At the Danielsen & Haas building, Doc and his men left their taxi waiting.
In the lobby, they encountered pretty Edna Danielsen. She was alone. She looked worried.
Doc said seriously. "It is dangerous for you to be chasing around alone without—"
"Wait!" she interrupted. "I am afraid something terrible has happened!"
"What do you mean?" Doc questioned sharply.
"Horace Haas has disappeared!" Edna Danielsen explained. "And poor old Silas Bunnywell is also gone! Worse still, I made a horrible discovery in Silas Bunnywell's little office!"
"What sort of discovery?"
"Come! I'll show you."
An elevator rushed them up to the top floor. Edna Danielsen led the way to old Silas Bunnywell’s cubby-hole.
"Look!" she gasped, and pointed.
* * *
SILAS BUNNEYWELL’S accounting table was overturned. So was a wastebasket. Red and black had spilled together in a lurid puddle. There had been a fierce struggle in the little cubicle.
To one side lay an inkwell. It was a heavy fistful of glass. Red ink from it was splashed high on the walls.
"Obviously somebody was clubbed over the head with this," Doc murmured. He picked up the inkwell. His golden eyes appraised it.
Several dark hairs clung to the bottom.
"Poor old Silas Bunnywell!" choked Edna Danielson.
"Not Silas Bunnywell," Doc corrected thoughtfully. "Hehad almost snow-white hair. These hairs are dark. Unless I'm mistaken, they came from the head of Horace Haas. You're sure Silas Bunnywell and Horace Haas are both missing?"
"Absolutely!" declared the attractive young woman. "Dad and I have looked everywhere for them."
"Where is your father?"
"In his office."
They retired to Big Eric Danielsen's office. Big Eric was treading circles on the worn carpet. The office was fogged with smoke from the cigar he was puffing.
"Where in the devil do you reckon Horace Haas and Silas Bunnywell have disappeared to?" he demanded.
"Frankly, I'm puzzled," Doc admitted.
Big Eric shivered. It did not add to his cheerfulness to hear this mighty bronze man admit he was puzzled, even though the bafflement might be only temporary.
"What are you going to do now?" he questioned.
"Unfortunately, we only have time for one bold stroke," Doc replied. "One of the men the Gray Spider has installed as a looter at the head of Worldwide Sawmills is to meet his master tonight at Buck Boontown's swamp settlement. He is to deliver a quarter of a million dollars of their loot to the Gray Spider in person. Ham, Long Tom, and myself have barely time to get there. We'll rush out there and try to grab the Gray Spider."
"I'd like to help you!" Big Eric declared.
"Nothing doing!" refused Doc. "You will stay here in New Orleans and guard the life of your daughter. We will escort you home immediately. We will also leave machine guns and hand grenades, so you can defend yourself against any attack by the Gray Spider's men."
They left this office. Almost running, they made for the elevators. The cage ferried them down.
Perhaps forty seconds after the elevator door clanked shut, one corner of the carpet in Big Eric's office lifted slowly. It flipped back. This disclosed that a section of the floor had been cunningly contrived into a trapdoor. Below it was a coffinlike cavity a few inches deep.
A man had been occupying this—listening!
* * *
THE eavesdropper stood up from his coffinlike skulking place. He wore a gaudily colored silk mask—much like a gay silk handkerchief.
The fellow looked somewhat ludicrous, for he wore a woolly overcoat. And the summer evening was rather hot! From his standpoint, there was cunning in the wearing of the coat. It had no exposed buttons which might have scraped on the sides of his hiding place and betrayed him! He had even pulled big wool socks over his toes so there would be no squeal of leather against wood.
This sinister person scooped up the telephone. He asked for a number and got it. He listened intently and recognized the voice which spoke to him.
"This is the Gray Spider!" he said in hoarse, fierce tones. "Assemble the most trusted men of the Clan of the Moccasin!"
"It will be done," replied an awed whisper.
"Tonight we wipe out the bronze devil! He cannot evade us!"
With an ugly, guttering laugh, the Gray Spider hung up. He glided into the corridor. He had not removed his silk mask, nor his foolish overcoat, nor the big wool socks from over his shoes.
He found a Window in the front of the building. Craning his neck, he managed to see down to the street. He made a snarling noise at what he saw.
Doc Savage was installing Big Eric, Edna, Ham, and Long Tom in the taxi.
Doc himself rode the running board, as was his custom. The cab rolled away from the curb.
Doc's golden eyes roved everywhere, missing nothing. They scrutinized the windows of the Danielsen & Haas building casually.
There was now no masked face at a top-floor window, however.
Big Eric and Edna were left at the Danielsen mansion. Doc handed over a pair of his wonderfully compact, extremely rapid-firing machine guns—the weapons of his own invention. He also produced gas masks and violent little hand grenades.
He made a quick, thorough search of the elaborate dwelling. Finishing, he was certain none of the Gray Spider's men were concealed about.
"Have you floodlights that will illuminate the grounds?" he questioned Big Eric.
"I sure have."
"Keep them on all night. One of you be on guard every minute. We will try to be back by morning. But it is impossible to guarantee that."
"We'll be all right," Big Eric declared.
"And you must be careful!" ravishing Edna Danielsen told Doc in a strange, tight voice, the significance of which was quite lost on him.
Ham and Long Tom exchanged knowing looks when they were outside.
"The queen has tumbled for Doc!" Ham grinned.
"And don't they all?" chuckled Long Tom.
* * *
THEIR next move was a quick return to Long Tom's "central," which he had established for all his tapped phone lines. There, Doc made an effort to get in touch with Johnny. But his rapid radio calling elicited no answer from the plane in the swamp.
"No way we can let Johnny know we're coming," Doc decided. "We'll leave the radio apparatus turned on, and if he calls, one of the stenographers can slip him the news."
Once more they entered a car. But it was Doc's roadster this time, instead of the taxi. The rumble seat and the baggage compartments already held such equipment as Doc thought they would need for just such a jaunt as this.
Doc wheeled the car into traffic. One of his bronze fingers clicked a newly installed switch. Under the hood, a police siren began to wail. The speedometer climbed past forty, fifty and sixty with ten-mile-an-hour jumps.
Ham and Long Tom sat tight and held their hat to keep them from being blown off by the terrific rush of air. Doc wore no hat. No goggles protected his golden eyes. The windshield was down. Yet the roaring wind seemed to have absolutely no effect on his bronze immaculateness.
"Hadn't we better pick up a boat somewhere?" Ham inquired.
"We’ve got it," Doc replied.
"Huh?"
"In the rumble seat—a collapsible silk boat you can almost put in your coat pocket. Also, there's an outboard motor that hardly weighs more than a portable typewriter. Other things, too!"
Ham pinched his eyes shut against the slapping, tearing wind. The uncanny way his big bronze leader had of preparing for every emergency was a continuous source of wonder to Ham. He, carrying in his head the keenest thinking machine of the adventurous group, excepting only Doc, could pick out many possible emergencies that could arise. But mighty Doc Savage saw ahead to dangers of which Ham did not dream, and seemed always to have a defense against them.
The miles streaked under the panting roadster. Darkness had f
allen. The moon was out, brilliant.
Into the swamps dived the road. Great cypress towered like clouds of green over the thoroughfare. On higher ground, yellow pines stood slender and tall like arrayed sentinels.
"Great lumber country," Ham offered, to break the silence.
"Second only to the State of Washington in the value of lumber produced," Doc replied.
Long Tom chuckled. "And I sort of had the idea sugar cane and cotton was all they grew down here!"
The smokestack of a sawmill spouted sparks on their left. Steam labored. A head saw bit into a log with a sound like silk cloth being torn. The mill was ablaze with lights. More electric bulbs hung out on a cableway system used to lift logs out of the storage yard and drop them on the log dogs in the bull chain that fed the sawing carriages.
Doc's roadster whipped on and the night-working sawmill was left behind. The road seemed to sink. It became a tortuous groove in a spongy mat of steaming, ominous swamp. The moonlight did not reach it often.
The headlights danced like fat white chalk sticks juggled on the snout of the roadster.
"Is this the only road into Buck Boontown's part of the Morass?" Ham asked.
"It is," Doc assured him.
* * *
THE monotony of their swamp trip was soon shattered. The road lifted suddenly. It narrowed until there was room for only one car. The road was crossing a deep bayou on a high levee.
To either side, moonbeams shimmered up from the listless surface of the bayou. Higher and higher, the car swept. It was half across the grade.
At this point, Doc's uncanny keenness of eye was demonstrated. The others saw nothing portentous of danger. No obstruction barred the way.
But Doc's golden eyes noted a disquieting object. A small stick, smaller even than a lead pencil, projected upward from the road middle. It had been set there recently. The disturbed condition of the road showed that.
Doc trod the brake. The suspicious stick was only a few yards away. The roadster was doing sixty. It skewered. It careened from side to side, skidding. All four tires, frozen immobile by the brakes, squealed like hungry pigs.
The stick came nearer. Doc saw the roadster wasn't going to stop in time. The road was too narrow to steer to either side.
Suddenly several men ran into view at the end of the levee. They were wizened. They looked like big, hairless, bob-tailed monkeys.
Harnessed to his middle, every man had an aircraft-type machine gun.
Doc's bronze head flashed around. Behind them, more of the swamp men had appeared.
"A trap!" Ham rapped.
The exclamation was hardly off Ham's lips when a powerful bronze arm grasped him and flung him bodily out of the roadster. Ham's form cleared the levee! He sailed for the water.
Despite the suddenness of what had occurred, Ham still retained a clutch on his sword cane.
Even as he saw Ham clear the levee, Long Tom found he was also spinning through space. Turning over in the air, he got a glimpse of Doc Savage's powerful frame cleaving down after him.
Both Ham and Long Tom felt as though they had been half jerked apart by the titanic sinews of the bronze giant. They were as dazed as though a stunning electric current had unexpectedly caroused through their bodies.
There had been no time for Doc to be gentle. He had hurled both his men clear of the levee and followed himself—all in an instant so fractional only a finely calibrated stopwatch could have caught it.
The roadster had not yet hit the upraised stick.
But now the car skewered into it. There was a terrific roar. A hideous tongue of flame leaped magically into being and tore the levee apart. The burst mangled the entire front off the roadster. It spouted smoke, sparks, dirt and rent fragments of the car.
Had the roadster been moving a little faster, it would have been completely annihilated. As it was, only the fore part met destruction.
* * *
Chapter XII. HUMAN SACRIFICE
HAM and Long Tom plunked into the water in one-two succession. They collided as they kicked in the depths. Together, they stroked to the top.
Doc's bronze head was not in evidence.
Dйbris from the dynamited levee still rained. The stuff ranged from steel splinters to clods as large as pork barrels. The rear half of the roadster dived beneath the surface with a loud gurgling.
Ham and Long Tom sank hastily to keep from being brained by dropping wreckage. They realized now that the roadster, in hitting the raised stick had closed an electrical contact which released the blast.
Swimming under water, Ham and Long Tom reached the concealment of canes which grew along the levee edge.
"Where's Doc?" Ham groaned. "He should have come to the top before now!"
"Maybe—" Long Tom shivered and didn't finish. Maybe a flying missile, driven by the explosive, had pierced Doc's giant bronze form! It was possible!
Racing feet spatted the levee. Hoarse commands were gobbled in the jargon the swamp men spoke. A machine gun vomited a string of concussions.
Long Tom and Ham sank wildly as copronickel bullets scored the water about their heads. They arose deeper in the gloom beneath the canes.
Over where the blast had occurred, great bubbles were arising. They made gruesome glub-glubsounds. Air escaping from the submerged roadster caused them. One arose now that seemed large as a tub.
"Ugh!" shuddered Ham. "Why don't Doc come up?"
Long Tom gave a hoarse gasp. "Look! As if the devils above us weren't enough!"
Perhaps three score feet distant, two knots had projected from the bayou surface. They resembled a pair of black fists held close together.
"'Gator!" Ham muttered. "The infernal things feed at night, too!"
The eyes of the alligator sank.
"Yo' come on out!" rasped one of the swamp men from the levee.
Ham and Long Tom made no answer. They fingered their compact little machine guns.
Suddenly a storm of slugs from the aircraft type weapons above them poured downward. The rank canes were chewed and split as by the fangs of an invisible, wood-devouring monster.
Ham and Long Tom saw they were at a hopeless disadvantage. They held their fire, not wishing to start a fight to the finish.
"Yo' no be keeled if yo' come out!" called the swamp man. "Gray Spider ees want to talk to yo'!"
The speaker swore at the machine gunners, silencing them. Then he waited to see what Ham and Long Tom would do.
"Doc!" Ham croaked. "He hasn't shown up yet!"
"We've got to do somethin'!" Long Tom hissed. Desperate, he called up to the swamp men. "We will surrender if you'll let us dive a few times in search of our leader!"
The answer came promptly. "Go ahead an' dive!"
"You promise you won't shoot us?" Long Tom asked.
"Yo' won't be shot. Me—I geeve yo' de word of Buck Boontown on eet!"
The leader of their attackers was Buck Boontown!
Swiftly, Ham and Long Tom swam out and dived. They groped repeatedly in the depths, seeking the giant bronze form of Doc Savage. Horror closed swiftly upon their hearts as they found no trace of Doc. Only mud and foul water plants lay on the bayou bottom, perhaps a dozen feet down.
A loathsome gurgling of bubbles still came from the sunken roadster. It was as though the car were a living thing and life was slowly departing from it.
Long Tom and Ham searched around the machine several times. Their spirits, weighted like lead, they stroked listlessly to the surface.
"Maybe he swam away," Long Tom mumbled hopefully. "He can stay under water for many minutes."
"I hope so," Ham agreed.
But a horrible sight was soon to drive even this faint hope from them.
"Yo' climb up here!" commanded Buck Boontown harshly.
* * *
THERE was nothing else to do. Long Tom and Ham crawled up the steep side of the levee. The swamp men seized upon them. Their arms were taken. Many an admiring gasp went up at sight of the tiny, s
uperefficient machine guns. A monkey man appropriated Ham's sword cane.
"We should've fought it out!" Ham gritted.
"They'd have gotten us!" Long Tom assured him. "They must have at least twenty of those aircraft machine guns. And with that metal-reлnforced leather harness they wear, I'll bet they can hold the weapons on a target without trouble."
Now came the ghastly incident they were to witness. It was by far the most shocking thing their eyes had ever beheld. Seeing it turned their very blood to water and left them despondent and crushed.
"Sacrй
— look!" shouted a swamp man.
All eyes went to a point a few score of feet out on the bayou. At this spot, the water was boiling. A great, hideous form was threshing only a foot or so down. A tapering, ridged tail squirmed into view for an instant.
"Gator!" croaked Ham. "The infernal thing has got something!"
The jaws of the alligator abruptly appeared. Moonlight glistened on the repulsive, sand-colored teeth.
Affixed in the teeth was a mighty bronze human arm!
The 'gator seemed to be worrying the limp body to which the arm was attached.
It sank from sight, leaving nothing but a turmoil of water to show where it had been.
Ham shrieked like a madman. He clutched at one of the swamp men's machine guns. He was driven to madness by the awful thing he had just seen. He wanted the rapid firer to slay the alligator.
He didn't get the gun. A swamp man nearly shot him. Buck Boontown's angry roar was all that saved Ham's life.
Long Tom also put forth a short struggle. A machine gun barrel swept against his head and stunned him. When he revived, his wrists were lashed.
Ham was also bound.
"Walk!" commanded Buck Boontown.
The cavalcade moved down the road. Soon they turned into the swamp. A labyrinth of palmettos, swamp maples, tupelo gums, cane, vines and creepers and loathsome aлrial moss closed in upon them.
At times they sank to their waists in mire that had a sickening stench. They trod rotting logs over what appeared to be bottomless abysses of slime. Once they took entirely to an aлrial thoroughfare of branches and lianas for some hundreds of yards.
The devilish little swamp men showed an amazing agility at getting through what would have seemed an impenetrable barrier of vegetation. But at frequent intervals even they were almost baffled by the steaming, festering tangle of the swamp.
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