Quest of the Spider ds-3 Page 14

  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 dire
cted.

  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.