. No doubt they took him to Keelhaul de Rosa."

ROXEY VAIL hurried at his side. She was forced to run to keep abreast.

"You haven't told me how you happen to be here," she reminded.

In a few sentences, as they climbed upward to the ice-basted deck of the lost liner, Doc told her of the map on her father's hack which could only be brought out with X rays, of the efforts of Keelhaul de Rosa and Ben O'Gard to kill each other off so one could hog the fifty-million-dollar treasure, and the rest.

'But where is the treasure?" asked the girl.

"I have no idea what became of it," Doc replied. "Keelhaul de Rosa expected to find it in the strong room, judging from his actions as you described them to me. Too, it looks like he suspects the Eskimos of moving it. That's why he gave them liquor. He wanted to get them pie-eyed enough to tell him where they hid it."

"They didn't get it." Roxey Vail said with certainty. "It was removed before the mutineers ever left the liner, more than fifteen years ago."

They were on deck now. Doc moved along the rail, hunting a dangling, ice-clad cable. He could drop the many feet to the glacial ice without damage, but such a drop would bring serious injury or death to the girl.

Roxey Vail was studying Doc curiously. A faint blush suffused her superb features. To some one who had been with Doc a lot, and watched the effect his presence had on the fair sex, this blush would have been an infallible sign.

The blond young goddess of the arctic was going to fail hard for big, handsome Doc.

"Why are you here?" Roxey Vail asked abruptly. "You do not seem to be stricken with the gold madness which has gripped every one else."

Doc let a shrug suffice for an answer.

Probably it was a brand of natural modesty, but Doc did not feel like explaining he was a sort of supreme avenger for the wrongs of the world — the great Nemesis of evildoers in the far corners of the globe.

They found a hanging cable. It terminated about ten feet from the ice. With Roxey Vail clinging to his back like a papoose, Doc carefully went down the cable.

Into the teeth of the moaning blizzard, they strode.

An instant later, Doc's alertness of eye undoubtedly saved their lives. He whipped to one side — carrying Roxey Vail with him.

A volley of rifle bullets spiked through the space they vacated.

The Eskimos had returned, accompanied by Keelhaul de Rosa and four or five riflemen and machine gunners.

AFTER THE flashing movement which had saved their lives, Doc kept going. He jerked the white hood of the girl's parka over her face to camouflage the warm color of her cheeks. He shrugged deep in his own parka for the same reason.

He wanted to get the girl to safety. Then he was going to hold grim carnival on the glacier with Keelhaul de Rosa and his killer group.

For his share in those hideous murders aboard the Oceanic, Keelhaul de Rosa would pay, as certainly as a breath of life remained in Doc Savage's mighty bronze body.

Another fusillade of shots clattered. The reports were almost puny in the clamor of the blizzard. Lead hissed entirely too close to Doc and his companion.

Doc's fingers slipped inside his capacious parka, came out with an object hardly larger than a high-power rifle cartridge — and shaped somewhat similarly. He flipped a tiny lever on this article, then hurled it at the attackers. The object was heavy enough to be thrown some distance.

Came a blinding flash! The glacier seemed to jump six feet straight up. A terrific, slamming roar blasted against eardrums. Then a rush of air slapped them skidding across the ice like an unseen fist.

There had been a powerful explosive in the little cylinder Doc hurled at his enemies.

Awful quiet followed the blast. The very blizzard seemed to recoil like a beaten beast.

A chorus of agonized squealings and bleatings erupted. Some of the enemy had been incapacitated. They were all shocked. The Eskimos felt a vague, unaccountable terror.

"Up an' at 'em, mateys!" shrilled a coarse tone. "Keelhaul me, but we ain't gonna let 'em get away from us now!"

It was Keelhaul de Rosa's voice. He, at least, had not been damaged.

More lead searched the knobby glacier surface. None of it came dangerously near Doc and his fair companion. They had gotten far away in the confusion.

Doc suddenly jammed the young lady in a handy snowdrift. He wasn't exactly rough about it, but he certainly didn't try to fondle her, as a man of more ordinary caliber might have been tempted to do. And it wasn't because the ravishing young woman would have objected to the caresses. All signs pointed to the contrary.

The big bronze man had long ago decided a life of domestication was not for him. It would not go with the perils and terrors which haunted his every step. It would mean the surrendering of his goal in life — the shunning of adventure, the abandoning of his righting of wrongs, and punishing of evildoers wherever he found them.

So Doc had schooled himself never to sway the least bit to the seductions of the fairest of the fair sex.

"Stay here," he directed the entrancing young lady impassionately. "And what I mean — stay here! You can breathe under the snow. You won't be discovered."

"Whatever you say," she said in a voice in which adoration was but thinly veiled.

She was certainly losing no time in falling for Doc.

The giant bronze man smiled faintly. Then the storm swallowed him.

KEELHAUL DE ROSA was in a rage. He was burning up. He filled the blizzard around about with salty expletives.

"Ye blasted swabs!" he railed at the Eskimos, forgetting they did not understand English. "Keelhaul me. The bronze scut was right in yer hands, an' ye didn't wreck 'im!"

"I tell ya dat guy is poison!" muttered a white gunman. "He ain't human! From de night he tied into us outside de concert hall in de big burg, we ain't been able ter lay a hand on 'im!"

Another white man shivered. He was fatter than Keelhaul de Rosa or the other gunmen. It was to be suspected he had some Eskimo b!lood in his veins.

As a matter of fact, this fellow was a crook recruited in Greenland. He knew the arctic. It was he who served interpreter in all discussions with the Eskimos.

"Dat bane awful explosion a minute ago." this man whined. "Aye sure hope we bane get dat feller damn quick."

"Scatter!" rasped Keelhaul de Rosa. "We'll get the swab!" The Eskimos spread out widely. The white men kept in a group for mutual protection.