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 directed.
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.
A lone pistol popped its magazine empty in his direction. The marksman might have been shooting at one of the pale clouds ten thousand feet overhead, for all the result his bullets produced.
Doc dropped lightly into one of the dugouts.
THE bundle brought by the big bronze man was now opened. First, there came to light some concentrated foods. Next, Long Tom was handed a package of apparatus.
"What's this?" questioned the electrical wizard.
"All you need to make a supersensitive microphonic 'ear'," Doc explained. "Set it up in the center of our fortress. When night comes, the voodoo men will no doubt try to creep up close enough to hurl bombs into our dugouts. But with your apparatus, you can hear them."
Long Tom nodded, then fell to examining his apparatus. He became elated. With this stuff, he could make a microphonic listening and amplifying device that would pick up the buzz of a fly at the distance of half a mile. Scant chance would skulkers stand of creeping upon them now.
Doc Savage busied himself with poor, half-witted Sill Boontown. A kit which he had brought from the plane proved to be a compact set of surgical instruments. It even included hypodermic needles for administering a form of local anaesthetic, a pain-deadener which affected only the part being worked upon.
"He's gonna operate on the kid!" Monk grunted.
"Two bits says the kid is normal as you or me when Doc finishes!" Ham offered.
"You would want to bet on a sure thing!" Monk snorted.
Both Ham and Monk were fully aware of Doc's magical skill in surgery. For it was at this, above all else, that the mighty bronze man excelled.
Surgery had been Doc's first training in life. It had been his most intensive. Although his ability at other lines of endeavor might seem uncanny, his accomplishments with surgery and medicine were far more marvelous.
It was an interested group that watched the delicate operation. Sinewy bronze fingers, steady as steel on a foundation of bedrock, laid back the scalp. A small aperture was opened in the skull.
As Doc had expected, a fragment of bone was pressing upon the brain, paralyzing certain of its functions. The blow on the head two years before had caused the trouble.
The bone fragment was removed. Swiftly, Doc completed the delicate operation. With catgut, which would dissolve of itself about the time the wound was healed, he stitched the scalp in place.
The effects of the anaesthetic wore off.
"How do you feel, sonny?" Doc inquired.
"I got one whopper of de headache!" replied the boy.
His tone showed that he was perfectly sane!
It was magic! Monk, Ham, Renny, Long Tom, Johnny—they all exchanged strange glances. Accustomed as they were to the marvelous things Doc Savage did, and knowing that such a brain operation was not unique in surgery, they were nevertheless awed.
Lost from the outside world, beseiged here in the steaming, festering swamp, volleys of machine-gun slugs storming over them every minute or so, the feat could not but impress them as uncanny.
They scattered to their gun emplacements, wriggling through the shallow trenches they had dug.
Time now dragged. Long Tom finished his microphonic listening device. It was something like the apparatus used by the defenders of London during the Great War to listen for Zeppelins and planes—although far more perfected.
It was well after noon when Doc Savage caught sight of Buck Boontown. The man was directing the seige.
Doc signaled Buck Boontown. It was his intention to inform the swamp man that his son would join him shortly. There was no longer necessity for keeping Sill Boontown here. The lad would not bungle into danger, now that his mental powers were normal. And even had the boy wanted to assist the beseiged man, Doc would not have permitted the lad to oppose his father.
Buck Boontown was suspicious. He thought Doc's wig-wagging was a trick. So he blazed away with a machine gun. His accurate fire caused Doc to duck swiftly.
BUCK BOONTOWN chortled gleefully at the results of his rapid-fire blast.
"Bien!
Me—I almo' got heem that time!"
He watched the molelike mounds and tiny ridges of dirt the defenders of the hill had thrown up. His blasphemous pleadings to his hideous voodoo deity for another shot went unanswered.
Soon one of the other swamp men wriggled up with a message.
"Gray Spider ees want yo'!" he told Buck Boontown. "He's send message. Yo' ees to go to Castle of the Moccasin!"
"Oui!"
smirked Buck Boontown. "Me—I go plantee queeck."
The swamp man was flattered. Although by far the most intelligent of the debased clan of humans who had resided in this great morass so many generations they had reverted to a state of near savagery, Buck Boontown was, nevertheless, far from a smart man.
He fawned like a big dog under the attentions of the Gray Spider. Sacrй!Now there was a man for you! Or so Buck Boontown thought. The money that the Gray Spider paid his swamp men minions was not a minor inducement, either. A city gunman would have sneered at the smallness of the sums, but to these swamp dwellers, each pittance was a little fortune.
As he plowed through the tangled morass, Buck Boontown treated himself to flights of imagination. He was saving his money. Already he had quite a sum hidden in a fruit jar in the swamp. He would hoard more. He might even get enough to go to the great and marvelous city of New Orleans and spend the rest of his days. He had heard of the wonders of that metropolis, but had never been there. Indeed, he had never been out of this great swamp in his lifetime.
And the swamp was but a few hours' drive by speedy car from New Orleans!
Mile after mile, Buck Boontown covered. He kept a straight course, weaving aside only for pools and slime which he could not leap.