Adventure Magazine Cover — page 136: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE. os rim OFriel z Author ot “The Snake,” and “The Sloth.” ~ WOULD not attack that spider again, senhor, if I were you. You have seen for yourself that you can not hit him. gua No matter how quickly you strike, he is inches away when the blow falls. - Those huge, bird-killing spiders all are incredibly swift. I have heard that not even a bullet is fast enough to kill one— that at the flash of the gun he jumps so quickly that the whole seven inches of him is out of danger when the shot strikes. Whether that be true or not, I know you will never hit him with your fist; you will only tire yourself out. Besides, he may grow angry and attack you in return. His fangs are half an inch long, senhor, and he is full of poison. It is not wise to risk his springing at yqu. » This is an odd place to find such a mon- ster—here in the middle of the broad “Amazon, on a steamer outward bound toward the Atlantic. Yet strange creatures sometimes come aboard these river-boats while they are tied up at the bank. Some -of them are harmless, and some are deadly. ‘And not all of the deadly things are found on the outgoing steamers, nor are they ~all bred here in the jungle. Sometimes they come up the river from the outside and are the more deadly because they are human. The memory of one of them came into my mind just now while I watched that great spider leaping aside from your blows. He, too, was called the “Spider,” that man, though his name was Schwartz. What is that? You say that schwarz means “black”? ‘That is very droll, senhor, for the Spider was black. Black of hair, 122 ‘ Gomichbooks.c¢o black of beard, black of eye he was—yes, and black of heart, too, though at first we did not know that. We called him Spider because he looked like one. His little eyes were set close together with a sort of spidery look in them. His body was small and bunchy, while his arms were long and thin and covered with black hair. His legs were short and crooked. Yet he could run amazingly fast on those little legs; that made him seen all the more like a spider. And later he made himself a spider’s lair— and came to a spider’s end. An up-river boat brought him to us one day, and with him a small brown bag and a rifle. He had no letters to Coronel Nunes, owner of the great rubber estate where I worked, nor anything else to show who he was or whence he had come. The coronel, however, received him with the courtesy he shows to all who come to him; and when this man told him he had had another bag, containing letters of intro- duction and other things of value, but that it had been stolen from him on the boat, the coronel believed him—or at any rate seemed to, for theft is a thing that may happen to any man in almost any place. Schwartz boldly.made himself at home there at the headquarters and _ talked vaguely about looking over the country for the people he said he represented. He went out in the jungle with us men and saw all he could see. Always he carried two weapons—the rifle, and a pistol. It may be a foolish fancy, senhores, but I have sometimes thought that a man may be judged by his weapons, and not only the man himself, but the country im