Adventure Magazine Cover — page 140: what you’re looking at

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

126 At first we believed that body to be dead, for it hung limp and there were two bullet- holes in it, but while we were cutting down branches to make a litter Senhor Affonso stirred and moaned. Pedro cried out joy- ously: “He lives! The senhor lives!’ Then he dropped, did Pedro, fainting from loss of blood, for he, too, had been shot by the Spider, and his wound was bad, near the shoulder. So now we had two men to carry home. As I learned later, this was what had happened: The Spider had told Senhor Affonso he had found a trap-door spider’s nest which was quite the most wonderful thing he had ever seen, and the senhor, greatly interested, went with him into a place where no men were working. There the Spider pointed to a hole at the base of a large tree, with thick spider-webbing across it, and said that was it. If the city gentleman had been better acquainted with spiders he would have known that no trap-door spider would ever make such a nest, but that it would be concealed so that it could not be seen at:all. But he went up to it, and then the man Schwartz said— “Look closely, Affonso, and see how a spider acts when he is cornered!” Then he shot him in the back. The only thing that saved the senhor was that, even as he bent to look, he sensed something treacherous in the Spider’s words and turned to see his face. The bullet struck him before he had turned half-way, but he had twisted so far that, instead of going into his heart, it went through him sidewise and came out under his right arm. The shock threw him for- ward and his head struck hard against the tree, knocking him senseless. The Spider, thinking him dead, swiftly robbed him of everything valuable—though he did not get so much as he probably ex- pected, for the senor had put most of his money in the coronel’s safe soon after his arrival. Then he dashed back to carry off the handsome Senhorita Flora, but on the way he met Pedro. Pedro, not wishing the pair to know he was there, had followed at some distance and, though he heard the shot, he did not see the shooting and could not be sure of what it meant. So, with his machete ready, _ Spider was gone. Adventure } he sought to stop the Spider and question him. Without a word the Spider shot him, too, firing twice. The first bullet knocked him down in the thick bush and the second missed. When he struggled up again the Since the first thing to do was to find Senhor Affonso, he went and found him. ita FOR some time it seemed that {yj both Pedro and the senhor would die. = But both were strong, and at last they recovered. While they lay there we hunted the Spider, but found nothing at all; he had disappeared as if he never had been there. It was during this time, too, that we learned what he meant by his double-tongued advice to Senhor Affonso to see what a cornered spider would do, for there came a boat, and with it two quiet, common-looking men who talked with the coronel and went out into the bush with our men. ‘They finally left without telling their business to any one except the coronel. When they had gone we learned with surprize that they were police. We also found that they sought the Spider, and that he was wanted in Para for murder, and.at Manaos for—worse than murder. So you see that though he could not know the law was so close behind him, he did know he could not go back down the river on the next boat. He had reached the last place where he could live among men, and now there was no place left for him but the jungle. My leg was well long before the senhor and Pedro were, and I went back to work. I heard, though, that Senhor Affonso vowed he would stay there until he had hunted down the man who had shot him and assailed the lady Flora, if it took the rest of his life. The senhorita was even more bitter against that man than Affonso himself— not so much because he had attacked her as because he had nearly killed her sweet- heart. That is the way of women. Yet | she pleaded with him not to seek the | Spider, as he might be killed in doing so. The coronel, too, pointed out that he was city-bred and not fitted for man-hunting in such terrible country as ours, that the Spider must have perished in the jungle, and that even the police had abandoned the idea of looking for him. Pedro, for whom the senor now had much affection, GEomichooks:Gco ml