He topped a huge stone block.
Directly below him sprawled Bittman. The taxidermist’s body, so thin it was a skeleton and a few hard muscles, lay grotesquely atwist.
It was motionless!
A SAILING spring put Doc beside Bittman. His mighty bronze hands started to explore.
Spang!
Another shot!
The bullet would have slain Doc — if he had been one iota less quick on co-ordinating eye and muscles. For he had seen a rifle barrel stir out of the jungle foliage. He had flattened his giant form.
The rifle slug slicked through the space his body had vacated. It hit a rock and climbed away with a loud squawk.
Doc’s own gun rapped. Once! Twice!
A man came tumbling, slowly, stiffly, out of the foliage. He was a short, broad man. He had the look of a human frog. Doc had never seen him before.
The man piled into a dead heap. One bullet had drilled his forehead. The other had stopped his heart.
Several seconds, Doc waited. No more shots came. He used his sensitive ears to their fullest. His bronze nostrils twitched, sampling the warm, moist air that should bring him any alien odors.
He decided no more bushwhackers were about.
Oliver Wording Bittman stirred. A low, whimpering sound trailed from his lips. His head lifted.
Suddenly he seized Doc’s leg. He gave a terrific wrench. Doc, taken by surprise, came lightly to a knee. His brawny hands trapped Bittman’s arms.
"Oh!" Bittman choked. "Oh!"
He relaxed. Remorse came into his thin face.
"I — I saw a gun pointing at me!" Bittman moaned. "I realized it was Kar. I — I guess I must have — fainted. When I revived, my first thought was to fight for my liberty. I thought you were Kar’s man. I’m sorry. My head wasn’t clear — "
Doc nodded thoughtfully. "Fainting was the most fortunate thing you could have done in that case. It dropped you out of sight of the bushwhacker."
Striding over, Doc inspected the dead gunman.
Renny, Ham, Johnny, Long Tom and Monk came up.
"Ever see this man before?" Doc indicated the corpse.
None of them had.
"Come on!" Doc directed. "Let’s investigate that fire!"
They made all speed possible across the waste of stone. They were not shot at. The wall of jungle again took them in.
The mysterious fire was close. To their nostrils came the tang of its smoke.
"Quiet!" Doc warned.
Fifty yards more were traversed at a snail’s pace. But it is difficult for seven men to move through an incredibly dense tangle of plant growth without noise. Especially when one has no particular woodcraft, such as Oliver Wording Bittman.
"Wait here!" commanded Doc.
Then he was gone like a bronze shadow. The jungle tissue seemed to absorb him. There was no sound.
In a moment, Doc’s golden eyes were inspecting the clearing wherein smoked the fire.
NO one was there. The fire had about burned out. It had been lighted for cooking purposes, between two immense logs. The logs alone now burned.
Near by lay mining paraphernalia — picks, shovels, an empty dynamite box and some stray, clipped ends of fuse.
A long minute, Doc appraised the scene. Then he strode boldly into the clearing — his keen senses had shown him no bushwhackers lurked near by.
He circled the open space, then criss-crossed it several times. He moved swiftly. And when he had finished, his retentive mind had a picture of what had gone on in the little glade.
Kar’s men had camped here. They had been mining somewhere in the waste of strange rock.
They had been mining the unknown element or substance which was the basis of the Smoke of Eternity!
What had caused their departure was difficult to say. Either they had secured what they sought, or had been frightened away by the knowledge Doc and his men were near.
Doc called his men. They hurried up.
"At least six men are in the gang — probably five, now that we got one." Doc indicated a half dozen tracks — only his dexterous eye could determine they were marks of as many distinct men. "Of the four men Kar sent out of the United States on the Sea Star, we did for one at the coral atoll, as he tried to bomb our plane. To the surviving three, he has added from the crew of the speedy yacht which took his men off the Sea Star, or from some other source."
"But where did they go?" muttered Oliver Wording Bittman. The taxidermist, although his fingers were still too shaky to play with the scalpel on his watch chain, had recovered amazingly.
"We’ll trail them," Doc declared.
It taxed Doc’s woodcraft hardly at all to find the trail. Broad and plain, smaller ferns and shrubs trampled down, it led off around the crater. A half mile, they had simple going.
Then the way came to an abrupt end!
It terminated at one of the many shallow, wide streams of hot water. As earlier in the day, Doc employed stilts to cross this obstacle.
But he could find no trail on the other side!
"They used a raft or a boat of some sort!" he called to his men.
"We’ll take one side and you the other until we find where they landed!" Ham offered.
But this soon proved unfeasible. The slough of hot water quickly became a great swamp. Although this water was far from boiling in temperature, it was still too hot to wade. And some of the channels were too deep for their stilts and too wide to jump.
"We’ll have to give it up!" Doc said regretfully.
Time had been passing swiftly. It was nearing dark again, and Doc made preparations looking to a safe night.
"We’ll take a lesson from the fact that the top of a tree near us was browsed off last night," he decided. "Each man will seek refuge up a separate tree. That way, if one meets with an accident, it won’t spell doom for the others."
The outburst of an awful fight between a pair of reptilian monsters less than a mile away lent speed to their search for a satisfactory location. The prehistoric giants were beginning their nocturnal bedlam.
The adventurers found a grove of the palmlike ferns which made an ideal set of perches. Up these, they hurriedly clambered.
Once more, night poured like something solid and intensely black into the crater of weird Thunder Island.
A FEW words were exchanged in the sepia void. Then conversation lagged. They knew the slightest sound was liable to draw the unwelcome attention of some reptilian titan.
Ham had selected a bower near Monk.
"So I can throw a club at Monk if he starts snoring," Ham chuckled.
Within half an hour after darkness fell, the awful bedlam of the dinosaurs had reached its grisly zenith. The cries of the things were indescribable. Often there came the revolting odor of great meat eaters prowling near by.
Suddenly Doc discovered a glowing cigarette end in a fern top near the thick jungle.
"Watch it!" he called. "The light might show Kar our position!"
"I’m sorry!" called Oliver Wording Bittman’s voice. A moment later, the cigarette gyrated downward, to burst in a shower of sparks.
Doc and his men were tired — they had not slept a wink the night previous. Although the satanic noises within the crater were as fearsome as on the night before, they were becoming accustomed to them. Noises that made their ears ring and icicles roll down their spines now worried them no more than passing elevated railway trains bother a dweller in the Bronx.
But Doc had developed a sort of animal trait of sleeping with one eye open. He heard a faint noise. He thought he saw a light some distance away.
Later, he was sure he detected a distinct, dragging noise very close!
The sound stopped. Nothing immediate came of it. Doc dropped off to sleep. Too many monsters were prowling about continually to be bothered with one noise.