Kenneth Robeson - Quest of the Spider

An occasional sawmill town made a spotty patch of lights. These sawmill towns differed from other settlements in that they were always scattered about a group of mill buildings—sawing structure, kilns, rough-dry and finish storing sheds, planing mill, machine shops, and other shacks.

The sawmill towns became scarcer. Riverlike bayous, the only avenue of transportation in the swamp, ceased to gleam in the moonlight. Tall trees suitable for timber also became scattered.

Johnny knew he was over the wildest portion of the great swamps. He cut the ignition switches of the three motors. He threw a lever. This changed the characteristics of the plane wings, giving the remarkable craft a less steep gliding angle and a much slower landing speed.

The great ship settled upon the swamp like a monster bat with wings outstretched and paralyzed.

Johnny selected a tiny bayou. It resembled a spot where a huge finger had scraped away the festering layers of swamp vegetation, revealing the shining surface of a mirror. The mirror, of course, was water.

Lightly, the plane dunked its floats in the water. It coasted ahead. The wake it left fanned outward, seeming to throw the bayou into shimmering convulsions.

"If I just don't hit the bank too hard!" Johnny muttered.

He didn't. The ship grounded with a slight jar, after sloughing through tall cane and under heavy overhanging branches.

Johnny clambered out. Walking along the wing, he pulled down armloads of the clammy aлrial moss from the vines and drooping branches overhead.

This moss was the variety called "old man's beard" by the natives. Johnny used it to cover the wings and fuselage of the plane, so there would exist less likelihood of its being seen.

That job completed, he extracted a large leather pouch from the plane. It was this which contained the stuff Doc had told Johnny he might need. After one look at the pouch contents, Johnny chuckled.

"Doc foresees about everything!" he declared.

Johnny thrust a rather unusual pistol inside his shirt. This weapon was in reality a wonderfully compact machine gun—undoubtedly the smallest and most efficient killing mechanism in existence.

The unique weapon was the invention of Doc Savage. They were manufactured secretly for him. Only his five friends and aids were supplied with them.

Johnny left the plane.

THE swamp was an indescribable tangle. Vines and creepers made a more impenetrable mass than any barbed-wire entanglement Johnny had encountered in the War. The gray, scaly moss hung so thick at times that it seemed he was entirely bundled up in the horsehairlike stuff.

In the next hour, Johnny made less than a mile.

"I can see why a criminal fleeing into this district would be safe!" he muttered. "Nobody could get in to grab him!"

Johnny was aware, however, that there must be secret trails through the morass—trails known only to the evil, ignorant colony, the offspring of criminals, who had spent their lives here. The little monkey men!

It was dark. Although moonlight pressed brightly upon the top of the jungle mat, few of the beams penetrated to the treacherous mess of foul water, mud, roots, and creepers that formed the earth.

Johnny came to higher ground. He listened. Owls were making quite a racket. Somewhere near, a hideous bawling arose. Johnny knew what it was—alligators!

He wet his lips. The 'gators had a grisly way of grabbing a man's leg, then whirling over and over until the leg was torn completely off.

Then, in the neighborhood, Johnny heard a sound which gave him a distinct start.

Apparently it was a child sobbing. He strained his ears. It was a child sobbing!

Puzzled, wary, Johnny made for the sound. The ground became higher. He reached a small glade.

Huddled in the middle of the glade, as if seeking the moonlight, was a small boy. The tot could not be more than four. He was scared. An owl hooted stentoriously at the glade edge, and the little boy emitted a series of squawls. He could not have made a bigger racket were he being devoured alive.

There seemed to be no one else near.

Johnny advanced.

The little boy saw him. His sobbing stopped. He raced for Johnny, stubby legs churning through the rank weeds.

"Ise losted!" he proclaimed in a small and trembling voice.

"That's tough, skipper!" Johnny chuckled. "What'd you do—go rabbit huntin' and follow the rabbit off?"

"How did oo know?" the tot inquired blankly.

Johnny grinned widely. "That's the way little boys usually get lost."

However, Johnny was wishing heartily the little boy had never heard of a rabbit hunt. Finding him, complicated things. Johnny, of course, would have to see his charge home.

Racking his brain, Johnny recalled having noted the light of a house a mile or two distant, just before he landed his plane. He decided to take the shaver there. He set out, the small boy riding his shoulder.

They had covered most of a mile when affairs took a surprising turn.

A flashlight sprayed against Johnny and the tot.

"There he is!" bellowed a coarse voice. "It's what I told you! That dirty, voodoo worshippin' swamp man kidnaped him! Lucky we happened onto him before he got away with the kid!"

"Daddy!" cried the tot at the coarse voice.

"Put the kid down!" snarled a second man behind the flashlight.

Johnny lowered the child. The shaver ran for his father.

Johnny started to explain. He was not given time.

"Teach 'im to go kidnapin' kids!" bellowed the coarse voice. "Kill 'im! Blow his head off!"

A shotgun loosened a terrific gush of flame almost in Johnny's face.

JOHNNY thought faster than the man with the gun—by about eighteen inches. The shotgun charge missed him that much. With a bound, he was out of the flashlight glare.

The flash stabbed wildly in pursuit of him. In his excitement, the man who held it let his finger slip off the button. Darkness clapped down.

It was the rush of sepia blackness that gave Johnny his big idea. He was thinking.

Why was this father so enraged and so certain his small son had been kidnaped? What had caused him to leap to the conclusion so swiftly? Why had he been determined to slay Johnny without waiting for an explanation?

What made the enraged man act as if Johnny was a foul rat, to be scotched without mercy?

The wrathful father had mistaken Johnny for one of the villainous swamp denizens—a voodoo worshiper. Certain obscene rites of the voodoo fiends usually involved the blood from a human sacrifice—a child!

The father thought his tot was being seized for a hideous voodoo ceremony!

Johnny's keen brain raced. He saw suddenly that this situation was made to his order.

He darted forward. He scooped up the small boy. He sprang into the brush. The father dared not shoot, even should he have had the chance, for fear of hitting his offspring.

The shaver was quiet. He seemed to be enjoying the excitement. This was not to Johnny's liking.

"Bellow for your dad, skipper!" he commanded. "Make him think I'm eating your ears off!"

Obediently, the boy let out a piercing howl for "Daddy!"

"He's over there!" shouted the frenzied father. "Follow him! Don't let the voodoo devil get away with my son!"

Johnny put on speed.

"Kinda onery to fool your old man like this," he told the shaver. "But maybe it'll teach him not to be so sudden on the trigger. If I had jumped a little less quick, the world would have lost its second best geologist."

Johnny was careful to make considerable racket, and not go so swiftly that his pursuers would lose track of him. Abruptly sighting the lights of several houses, he swung to one side. Evidently what he had seen was a trading post, where the swamp dwellers bartered muskrat skins, moss, fish, and crabs for their few necessities.