Johnny kicked a man in the middle. He booted so hard that he distinctly felt his heel push a stomach in and jar against a backbone. The fellow sailed ungracefully away.
A club rapped Johnny's head, causing a burst of colored lights and lances of flame. That, and the wire drawing steadily tighter around his neck, sapped his strength. His struggles weakened. They became slower. He was like a clockwork toy that was running down.
"Bien!"
puffed one of the Gray Spider's swamp men. "Eet ees about over!"
It was. But not like the swamp man expected.
There suddenly wafted over the scene of strife an uncanny trilling note. It was a whistle, and yet not a whistle. It had a low and mellow quality that might be likened to the song of some rare bird of the jungle, or the melodious but untuned note of a wayward breeze filtering among the pipes of a great organ.
It seemed to come from everywhere.
Johnny heard it, although but half conscious. The sound of Doc Savage!
* * *
THE sound had a remarkable effect on Johnny. Renewed energy flowed into his faltering muscles. He struck and flailed fiercely.
Out of the night came flashing a mighty bronze form. The charge of a lion would hardly have been more disastrous to the Gray Spider's two men.
Only two blows, coming so close together that they sounded like two men clapping hands simultaneously, and the pair went tumbling like rabbits shot on the run. It was doubtful if either had seen what caused their downfall. The third man, disabled by Johnny, writhed and moaned near by, entirely helpless.
Doc freed Johnny's neck from the wire noose.
"You're a handy guy to have around, Doc," Johnny laughed shakily. Then he noticed that the seaplane still taxied out on the lake. It was nowhere near shore. "Huh—I thought you were in the plane."
"Ham is flying the bus," Doc explained. "It occurred to me after you called that the Gray Spider might be doing some wire-tapping himself. In that case, he might have heard us make the appointment to meet here. So I dropped around merely to play safe. And here we are."
"Yeah—thanks to you," Johnny said wryly, feeling his sore neck. "One thing that is fortunate—on my call to you I didn't say a thing which would give the Gray Spider a clue to my identity or purpose."
"Sure—there's no harm done," Doc agreed. "In fact, we've added three more prisoners to our menagerie. Every little bit helps."
The plane now taxied close in. Ham, slender and waspish, waded ashore. He held his sword cane high over his head and said some uncomplimentary things about the mud underfoot.
"You are to take the plane into the swamp," Doc told Johnny. "Park it at some spot where nobody’ll find it. Use the radio to get in touch with me. Long Tom has installed a receiving and transmitting station in it. You will, of course, use the Mayan language, so no one will understand our talk."
"Righto," Johnny agreed.
"There's some stuff in the ship that you might need," Doc added.
Johnny now waded out to the plane, hauled himself up on one of the newly installed metal floats, and sprang into the cabin. The silenced motors sped up. The propellers churned the air shrilly. Out across Lake Ponchartrain, the craft streaked, then leaped into the air.
Johnny banked for the swamp country. He was an expert pilot, thanks to the teaching of Doc Savage. The remarkable bronze man seemed gifted with the ability to impart much of his own vast knowledge and skill to those whom he taught, and it was this strange quality which had turned his five friends into accomplished airmen, second only to Doc himself.
* * *
THE foggy area proved to be only in the vicinity of New Orleans. Johnny soon left it behind. He kept the silencers on the motors, made the cabin airtight, turned on the apparatus which supplied artificial air, and flew very high—about twenty-five thousand feet. He used powerful binoculars to observe the terrain below.
A narrow bayou wound like a frayed silver ribbon through the marshy jungle which looked from that height like so much green velvet. Johnny observed a few tow steamers escorting long, flexible log rafts.
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 stentoriousl
y 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.
* * *
Chapter X. VOODOO'S DOMAIN
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.
A few minutes later, he stopped his dawdling. He put every ounce of effort into racing through the swamp with the small boy.
For bloodhounds were now on his trail! Evidently they had been secured from the trading post. His trailers gained rapidly!
"This isn't quite so funny!" Johnny muttered. If those enraged pursuers caught him, he was certain to be shot or hanged without delay. Johnny looked exactly like one of the fiendish swamp denizens, and as such would be considered lower than a rat.
Mile after mile, Johnny plunged ahead. His legs ached. Each breath felt as if a mowing machine-sickle was being sawed up and down his throat. A lesser man than Johnny would have collapsed long ago, for Johnny's remarkable physical quality was his endurance. Ordinarily, he was tireless. But carrying the shaver and outrunning the bloodhound pack was taxing even his abilities.
He reached a break in the jungle where moonlight poured down like transparent silver.
Suddenly a man appeared before him. The fellow jabbed out a long-barreled squirrel rifle.
"Who yo' be?" he rumbled.
* * *
JOHNNY carefully kept his face expressionless. This was exactly what he had been hoping for! The man was one of the yellowish-brown, monkeylike swamp clan!
True, the fellow was the largest of the tribe Johnny had seen. And he had a somewhat more intelligent face than usual. A good muscular development showed under the torn sleeves of his shirt.
"Bien!"
ejaculated Johnny, lapsing into the conglomerate swamp dialect. "Yo' show me way to lose de bloodhounds! Me—I pay yo' to do dat! Oui!"
"Vat yo' do?" inquired the swamp man suspiciously. "Why dey want yo?"
Johnny indicated the small boy, who was peering with mingled interest and fear at the sinister-looking swamp man.
"Me—I grab dis white pickaninny!" Johnny explained.
"Dam'! Why yo' do dat?"
Here Johnny drew on his knowledge of voodoo. He explained, with many a hocus-pocus gesture, that he was no less than a high priest of voodoo!
The swamp man was impressed. He furtively produced a charm which looked suspiciously like it was carved out of a human arm bone.
"Yo' want white pickaninny to make beeg voodoo sacrifice?" he muttered. He was a voodoo believer. As such, he would help Johnny.
"Yo' got de idea," said Johnny.
Meantime, the bloodhounds were rapidly drawing nearer. The beasts set up a fearsome baying and yipping. Frightened owls and other birds flashed over the clearing in flight, resembling darksome, big, wind-blown leaves.
"
Sacrй!"the swamp man swore softly. "Yo' have to leave white pickaninny. No can take heem!"
"Non!"
growled Johnny, pretending great reluctance. He added that the voodoo dieties demanded a sacrifice of the blood of a white child in the good old-fashioned manner.
"Yo' gotta leave heem!" insisted the swamp man.
"Non!"
Johnny retorted stubbornly. "Eef we can escape, we can take white brat along."
The real reason for leaving the little boy behind now came out—not that Johnny had the slightest idea from the first of letting him fall into the hands of the voodoo men.
The Gray Spider did not want the attention of the law drawn to his clan of swamp devils. To kidnap the white boy would do just that. Therefore, either Johnny had to leave his prize behind, or take his chances with the bloodhounds and the shotguns.
Johnny feigned vast disappointment. He boosted the small boy to a branch, strapped him there with his belt, and followed the swamp man.
Covering only a couple of rods, Johnny's guide waded into a cluster of canes. He bent the tall, rushlike stems aside. A small pirogue, dug out of a single log, was concealed there. The two men entered. Both dipped crude paddles. The little craft handled almost as easily as a birch-bark canoe, even if it was hollowed out of a log.
They shot away.
Behind them, they heard shouts.
"
Here he is!" the father called, finding his son safe. "The voodoo devil had to leave him!"
Johnny smiled slightly. No harm had been done. The father had been punished with a little additional worry for his too hasty attempt to shoot Johnny. The shaver had put in an exciting hour or two in the swamp, with no danger to himself.
And Johnny was in a fair way to be welcomed with open arms by the voodoo-sacrificing swamp denizens. They would look on him with admiring eyes. Hadn't he tried to get a white child for the human sacrifice?
* * *
JOHNNY was amazed at the speed they were making. On other occasions he had seen natives go swiftly through a jungle that seemed impenetrable. But never anything quite like this!
At times his escort propelled the pirogue straight for a seemingly solid bank. But water always materialized under the keel. Sometimes the watery trail was completely concealed by cane and reeds growing out of it.
"Yo' sure know de way!" he flattered his guide.
"Oui!
I oughta! Me—I live all my life here."
"What yo' name?"
"Buck Boontown," replied the swamp man.
"Buck" Boontown, Johnny reflected, seemed to be of a somewhat higher mentality than the other swamp dwellers, just as he was a better physical specimen.
Nevertheless, the fellow was a vicious character. His belonging to the voodoo cult showed that.
"Where yo' come from?" demanded Buck Boontown.
Johnny now spun an elaborate story. He had been all over world, studying the fine points of voodoo sorcery, and now he was visiting this region, where he had heard the art had attained a high degree of perfection. Or so he said.
This vaguely missed being an outright fib. Buck Boontown ate it up. Johnny—or plain "Pete," as Johnny introduced himself—made an instant hit with Buck.
We got plenty big voodoo man in dese swamps," Buck Boontown said impressively. "Yo' ever hear of de Gray Spider?"
"Me—I t'ink so," Johnny said vaguely. "Nothin' but talk, though."
"
Bien!"ejaculated Buck Boontown. "Maybe Gray Spider take yo' into his inner circle."
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