Johnny thought the fellow would do that—for the dishonest purpose of seizing the money and keeping it himself. Johnny had purposefully named the sum as amounting to nearly twenty thousand dollars. Even the Gray Spider would hardly pass up as juicy a steal as that.
The masked man now departed.
Evading the attention of Buck Boontown and the other inhabitants of the scrawny settlement, Johnny trailed the masked man. He could hear the fellow crashing along ahead, but did not catch sight of him.
Johnny soon turned to the left. He found his hidden plane in the morass. Pawing the draping moss aside, he entered the cabin. In a minute, he was in radio-telephone communication with Doc Savage.
'I sent this guy to that room where you put on my makeup,' he told Doc, after explaining the situation. 'You can grab him there.'
'Do you think he is the Gray Spider?' Doc's voice came back clear as a fine bell. They spoke in the language of ancient Maya, of course.
'I cannot tell for sure,' Johnny replied. 'My guess would be that he is.'
'I'll hold a reception for him,' Doc said grimly. 'Good work, Johnny! Go back and continue as you were.'
'O.K.,' said Johnny. He clicked off the radio-telephone apparatus and left the plane.
Climbing a near-by tree, he glanced about over the steaming, festering swamp. It seemed to extend to the horizon in all directions.
For an instant, Johnny caught sight of the masked man—discovered that the fellow had now removed his mask. He was too far away for Johnny to discern details about his face.
The fellow flushed up a cloud of blackbirds, then trudged out of sight in the morass.
Johnny slid back down his tree and moved toward Buck Boontown's settlement. His work for Doc Savage here in the voodoo swamps was progressing nicely.
Chapter XI. THE WELL-KNOWN EGG
THE man who had worn the mask, swore at the cloud of blackbirds Johnny had seen him flush up. His profanity had a happy note. He seemed highly satisfied with the world.
'That voodoo man is a dumb one!' he chuckled. 'Thinks I will bring him his money! Nearly twenty thousand bucks! Imagine that!'
He shied a clod at the little lizards racing up a palmetto.
'That money goes in my own pocket and stays there!' he declared aloud. 'It's so much gravy!'
In the course of a couple of hours, he reached a bayou where lay a small motor boat. This sped him a number of miles, finally depositing him near a highway. A powerful coupй raced him into New Orleans.
'Now to get the money!' he grinned.
The fellow had certainly swallowed Johnny's bait, hook, line, and sinker.
It was late afternoon. Canal Street seethed with office workers going home. Newspaper delivery boys dashed along the residential streets, flinging folded papers onto porches. A pop-corn man was doing a big business with school children.
The man who had worn the mask, parked his car near the address Johnny had given him. He got out. Carefully, he surveyed the scene.
A man was digging a ditch in front of the house. There was no one else in sight.
The man who had worn the mask, swung up the walk to the house.
As he passed the ditch, the man in it knocked the dirt off his shovel by banging it loudly on the cement walk.
The visitor noticed this, but thought nothing peculiar about it. He strode across the porch and rang the bell.
A thin, piping voice—it sounded like the tone of an old man on his last legs—invited, 'Come in!'
'Fine!' thought the man. 'If there's nobody here but an old duffer, it will be simpler in case it comes to rough stuff.'
He opened the door. He didn't even trouble to have his hand in his pocket with his revolver. He stepped in boldly.
His jaw fell. His hands whipped spasmodically for the weapon in his pocket. They never reached it. Bronze lacquered talons of tempered steel seized them.
A moment later, the lightning seemed to strike his jaw. He went suddenly to sleep.
The fellow's slack form lifted and came to rest under Doc Savage's mighty bronze arm.
Doc strode outside. It was he who had imitated the piping tones of an old man and invited his victim indoors.
The man was climbing out of his ditch. He scratched about in the soft dirt he had dug up and produced a black, innocent-looking cane that was in reality a sword cane.
It was Ham.
Ham stared at Doc's limp burden.
'For the love of mud!' he exclaimed. 'Is
'The scheme did sort of lay the well-known egg,' Doc admitted wryly.
Ham twirled his sword cane and scowled at the face of the captive.
The man was Lefty—the survivor of the crooked lumber-detective pair.
'IT wasn't Johnny's fault we didn't get the Gray Spider,' Doc explained as they rode downtown. 'He had never seen Lefty. And, anyway, the man was wearing a mask when he talked to Johnny.'
'Any chance of this endangering Johnny?' Ham pondered.
'Probably not,' Doc replied. 'This man undoubtedly came to get that money and keep it for himself, hence he would not report its existence to the Gray Spider. So the master mind has no way of knowing Johnny sent him into a trap.'
They added Lefty to the ever-growing collection of sleepers waiting transportation to the up-state New York criminal-curing institution.
'We'll pay Long Tom a visit,' Doc decided.
They found the pale blond electrical wizard in a long, narrow room in an office building off Canal Street. Hugging each wall of this room was a row of small tables.
Competent-looking young women sat at the tables. They wore telephone headsets. Their fingers grasped pointed pencils. Stenographic notebooks lay before them, open and ready.
At one end of the room stood a radio telephone transmitter and receiver.
Each young lady was a highly skilled stenographer. They were making records of every word of conversation to go over the phone lines of the leading lumber companies of the South.
Long Tom had done a miraculous piece of work, considering the short time he had been at it.
'Got anything?' Doc inquired.
'Only one thing of real importance,' Long Tom replied. 'That is the tip that an important conversation should take place soon between one of the Gray Spider's chief lieutenants and the Gray Spider subordinate who has taken control of Worldwide Sawmills.'
'Any idea what the talk will be about?'
'Nope. All I know is that the man at Worldwide Sawmills has been tipped that one of the big boys will give him a ring soon.' Long Tom waved at a loud-speaker at the end of the room. 'I've arranged to cut the conversation into that loudspeaker when it comes in, so we can all listen.'
'Fine,' smiled Doc.
He said nothing more, but waited. Apparently he was entirely unaware of the panic of feminine hearts he was causing among the battery of stenographers.
