Robeson Kenneth. Quest of the Spider

   The grounds were brilliant with floodlights, as the Gray Spider had said they would be. The massive iron gates at the entrance were locked.
   Monk got out of their touring car boldly. He strode to the gates. He gave the lock a mighty yank.
   Pin-n-g!
   A bullet left a shiny spot on the wrought iron of the gate, not a foot from his head. It had been fired from the mansion.
   Monk did not bat an eye. That in itself was proof that he had pretended great terror at the recklessness of Renny's driving merely to have something to quarrel about good-naturedly.
   Monk was never satisfied unless picking on somebody, or being picked on in turn. Usually it was the waspish Ham who insulted him and promised at intervals to see Monk skewered on the sword cane. But Ham and Monk had not been thrown together much in this adventure.
   "Hey!" Monk's small voice sounded injured. "You wouldn't shoot a guy, would you, Doc?"
   From the mansion, Big Eric's bellow rolled. "Who're you? Come a yard closer, and by golly, I'll put windows in your skull!"
   Monk was surprised. This must be Big Eric Danielsen. And Big Eric had never met either Monk or Renny.
   "Where's Doc Savage?" Monk called eagerly.
   "What business is it of yourn?" Big Eric was canny.
   Monk explained who he was. Big Eric was not easily convinced, not even when Renny added his solemn-faced assertions.
   "Aw—where’s Doc?" Monk demanded. "We gotta see him. And we ain't got all night."
   "Doc Savage went into the swamp with Long Tom and Ham to seize the Gray Spider," Big Eric admitted grudgingly.
   "What?"
   Without waiting for an answer, Monk leaped easily upward. He caught the bars of the gate. In a surprisingly short time he had surmounted the barrier, monkeylike. He threw the gate lock and Renny drove the car inside.
   Big Eric was growling and holding one of Doc's compact machine guns at ready. But he did not fire. As Monk and Renny approached, he concluded they were actually Doc's men.
   Pretty Edna Danielsen added the only word needed to allay Big Eric's suspicions.
   "These men are Monk and Renny," she said. "They answer Mr. Savage's description."

* * *

   FOR a moment, Monk and Renny were held quite speechless by Edna Danielsen's superb beauty. Monk, especially. Monk was something of a connoisseur of feminine pulchritude, homely soul though he might be himself. The secretary who presided over his correspondence in the penthouse laboratory Monk maintained near Wall Street in New York was conceded to be the prettiest in town. She couldn't hold the well-known candle to Edna Danielsen, though.
   "But the Gray Spider has left the swamp by now!" Renny declared. "He was to wait for us here in New Orleans."
   "When did you last see the Gray Spider?" inquired Big Eric.
   "It was nearly midnight."
   Big Eric's massive face tensed. "That does not sound so good! The appointment at which Doc Savage intended to seize the Gray Spider was set for ten o'clock. Something went wrong."
   Worried expressions came over the features of Monk and Renny. They exchanged glances.
   "What do you reckon?"
   "Hard to tell," Monk growled. "The thing for us to do is set a trap of our own for the Gray Spider."
   "Shall we call in the police?" asked Big Eric.
   "And spend the rest of the night explaining and wading around in red tape?" Monk snorted. "Nix!"
   "Yeah," Renny couldn't resist razzing Monk. "The cops would take one look at you and swear there'd been a break at the zoo."
   Monk grinned widely. Strangely enough, any and all nasty cracks about his looks tickled Monk. He was one of those rare individuals—a homely man who was genuinely proud of the fact that his features were something to stop a clock.
   "Renny and me will take care of this Gray Spider!" he declared.
   "Renny and you and I!" corrected Big Eric. "I’m in on this. We'll drop by the police station and leave Edna in safety."
   "You will not!" Edna snapped. "I'm going to drive the car!"
   "Glory be!" grinned Monk. "I was afraid I'd have to ride with Barney Oldfield, here, again!" He gave Renny an amiable leer.
   Big Eric ran into the house, was gone a minute, and came out stuffing little hand grenades into his pockets as though they were apples. He leaped into the car. The machine whipped around expertly, Edna Danielsen's slenderly capable hand on the wheel.
   Big Eric flexed an arm which was muscled like a mule's leg.
   "I crave action!" he declared.

* * *

   HE got it a lot sooner than he expected. The powerful touring car swerved into the street. Instantly, two other machines approached from opposite directions.
   They were big vehicles, but old and dilapidated. They literally bristled with little swamp men. Almost a dozen to each vehicle!
   Both old cars banged headlong into the car occupied by Big Eric, Monk, Renny, and Edna. As though splashed by the impact, wiry, vicious swamp men covered the machine.
   With a bellow, Renny reared upright. He performed the well-nigh incredible feat of grasping a man by the middle of the body with each hand. Only his gigantic fists made this possible. He banged them down among the other swamp men.
   Monk's arms—longer by six inches than his own legs—gathered a bundle of the attackers. He fell out of the car with them, contriving so his two hundred and sixty pounds of gristle and stiff red hair landed atop them. As one man, they screeched in agony.
   One of the efficient light machine guns Doc had perfected turned loose in Big Eric's fist. It seemed to melt the man in front of the muzzle. A second swamp man died before the ripping weapon.
   Then a car jack swung. Big Eric collapsed. He kicked weakly on the floor boards trying to rise. A hard little fist pounded his temple until he no longer squirmed.
   Monk emitted a series of deep bellowings, hisses, and gruntings—the sounds he always made when he fought. Men rushed him in clouds. They flew away from his driving arms like sparrows tackling a windmill.
   Suddenly Monk seized a yellowish-brown fiend. With seeming ease, he threw the fellow fully twenty feet. The man's hurtling body knocked down another swamp man who was on the point of knifing Renny in the back.
   Three of the attackers were holding Edna Danielsen. She kept them busy dodging her kicks and bites.
   Renny abruptly went down, stumbling over a man he had slammed into unconsciousness with his great fists. And half a dozen swamp denizens piled atop him.
   The man with the car jack ran up. He clanked his weapon off Renny's head. Renny weaved. He seemed to get sleepy on his feet.
   Lunging, Monk reached Renny's side. He tore the assailants away. In a moment both giants were on their feet, fighting side by side.
   A gun or two cracked. But in the gloom it was as easy to hit friend as foe.
   Somewhere in the distance, a police siren started wailing. The shots had been heard. Somebody had put in a riot call.
   "We got—'em goin'!" Monk puffed. He tore the car jack out of the hands of the wielder, and with one pull all but ripped the man's arm from his body.
   Pretty Edna Danielsen screamed piercingly.
   Monk and Renny looked in her direction.
   A vicious-faced swamp man was holding a revolver to her head.
   "Geeve up, damn yo'!" he screeched at Renny and Monk. "Yo' want me to keel gal?"
   The attackers had picked their one chance of stopping Renny and Monk. The two giants hesitated—and were suddenly down and secured. Stout ropes were lashed about their ankles and wrists.
   A large bakery delivery truck now ran up. Monk remembered that Doc had mentioned the fact the Gray Spider used such trucks to transport his men in New Orleans. At least, such a truck had been waiting outside the Antelope Hotel, with Lefty at the wheel, when the swamp men had turned the shrapnel burst loose in the room they thought was occupied by Doc's men.
   Such a truck would not attract attention at this hour. Bakeries often made early-morning deliveries.
   Every one—prisoners and attackers alike—jammed into the truck. The vehicle rumbled away, spurred by the nearing wail of the police siren.

* * *

   THE spokesman of the swamp men sneered into Monk's face.
   "Yo' ain't so smart!" he grated.
   "You're tellin' me?" Monk snarled. He was smarting under the defeat.
   "Gray Spider ees send yo' to keednap Beeg Eric as test!" growled the swamp man. "Hees want to see if yo' talk to Beeg Eric as friend. Yo' did. Bien!Dat prove yo' work fo' bronze man!"
   Monk blinked slowly a few times. Then, just as slowly, he lifted what was left of his coat tails.
   "Kick me!" he invited. "Hard!"
   He saw now that he and Renny had been tricked into revealing their true colors. But how had the Gray Spider gotten word into town so quickly? No one could have equaled that terrific drive of Renny's.
   "The Gray Spider tipped you by radio to set a trap for us at Big Eric's place—that right?" he asked.
   "Oui!
   Yo' guess eet!"
   Monk gave Renny a downcast look. These swamp men were part of the force the Gray Spider kept in New Orleans to do his bidding, no doubt Monk could understand how it would have been simple for the master villain to set his trap.
   "What a pair of busts we turned out to be!" he growled.
   The worst fact was—they had caused Big Eric and Edna to fall into the Gray Spider's clutches. And a moment later, the already gloomy outlook was enormously blackened.
   For, with great glee, the spokesman of the swamp men told of the capture of Long Tom, Ham, and Johnny. He recited in detail about his fellows glimpsing an alligator in the act of devouring the giant bronze form of Doc Savage. He had evidently received this news by radio from his comrades in the swamp.
   The word of Doc Savage's demise had a terrible effect on pretty Edna Danielsen. She had been holding up splendidly under the difficulties, betraying little nervousness. But now she gave a single low, wretched cry, and fainted.
   She was still unconscious when her form was lifted from the delivery truck a short distance outside New Orleans. Big Eric was also forced out.
   As the truck drove on, Monk caught a glimpse of a plane in a field near where Big Eric and Edna had been unloaded. It was apparent they were to be taken somewhere by air.
   "To the Castle of the Moccasin!" Monk guessed.
   He fell to wondering about that mysterious rendezvous. The Castle of the Moccasin! They had so far learned nothing of its whereabouts. They did not have even a wisp of information concerning the nature of the place.
   The delivery truck, it soon developed, had a high-powered engine. And on the straightaway, Monk would have been willing to bet it was making eighty miles an hour.
   The very speed of their going made time drag.

* * *

Chapter XIV. THE BIG SURPRISE

   DAWN had not yet arrived when Renny and Monk were hauled into the presence of Long Tom, Ham, and Johnny, who lay bound hand and foot in the shack in the depths of the great swamp.
   Long Tom moaned aloud. "Good night! And you fellows were our last hope!"
   Monk caught sight of Ham. The faintest of amused gleams came into Monk's little eyes. If it had not been for his grief over learning of Doc Savage's demise, Monk would have burst into roars of laughter.
   Any sort of misfortune Ham met with tickled Monk—although the next instant Monk might risk his very life to rescue Ham. These two had been good-natured enemies since the War.
   It was Monk who had framed the ham-stealing charge which had been the cause of Ham getting his nickname. Ham had never been able to prove it, a point that still rankled his lawyer soul.
   Too, Monk was one man who could hold his own against Ham's sharp tongue. He had an infallible system of getting Ham's goat. He would merely make some reference to Ham's stealing anything connected with a porker, from pig's knuckles to the pig's way of squealing. This burned Ham up.
   There was no laughter or razzing now, though.
   It was not their own danger that stilled their tongues. It was the overpowering grief brought by the knowledge that they had lost their friend and benefactor—Doc Savage.
   The sinister throbbing of the tom-toms still flung its disquieting influence over the huge morass. The cadence was faster. It tore at their nerves. It seemed to destroy the very regularity of their heartbeats. It beat like invisible waves against their brains.
   "That infernal racket is driving us nuts!" Johnny muttered.
   "And a big alligator keeps crawling up in front of the door," Long Tom groaned. "The guards chased it away a time or two. But lately, they've been letting it hang around, just because it makes us sweat. Seeing the infernal thing reminds us of— of—"
   The electrical wizard shuddered violently, and could not finish. Thought of Doc's fate choked him.
   Once more, they sat and listened to the thump din of the voodoo ceremony in the hollow at the top of the hill. The caterwauling yells still came. If anything, they were louder, even more fanatic.
   "They're working up to the point where the human sacrifice will be offered!" Johnny said in a thick voice. "I studied their infernal rites enough to be able to tell."
   "Use your brain on somethin' useful!" Monk groaned. "Gettin' us out of here, for instance!"
   Long Tom suddenly gave voice to a horror-stricken gasp. He shut his eyes tightly. The others looked to see what had affected him.
   The giant alligator had returned. It crawled slowly through the steaming moonlight for the door. It was like some hideous thing from Hades.

* * *

   CHUCKLING loudly, the guards looked inside. The horror the presence of the reptile inflicted upon the prisoners seemed to give them great glee. They clucked at the 'gator, calling "Sic 'em!" and other pleasantries.
   One guard departed. A chicken's frightened squawl arose. The man came back with the fowl. Using the live bait, he proceeded to decoy the giant alligator through the door.
   The reptile entered like a pet dog.
   Playfully, the guard tried to persuade it to take a bite out of Monk's leg. He had no success. Disgusted, he kicked the 'gator in the side.
   The big saurian now became quite motionless. It might have been hearing something.
   Sure enough—a sound came!
   It was by far the most welcome note that ever impinged upon the ears of the five men lying bound and sentenced to death upon the filthy floor.
   The sound that meant Doc!
   More than ever was the ventriloquist quality evident in the wondrous note. Mellow, trilling, soft, it seemed to waft forth from every part of the ramshackle building. It filtered through the awful throb of the tom-toms; and, tiny, small thing though it was, it reduced the savage rhythm to something unimportant, no longer dangerous.
   Courage flowed into the five men. Utter joy washed their bodies like some hot, exquisite bath. Doc was alive!
   They didn't know how it could be. But Doc was here somewhere. Furtively, they tried to locate him. It was fruitless. His trilling sound seemed to emanate from the molecules of the air itself.
   The guards were puzzled and not a little awed.
   "Sacrй!
   Vat ees dat noise?"
   The swamp man who had kicked the 'gator stepped back. The next instant the reptile gave an expert flounce. The guard sprawled flat on his back. He lost his machine gun from his hands.
   The alligator now did what no commonplace saurian ever did. It got up on its rear legs. The repulsive stomach of the thing was closed with, of all things—
   A zipper fastener!
   With a s-s-wick!of a noise, the zipper came open.
   The mighty bronze form of Doc Savage flashed forth.

* * *

   FOR a moment, the superstitious guards must have thought the big reptile had actually turned into the bronze giant they believed one of its kind had devoured. Astonishment held them paralyzed.
   Doc hurled his 'gator masquerade at them. It was but the hide of one of the reptiles, cleverly mounted. It was heavy, though. It flew true. One guard went over backward.
   Another guard emitted a howl of alarm. His aircraft-type machine gun cut loose. The recoil of the powerful weapon shook the strange harness about his middle, threatening to tear him to pieces. Empty cartridges chased each other over the floor like brassy mice.
   In his haste, the man forgot to exert the proper science in holding his weapon down. It got away from him. The stream of slugs cut through the plank walls like a slasher saw.
   The fellow saw the bronze giant whip toward him. He sought to retreat. A terrific blow felled him.
   A knife glinted in the pale light over the roped forms of the five prisoners. It slashed with the nice precision of a machine. Ropes fell away.
   "Yeo-o-ow!" bellowed Monk. He reared to his feet, roaring, snorting.
   Outside the shack, a swamp man was creeping along the wall. His wizened figure could be seen through the inch-wide cracks between the up-and-down wall planks.
   Monk took two quick steps. His two hundred and sixty pounds of gristle, bone, and stiff red hair sailed upward. Feet first, Monk hit the wall. Planks split, crashed, caved. He went through the wall like a ball from a muzzle-loading cannon.
   The swamp man met destruction in the wreckage.
   The swamp men possessed an animal-like bravery. Where-as beings with more brains would have fled, they stood and fought—and quickly found their Waterloo.
   Renny's big fist took one amidship. All the starch left the fellow. He draped loose as a dirty shirt over the gallon of knuckles which had hit him.
   The bronze flash that was Doc Savage in action accounted for the others.
   Ham found his sword cane. One of the unlucky guards had been carrying it. Ham unsheathed the razor-sharp, flexible blade. It sang like a big tuning fork in his hand.
   "Yeo-o-ow!" bawled Monk. "I ain't even warmed up!"
   "You will be!" clipped Ham. "You'll probably be on fire, before this is over! There's only a few hundred of the voodoo devils left!"

* * *

   BEDLAM had broken out on the hill above the settlement. The greenish snake of fire burning within the hollow cast a lurid glow on the jungle immediately adjacent. The hilltop might have been the gullet of some bloated dragon.
   Against the emerald luminance, ugly figures were silhouetted. Barbaric, savage forms, these were—except for the fearsome killing machines many wore harnessed to their bodies.
   They had heard the prisoners escaping. They poured down the hill.
   "Come!" Doc's single word was low, calm. But it had the effect of an explosive.
   He glided away into the night.
   His five men followed. They knew Doc had some plan. They couldn't imagine what it was. They were hopelessly outnumbered. Should they take to the swamp, Doc alone stood a chance of escaping. The swamp men, knowing the intricacies of the vast and entangled morass, would overhaul any one of lesser physical ability. Doc would never desert his men. Hence they knew he must have some other scheme for coping with their immediate peril.
   Machine guns searched the festering growth with whistling, popping streams of lead. The slugs sickled off branches and leaves. Violent rolls of rapid echoes gamboled over the low hill.
   Amid all that discord, Doc and his men could talk without attracting attention.
   "How did you do it, Doc?" Ham questioned. "I mean—when the car went into the bayou? I'd have sworn we saw a 'gator making a meal out of you."
   "What you saw was merely a trick to make the swamp men think I was done for," Doc replied. "I thrust an arm into the jaws of that stuffed alligator, then pushed the head out of the water and shook it. Naturally, it looked as if one of the huge reptiles had me."
   "What I want to know is, where the stuffed 'gator came from?" Long Tom put in.
   "What is the best masquerade a man could don to move about in this swamp?" Doc countered.
   "That's easy!" Long Tom chuckled. "Pass himself off as an alligator!"
   "Exactly," said Doc. "That stuffed 'gator was in the rumble seat of the roadster. It was one of the things I brought along into the swamp, on the chance we might need it. I simply dived and got it, after the car went into the water. The thing could be folded up in a fairly small space, for all its large size. And it looked natural enough to fool the swamp men, especially when seen only by moonlight. In the daytime, they might not have been deceived so easily."
   "Maybe," replied Long Tom. "But the way it was, it sure ran a whizzer on everybody concerned."
   A note of regret now came into Doc's powerful, expressive voice.
   "I am sorry I had to deceive you along with the swamp men," he said, "but it could not be helped. And there was also nothing else to do but let you fall into the hands of the Gray Spider's men. To have attempted to spirit you away under water would only have meant you would be drowned."
   Doc and his five men were working around the hill as they conversed.
   "Where we goin'?" Monk inquired.
   "Wet your finger and hold it up," Doc suggested.
   Monk complied. "Huh—you mean that now we're gettin' the wind at our backs?"
   "That's the idea. As you may have noticed, I did some scouting around in the course of the night. In fact, I'll venture to assure you, brothers, that there is scarcely a square yard of this hill over which Doc 'Alligator' Savage did not crawl. Among other things, I made a find which, unless I'm far mistaken, will be our salvation."
   Ham thought of something. "Say—there was a real alligator, wasn't there? I saw that half-wit kid playing with one like it was a dog."
   "There was," Doc agreed. "I have both the boy and his unusual pet tied up in the near-by swamp. Neither have been harmed—nor will they be. Unknowingly, they did us a good turn. Things would not have been nearly so simple, had the swamp men not been accustomed to seeing this alligator around."
   Loud yells denoted the voodoo men were taking the trail of Doc and his friends. Pine-knot torches flamed. They cast fitful, dancing shadows. The hot white rods of modern flashlights mingled with them.
   Random bursts were loosened frequently from machine guns. These never did anything more annoying than shower Doc and his five men with bark, twigs, and leaves.
   "Kinda reminds me of the big scrap in France!" Monk's mild voice was more than ever a surprising contrast. It hardly seemed possible the boisterous, animallike bellowings he emitted while in action could come from the same source as the sleepy, soft words.
   "Well, the wind is at our backs!" Renny announced. "So what?"
   "So this!" Doc pointed.
   Before them reared the white, ghostly stub of a dead tree. Lightning had apparently shattered it long ago. The bark was gone. Cracks gaped in the pale wood. Patches of foul green fungus spotted it.
   Doc quickly wrenched away a section of the lifeless trunk. A cavity was revealed. The trunk was hollow.
   The cache held a number of boxes about the size of apple crates. One of these had been opened.
   "I investigated," Doc explained. "Two of those boxes hold ordinary hand grenades. The others contain a supply of poison-gas grenades. It's the same kind of deadly gas the Gray Spider has twice sought to use on us. The wind will carry it over our foes."
   "Glory be!" enthused Monk. "And that ain't the half of it! There's gas masks along with the stuff!"
   The masks were swiftly hauled out. Monk, Renny, Long Tom, Ham, and Johnny donned them. But Doc Savage delayed.
   "We will use the gas only as a last resort," he pointed out "After all, the fiendishness of these swamp men is largely due to one man—the Gray Spider. If we can get the master devil and the group of his important lieutenants, which he calls the inner circle of his Cult of the Moccasin, it will be unnecessary to do any wholesale killing. The other swamp men, freed from the Gray Spider's sinister influence, can be reformed."
   Doc now advanced a few yards. He carried a hand grenade—one which did not contain gas. He plucked out the firing pin and lobbed the metal egg into the morass.
   It exploded with an ear-splitting roar.
   The blast caused silence to seize momentarily upon the low hill. The voodoo men were surprised, uneasy.
   Into the void of quiet rolled Doc Savage's words. Now, more than ever, was the amazing quality of penetration apparent in the bronze man's voice. It seemed to gather some of the elusive nature of Doc's strange trilling sound, for, without being in the least loud or blaring, it filtered to every part of the hill.
   "We have the gas and the masks!" Doc told the voodoo men. "To attack us will mean death for you! The wind will sweep the gas to you!"

* * *

   AT this threatening declaration, the silence deepened. It became an uneasy pall.
   Suddenly, an order crashed among the voodoo men.
   "He's right! We can't rush them. Draw back into the swamp! We'll get them if they try to leave the hill!"
   It was the Gray Spider speaking.
   Doc's men exchanged puzzled looks.
   "Glory be!" gulped Monk. "Did you notice—"
   In giving the command to his voodoo followers, the Gray Spider had been forced to lift his tone to a yell.
   He had forgotten to disguise his voice!
   "I’ll say I noticed it!" Renny snapped. "That voice is familiar! I've heard it somewhere!"
   "So have I!" Monk said mildly. "But I can't place it."
   Renny offered: "Maybe Doc can!"
   With a start, Renny bit off his words.
   Doc had vanished! There had been no sound. They had noticed no stir in the pale moonlight that splattered through the canopy of swamp vegetation. Yet the mighty bronze form was no longer in their midst; he had slipped away as if on a moonbeam.
   "Doc has gone after the Gray Spider alone!" Ham clipped.
   Ham had made a good guess. At the precise moment he spoke, Doc was two-score yards away. The russet metal hue of his skin, the dark color of his garments, rendered him nearly invisible, even when he crossed patches of moonlight.
   At the foot of the hill, the swamp tangle reared like a wall. A great leap sent the bronze man upward. His case-hardened fingers found a limb. The branch bent some under his great weight, but made little noise.
   A voodoo man near by saw the foliage sway. He got the most fleeting glimpse of a figure that might have been a metallic bat. There had been no noise. The swamp man blinked, thinking a dark, night-flying moth was before his eyes. When he looked again, the strange vision was gone.
   He galloped off, muttering of voodoo curses and evil spirits. He couldn't understand what he had seen.
   Nor would he have believed his eyes, had he observed the flashing speed with which a Herculean bronze man traversed the aлrial lanes of the interlaced swamp vegetation. No squirrel or anthropoid jungle dweller could have shown more uncanny ability.
   Sometimes creepers draped in tree-tops parted under the weight of the bronze giant. But he never fell far before his sure fingers found fresh grip. Nor did these breath-taking drops seem to bother him in the least.
   Deep in the morass, the voodoo man had stopped to catch his breath.
   Suddenly a voice came out of the murk beside him.
   "Sacrй
   — vare ees de Gray Spider?" it asked. "Me—I got plentee important message fo' heem."
   The voodoo man thought it was one of his fellows. "Dunno vare Gray Spider ees! Him go away—not tell anybody vare to!"
   The silence of a tomb followed. The voodoo man got curious. He investigated. He found no trace of whoever had spoken.
   Several other swamp men had almost identical experiences. No one discovered who had addressed them in the debased jargon of their kind. Not one dreamed it was the mighty bronze man they feared.
   For Doc Savage was seeking the Gray Spider—seeking with all his great resource of muscle and brain—and seeking in vain!

* * *

Chapter XV. THE BUZZING DEATH

   DAWN!
   Periodic, vicious little storms were sweeping the voodoo hill in the great swamp. The storms were lead—driven by the machine guns of the voodoo men. The little devils completely ringed the hill around.
   Trees sheltered them. Foliage concealed them. An army of forty thousand men would have had trouble stamping them out. When danger threatened one particular group, they had but to fire and lose themselves in the steaming, cankerous morass.
   Doc and his five men were in a state of siege upon the hill. They had ripped planks off the shacks of Buck Boontown's settlement, and used them to scoop out gun pits. In these they had installed the machine guns which they had taken from their erstwhile swamp guards.
   Employing the same planks, they had rigged substantial dugouts—a precaution that proved highly worth while.
   "Listen!" Monk barked. "There's a plane coming!"
   The craft soon swept into view. It dived on the hill. Crude bombs, fizzing fuses attached, dropped overside.
   Exploding, these threw up great fountains of mud and vegetation. Thanks to the dugouts, no harm was inflicted upon Doc and his men.
   "Get that crate!" Doc directed. "It may come back with more efficient bombs!"
   The rapid-firers snarled in chorus. Ragged patches appeared in the wings of the plane. The craft banked away. Apparently it was not seriously damaged. Now it was lost to view, flying very low.
   But a few minutes later, the sound of the engine suddenly ceased. A short silence, a gruesome whistling of wind through flying wires—and a resounding crash!
   "Motor conked!" Monk grinned. "From the sound of it, he made a landing he won't walk away from."
   "I think we riddled his gas tank," Doc offered. Only his keen golden eyes had discerned the leakage of gasoline from the plane as it departed.
   "We're all set here!" Monk chuckled. "Regular little war! And we could fight for a year without anybody in the outside world being the wiser."
   "Can you go without eating for a year?" Ham asked sarcastically.
   "Huh?"
   "Maybe you haven't noticed our lack of grub?"
   "Yeah—I knowed there was somethin' I had missed," Monk grinned. "It was my breakfast ham—the six slices I eat daily in your honor!"
   Ham scowled threateningly at the big, homely Monk. Any reference to a porker that Monk made was always sure to get Ham's goat. Ham racked his keen brain for some verbal thorn he could stick into Monk, couldn't find any, and held his tongue.

* * *

   DOC SAVAGE now launched into his daily two-hour routine of exercises. This was a ritual he did each day of his life, without fail. Not once since childhood had he skipped that intensive one hundred and twenty minutes spent conditioning his marvelous bronze body and his remarkable brain.
   The routine included every possible form of muscular exercise. In addition, he had an apparatus which emitted sound waves above and below the audible range—and so keen had his ears become through long practice that he could hear many of these sounds which would have escaped an ordinary person.
   He identified scores of vague odors contained in small bottles, afterward inspecting the bottle labels to be sure he was right. He performed intricate problems in high calculus, entirely within his head.
   The apparatus for these exercises was contained in a tiny, waterproof metal case Doc carried always with him.
   Doc went through his ritual at a terrific pace—often doing a number of things at once. Ten minutes of it would have left an ordinary man panting and exhausted—granting the unlikely chance that such a man could muster the enormous degree of concentration necessary to do the exercises as furiously as Doc did them.
   Watching this routine, it was no mystery to his five friends and aids where Doc Savage got his incredible physique and brain. Monk, Renny, Ham, Long Tom, and Johnny, themselves far above the average in mentality and brawn, knew to a surety that they would never have maintained such a grueling ritual from childhood. It took a man of steel will power to do that.
   The exercises completed, Doc moved over to speak with Sill Boontown. The half-wit boy crouched in the dugout.
   "He is safer here," Doc had explained. "If he wanders around in the swamp, he might get shot or injured."
   Doc exchanged many words with Sill Boontown. He examined the youth, concentrating on the spot where Sill Boontown had been struck on the head a couple of years before.
   Suddenly Doc joined his friends.
   "I’m going to leave you for a while," he declared.
   They were thunderstruck. They did not see how even Doc could escape safely from their makeshift fortress on the cleared knoll.
   Working swiftly, Doc kindled a fire. He used wood which the voodoo men had been employing in their snakelike ceremonial blazes. The sulphur-treated stuff gagged them and nearly made their dugouts untenantable.
   The blaze mounted high, however. Doc heaped on a pile of soggy green grass and bushes.
   Smoke now rolled. It poured across the open slope of the hill and into the matted swamp growth.
   "Build a fire like this when you hear me come back!" Doc directed.
   A streaking blur of bronze, he raced through the smoke for the encircling jungle. The smudge hid him partially.
   A swamp man saw him. A machine gun guttered fiercely. But the bronze flash was gone. The verdant mat of the morass had swallowed Doc Savage.

* * *

   A GREAT deal of excitement followed the cunning escape. Voodoo men dashed about, pushing a wild search.
   However, Doc Savage was half a mile distant before they had operations under way. He did not linger in the vicinity. Clearing bottomless quagmires of slime with gigantic springs, running along draped vines with his hands, swinging from limb to limb, he made good time.
   His journey brought him to the spot where Johnny had hidden the low-wing, tri-motored speed plane. Sinewy bronze fingers parted the moss that curtained the craft. Doc entered the cabin.
   It required less than five minutes to get what he needed. When he reappeared, a bundle about the size of a bushel basket was lashed to his back with stout cord.
   He now returned to the spot where his friends were besieged. Circling, he took a position upwind from the mound. But he kept fully two hundred yards distant.
   His weird, mellow trilling sound now filtered through the tangled vegetation of the morass. Although it seemed no louder than ever, it carried clearly to his five friends.
   "That means we're to light a fire!" Monk grunted. The blaze was forthwith kindled. Flames leaped high. Wet grass and branches were thrown on. Dense smoke rolled.
   The voodoo men were wily. They knew the giant bronze man had escaped through such a smudge. They reasoned he would come back by the same means. So they turned every available machine gun loose into the smoke.
   The smoke all but assumed the color of lead, so thickly did the bullets fly. Slugs tore the ground until it looked like it had been gone over with a disc cultivator.
   All of which merely made it simpler for Doc to reach his friends! He came, not through the smoke, but from the opposite direction. He ran silently and like the wind.
   A lone pistol popped its magazine empty in his direction. The marksman might have been shooting at one of the pale clouds ten thousand feet overhead, for all the result his bullets produced.
   Doc dropped lightly into one of the dugouts.

* * *

   THE bundle brought by the big bronze man was now opened. First, there came to light some concentrated foods. Next, Long Tom was handed a package of apparatus.
   "What's this?" questioned the electrical wizard.
   "All you need to make a supersensitive microphonic 'ear'," Doc explained. "Set it up in the center of our fortress. When night comes, the voodoo men will no doubt try to creep up close enough to hurl bombs into our dugouts. But with your apparatus, you can hear them."
   Long Tom nodded, then fell to examining his apparatus. He became elated. With this stuff, he could make a microphonic listening and amplifying device that would pick up the buzz of a fly at the distance of half a mile. Scant chance would skulkers stand of creeping upon them now.
   Doc Savage busied himself with poor, half-witted Sill Boontown. A kit which he had brought from the plane proved to be a compact set of surgical instruments. It even included hypodermic needles for administering a form of local anaesthetic, a pain-deadener which affected only the part being worked upon.
   "He's gonna operate on the kid!" Monk grunted.
   "Two bits says the kid is normal as you or me when Doc finishes!" Ham offered.
   "You would want to bet on a sure thing!" Monk snorted.
   Both Ham and Monk were fully aware of Doc's magical skill in surgery. For it was at this, above all else, that the mighty bronze man excelled.
   Surgery had been Doc's first training in life. It had been his most intensive. Although his ability at other lines of endeavor might seem uncanny, his accomplishments with surgery and medicine were far more marvelous.
   It was an interested group that watched the delicate operation. Sinewy bronze fingers, steady as steel on a foundation of bedrock, laid back the scalp. A small aperture was opened in the skull.
   As Doc had expected, a fragment of bone was pressing upon the brain, paralyzing certain of its functions. The blow on the head two years before had caused the trouble.
   The bone fragment was removed. Swiftly, Doc completed the delicate operation. With catgut, which would dissolve of itself about the time the wound was healed, he stitched the scalp in place.
   The effects of the anaesthetic wore off.
   "How do you feel, sonny?" Doc inquired.
   "I got one whopper of de headache!" replied the boy.
   His tone showed that he was perfectly sane!
   It was magic! Monk, Ham, Renny, Long Tom, Johnny—they all exchanged strange glances. Accustomed as they were to the marvelous things Doc Savage did, and knowing that such a brain operation was not unique in surgery, they were nevertheless awed.
   Lost from the outside world, beseiged here in the steaming, festering swamp, volleys of machine-gun slugs storming over them every minute or so, the feat could not but impress them as uncanny.
   They scattered to their gun emplacements, wriggling through the shallow trenches they had dug.
   Time now dragged. Long Tom finished his microphonic listening device. It was something like the apparatus used by the defenders of London during the Great War to listen for Zeppelins and planes—although far more perfected.
   It was well after noon when Doc Savage caught sight of Buck Boontown. The man was directing the seige.
   Doc signaled Buck Boontown. It was his intention to inform the swamp man that his son would join him shortly. There was no longer necessity for keeping Sill Boontown here. The lad would not bungle into danger, now that his mental powers were normal. And even had the boy wanted to assist the beseiged man, Doc would not have permitted the lad to oppose his father.
   Buck Boontown was suspicious. He thought Doc's wig-wagging was a trick. So he blazed away with a machine gun. His accurate fire caused Doc to duck swiftly.

* * *

   BUCK BOONTOWN chortled gleefully at the results of his rapid-fire blast.
   "Bien!
   Me—I almo' got heem that time!"
   He watched the molelike mounds and tiny ridges of dirt the defenders of the hill had thrown up. His blasphemous pleadings to his hideous voodoo deity for another shot went unanswered.
   Soon one of the other swamp men wriggled up with a message.
   "Gray Spider ees want yo'!" he told Buck Boontown. "He's send message. Yo' ees to go to Castle of the Moccasin!"
   "Oui!"
   smirked Buck Boontown. "Me—I go plantee queeck."
   The swamp man was flattered. Although by far the most intelligent of the debased clan of humans who had resided in this great morass so many generations they had reverted to a state of near savagery, Buck Boontown was, nevertheless, far from a smart man.
   He fawned like a big dog under the attentions of the Gray Spider. Sacrй!Now there was a man for you! Or so Buck Boontown thought. The money that the Gray Spider paid his swamp men minions was not a minor inducement, either. A city gunman would have sneered at the smallness of the sums, but to these swamp dwellers, each pittance was a little fortune.
   As he plowed through the tangled morass, Buck Boontown treated himself to flights of imagination. He was saving his money. Already he had quite a sum hidden in a fruit jar in the swamp. He would hoard more. He might even get enough to go to the great and marvelous city of New Orleans and spend the rest of his days. He had heard of the wonders of that metropolis, but had never been there. Indeed, he had never been out of this great swamp in his lifetime.
   And the swamp was but a few hours' drive by speedy car from New Orleans!
   Mile after mile, Buck Boontown covered. He kept a straight course, weaving aside only for pools and slime which he could not leap.
   He was entering the most remote section of the swamp. Even the folk who lived in the great morass seldom came here. The region was forbidden to all but the inner circle of the Cult of the Moccasin. It held the Castle of the Moccasin—the headquarters of the king of the voodoo cult. The lair of the Gray Spider!
   Buck Boontown climbed a cypress to make sure of his bearings.
   Not a mile distant lay the Castle of the Moccasin!

* * *

   NO doubt airplane pilots flying over the vast swamp and bayou district had noted the peculiar knot of trees and shrubs projecting over the surrounding territory. Probably they mistook it for a tiny clump of very tall trees.
   Should they have chanced to fly low, they would have seen that these trees, strangely enough, were growing out of a great, boxlike knob which was covered completely by vines.
   It had never occurred to any one that the knob was in reality a huge stone building, the roof and walls of which were cunningly camouflaged with growing vegetation.
   Buck Boontown neared the strange, concealed castle of a structure.
   He was challenged by a heavily armed guard, and permitted to pass. Soon he met a second guard.
   It was well nigh impenetrable to the casual wayfarer, this Castle of the Moccasin. Years had been spent in its building. Labor had been furnished by the members of the voodoo cult.
   The Gray Spider's campaign of wholesale looting of the great lumber companies of the South was no snap-of-the-finger scheme. It had been years in the conceiving and preparation.
   Buck Boontown was admitted to the Castle of the Moccasin through a secret door.
   The passage into which he came was stone-walled. Electric bulbs lighted the way. The air inside, contrasting greatly with the malodorous and steaming vapor of the swamp, was clean and pure. Buck Boontown knew nothing of such things as air-conditioning machines, so he attributed the sweetness of the atmosphere to some magic about the presence of the Gray Spider.
   He entered a large room. The color scheme looked like it had been conceived by a futuristic artist who had gone crazy among his paint pots. Streaks and spots and daubs of green, red, blue, yellow, white, aluminum, gold—it all made neither sense nor beauty. Concealed colored lights dancing off and on added to the garish effect.
   The whole thing was deliberately conceived to impress the near-barbaric minds of the swamp dwellers who worshiped the heathen deities of voodoo.
   In the center sat a throne of gold—gold paint on a wooden foundation, although Buck Boontown didn't know it. To him, the throne alone represented limitless wealth.
   The Gray Spider occupied the throne. He wore robe and mask. The repulsive, ash-colored tarantula crawled continually over one of his hands.
   "Vat yo' want?" asked Buck Boontown in an awed whisper.
   The Gray Spider mouthed a few low, meaningless sounds before he answered. This was merely to add to the supernatural atmosphere created by his weird surroundings.