He had pursued the outward trail with great speed, but his return was immeasurably swifter. He carried the black-and-white pelt, rolled tight so it would not smell so badly, under one mighty bronze arm.
A shock awaited him at the spot where he had left his friends. They were gone!
Many tracks were about. They told Doc’s jungle-wise eyes a story — told it as perfectly as a book could have.
Kar had seized his friends!
Chapter 21. HUMAN MONSTERS
WITH the swiftness of a trade wind, Doc took up the new trail. It was broad, plain. Entirely too plain!
Doc knew Kar would expect him to follow. Probably the man would set a trap. He would hope that Doc’s excitement over the capture of his friends would dull his keen senses.
But the shocking knowledge served only to sharpen Doc’s perceptive powers. He kept wide of the trail, his keen eyes locating it by the most vague of signs. A stalking leopard could not have gone more silently than the bronze giant.
A tiny patch of thorns appeared. Discovering the trail of Kar’s men and their captives — Doc’s friends — led directly through the burry growth, Doc approached furtively to investigate.
"They’re not overlooking any bets!" he said grimly.
For a considerable distance into the thicket, the needle-tipped thorns were daubed with a brownish substance. Undoubtedly a deadly poison!
It was the first of Kar’s traps!
Doc went on, not lessening his caution.
Kar’s men had taken their prisoners along the crater side, traversing a region Doc had not yet explored. They held a course as straight as possible. It seemed they had a definite objective.
Doc’s golden eyes picked up the tracks of Renny, Monk, and Ham in one spot. The trail of Long Tom and Johnny appeared soon after. None of them seemed to be wounded. At least, their footprints did not show the uneven depth and irregular spacing characteristic of a badly injured man.
Oliver Wording Bittman was lagging behind the whole group. However, his tracks also seemed normal.
But Doc knew he would have to make speed. His friends were being kept alive for only one reason, he believed. Kar was using them as a bait to decoy Doc into a trap.
Rather, into a series of traps! For Doc’s adamant gaze located a creeper across his path. The vine stretched just a bit too tautly. He investigated.
The creeper was attached to the trip of a machine gun! Had Doc as much as touched it, a stream of lead would have riddled him.
He detached the machine gun and took it along, to use on Kar if necessary.
Sometime later, he found another of the poisoned thorn reception committees arranged for him. There was a deadfall which probably wouldn’t have broken his back, considering the speed with which Doc could move. A more dangerous snare came next.
Doc noted a peculiar, dragging movement Monk’s big feet made at intervals.
"Good boy, Monk!" Doc smiled.
Monk was making those marks with his feet just before each trap. He was warning Doc!
The mighty bronze man now made better time.
The ground here was higher than any upon which Doc had stood within the crater — excepting only the rim of the mud lake up on the crater side. And this spot was so far from the point where he had surveyed the crater bottom that the ever-present fog of moist, hot air had prevented him seeing much of the detail.
The jungle growth abruptly became scattering. Small glades appeared. Then larger meadows! A rank, crude sort of grass floored these. The ground felt less spongy.
A mass of rock jutted up before him. It lay close to the sheer, nearly two-mile-high cliff of the crater wall. No doubt it had fallen from the wall centuries ago.
To Doc, the rock looked big as a sizable cut off Gibraltar. Others were behind it, too. They were nearly as large. All had toppled from the hulking cliff.
The trail weaved among these. Doc kept fully a hundred yards to one side, wary of bushwhackers. He came to a vast dornick which had a deeply corrugated surface. This would offer shelter to a climber. Doc mounted to reconnoiter.
He saw Kar’s plane!
THE craft was an amphibian — could land on ground or water. It had two motors, both very large. Its cabin would accommodate eight or nine passengers. The long upper wing and the bobbed lower wing and rudder and elevators were joined in a spidery box kite of a framework.
With black fuselage and yellow wings, it looked like a bloated dragonfly crouched in a natural hangar formed by the leaning together of two great stone blocks.
Huge timber had been employed to build a massive fence to keep out lesser carnivora. The cavern between the two blocks of rock was too small at the entrance to admit the king-giant of the killer reptiles, the tyrannosaurus.
The construction work had been done some time ago! Months past, at least!
"Kar built the hangar on his other trip!" Doc concluded.
Clambering down from his lofty perch, Doc approached the plane. He was not molested. Kar probably had no more than three men surviving. At least, only three had captured Doc’s friends. As for that capture — how had a mere three thugs managed to get the upper hand on Doc’s men?
Doc had his suspicions. They were far from pleasant!
Doc investigated the craft. He found a few boxed supplies in the cabin. These proved to be canned goods and dried fruit. Although Doc was hungry, having had nothing but meat since entering the crater, he did not touch the grub. He knew in just what subtle forms poison can be administered.
Doc quitted the strange hangar. Tall grass outside the massive timber gates absorbed his bronze figure.
Kar’s headquarters should be somewhere near. Doc was hunting it. His men would be prisoners there, since they had not been in the hangar.
In the distance, faint spots in the moonlightlike day within the steam-covered crater, the fearsome bats of reptiles still circled. Probably they had not quitted the thorn patch where they had chased Doc. They were more tenacious of purpose than he had thought.
Somewhere, a prehistoric beast emitted a series of hideous cries. The echoes were taken up by another reptile. For a moment, a bedlam, remindful of the awful night sounds reigned. Then comparative quiet fell.
It was a ghastly spot — this lost land of terror which reposed within the cone of Thunder Island.
DOC came suddenly upon his imprisoned friends. They were being held within another natural cave resulting from the massive blocks of stone piling together. Doc heard voices first.
"You guys just make one move — you’re finished!" A strange tone. It must be one of Kar’s men.
With no noise at all, Doc’s bronzed, giant figure floated nearer. His golden eyes watched the cave mouth — and all the surrounding terrain.
"I’ll rush him!" Monk’s big, amiable voice offered. "He can’t get us all!"
Evidently only one man watched the prisoners within the cavern!
"No need of that, yet," rumbled Renny. Thunder gobbling out of a barrel would have had a close resemblance to Renny’s vast voice.
"Let him be a hero!" clipped Ham. The quick-thinking lawyer seldom got in a spot so tight that he neglected to razz Monk.
"Can’t you see what they’re doing?" Long Tom demanded. "They’re holding us as a bait to get Doc!"
"Bait or no bait," Johnny, the geologist, put in, "Doc will take care of himself. And if we went and got ourselves shot, we’d still be bait. I’m in favor of stringing along for a while to see what happens."
"That’s a wise guy!" snarled the coarse voice of Kar’s gunman. "You birds behave, an’ we’ll do the white thing by you, see! We’ll let you keep on livin’! We’ll leave you behind in the crater when we take off in our plane!"
He laughed uproariously at this. He knew life in the crater would be one long living hell! A more perilous domicile would be hard to imagine.