Swiftly, the others came up. They had found no one else about.
"I'd be glad to hold him for you!" Monk suggested hopefully to Doc. His furry fingers opened and shut.
Doc shook his head and released the prisoner. The man instantly started to run. But Doc's hand, floating out with incredible speed, stopped the man with a snap that made his teeth pop together like clapped hands.
"Why did you shoot at us?" Doc demanded in English.
The stocky man spewed clucking gutturals, highly excited.
Doc looked swiftly aside, at Johnny.
The gaunt archaeologist, who knew a great deal about ancient races, was scratching his head with thick fingers. He took off the glasses with the magnifying lens on the left side, then nervously put them back on again.
"It's incredible!" he muttered. "The language that fellow speaks — I think it is ancient Mayan. The lingo of the tribe that built the great pyramids at Chichen Itza, then vanished. I probably know as much about that language as anybody on earth. Wait a minute, and I'll think of a few words."
But Doc was not waiting. To the squat man, he spoke in ancient Mayan! Slowly, halting, having difficulty with the syllables, it was true, but he spoke understandably.
And the squat man, more excited than ever, spouted more gutturals.
Doc asked a question.
The man made a stubborn answer.
"He won't talk," Doc complained. "All he will say is a lot of stuff about having to kill me to save his people from something he calls the Red Death!"
Chapter 5. THE FLY THAT JUMPED
Astounded silence gripped the group.
"You mean!" Johnny muttered, blinking through his glasses, "You mean this fellow really speaks the tongue of ancient Maya?"
Doc nodded. "He sure does."
"It's fantastic!" Johnny grumbled. "Those people vanished hundreds of years ago. At least, all those that comprised the highest civilization did. A few ignorant peons were probably left. Even those survive to this day. But as for the higher-class Mayan" — he made a gesture of something disappearing — "Poof! Nobody knows for sure what became of them."
"They were a wonderful people," Doc said thoughtfully. "They had a civilization that probably surpassed ancient Egypt."
"Ask him why he paints his fingers red?" Monk requested, unfazed by talk of lost civilizations.
Doc put the query in the tongue-flapping Mayan tongue. The stocky man gave a surly answer. "He says he's one of the warrior sect," Doc translated. "Only members of the warrior sect sport red finger tips."
"Well, I'll be dag-gone!" Monk snorted.
"He won't talk any more," Doc advised. Then he added grimly: "We'll take him down to the office, and see if he won't change his mind?"
Searching the prisoner, Doc dug up a remarkable knife. It had a blade of obsidian, a darksome, glasslike volcanic rock, and the edge rivaled a razor in cutting qualities. The handle was simply a leather thong wrapped around and around the upper end of the obsidian shaft.
This knife Doc appropriated. He picked up the prisoner's double-barreled elephant rifle. The marvelous weapon was manufactured by the Webley Scott firm, of England.
Monk eagerly took charge of the captive, booting him ungently out to the street and to their taxi.
Swishing downtown through the rain, Doc, speaking through the taxi window, tried again to persuade the stocky prisoner to talk.
The fellow disclosed only one fact — and Doc had already guessed that.
"He says he's really a Mayan!" Doc translated for the others.
"Tell him I'll pull his ears off an' feed 'em to him if he don't come clean!" Monk suggested.
Doc, anxious himself to note the effect of torture threats on the Mayan, repeated Monk's remarks.
The Mayan shrugged, clucked in his native tongue.
"He says," Doc explained, "that the trees in his country are full of them like you, only smaller. He means monkeys."
Ham let out a howl of laughter at that, and Monk subsided.
Rain was threshing down less vigorously when they pulled up before the gleaming office building that spiked up nearly a hundred stories. Entering, they rode the elevator to the eighty-sixth floor.
The Mayan again refused to talk.
"If we just had some truth serum!" suggested Long Tom, running pale fingers through his blond, Nordic hair.
Renny held up a monster fist. "This is all the truth serum we need! I'll show you how it works!"
Big, with sloping mountains of gristle for shoulders, and long kegs of bone and tendon for arms, Renny slid over to the library door. His fist came up.
Wham! Completely through the stout panel Renny's fist pistoned. it seemed more than bone and tendon could stand. But when Renny drew his knuckles Out of the wreckage and blew off the splinters, they were unmarked.
Renny, having demonstrated what he could do, came back and towered threateningly over their captive.
"Talk to him in that gobble he calls a language, Doc! Tell him he's in for the same thing that door got if he don't tell us whether your father was murdered, and if he was, who did it. And we want to know why he tried to shoot us."
The prisoner only sat in stoical silence. He was scared — but determined to suffer any violence rather than talk.
"Wait, Renny," Doc suggested. "Let's try something more subtle."
"For instance?" Renny inquired.
"Hypnotism," said Doc. "If this man is of a savage race, his mind is probably susceptible to hypnotic influence. It's no secret that many savages hypnotize themselves to such an extent that they think they see their pagan gods come and talk to them."
Positioned directly before the stocky Mayan, Doc began to exert the power of his amazing golden eyes. They seemed to turn into shifting, gleaning piles of the flaked yellow metal, holding the prisoner's gaze inexorably, exerting a compelling, authoritative influence.
For a minute the squat Mayan was quiet, except for his bulging eyes. He swayed a little in his chair. Then, with a piercing yell in his native tongue, the prisoner lunged backward out of his chair.
The Mayan's plunge carried him toward Renny. But the big-fisted giant had been watching Doc so intently he must have been a little hypnotized himself. He was slow breaking the spell. Reaching for the Mayan, he missed.
Straight to the window, the squat Mayan sped. A wild jump, and he shot head-first through it — to his death!
Awed silence was in the room for a while.
"He realized he was going to be made to talk," Ham clipped, whipping his waspish frame over to the window to look callously down. "So he killed himself."
"Wonder what can be behind all this!" Long Tom puzzled, absently inspecting his unhealthy-looking features as reflected by the polished table top.
"Let's see if the message my father left written on the window won't help," Doc suggested.
They followed Doc to the library in a group. "Important papers back of the red brick," read the message in invisible ink which could only be detected by ultra-violet light. They were all curious to know where the papers were, anxious to see that they were intact. Above all, they wanted to know the nature of these "important papers."