SPIDER City of Flaming Shadows

No sound? That was the answer for which Wentworth had hoped. He was pursued. Detecting that trailing car, he had spurted on past his goal, doubled back. But the car had persisted, and there was work to do. He had no more time for dodging through country roads. If they found him now, they would find the Spider.

And crooks who overtook the Spider often lived-briefly-to regret it!

Wentworth's lips were smiling thinly as he slipped from the car, a hand brushing the twin guns that nestled in the pockets of his black leather jacket. The shadows reached out and absorbed him.

A half mile away a cottage gleamed white in a small clearing. A single yellow light peeped through the denuded shrubbery that clattered hard switches against its side.

The gleam of the house was not paint. Once it had been bravely white. Now it was lopsided and loose shingles slapped in the wind. Its sides were polished by wind and rain.

A shadow detached itself from the encircling woods, drifted to a shrub where the darkness was thickest. The man's hands went to his face, and a black silk mask slipped into place.

The Spider crept toward the lonely cottage.

Months had passed since last he had donned that mask to battle with the Black Death, months in which it had seemed to him and to Nita van Sloan that at last their dreams were to be realized; that the Spider's single-handed battle against crime had wiped out the master minds of the underworld, had left only petty criminals with whom the police could cope. It had seemed that at long last he and Nita could consummate the love that had been forced to wait upon Wentworth's crusades of justice.

Now, once more, the tocsin had sounded.

Not in New York itself, but in Hamlettown, far upstate. Wentworth had read in the newspapers of the crime there and his face had grown grim. For in those few lines of type describing the looting of a small, but very rich bank, Wentworth had seen a menace that threatened to strip the nation of its wealth, to impoverish millions and send the nation plunging back into the depths of depression from which it had just begun to climb!

The robber gang had a system that even the Spider would be at a loss to combat. Working with uncanny knowledge and precision, the criminals had isolated all Hamlettown, had severed all connection with the world. Telephones had been useless, alarm systems disconnected and, adding to the mad confusion, even the lights had been dimmed throughout the city.

The looting of the bank itself had been simple. The guard had been murdered, as had two police, who finally stumbled on the crime, and Joseph Ringer, the president of the bank. Working with a flaming electrical torch of incredible heat, which apparently had been hooked into the city's electrical system by a powerful transformer, the gang then had burned through steel doors and vaults as if they were so much butter.

The treasury of the United States itself could not resist such an attack!

No wonder the Spider, stern defender of humanity and nemesis of the underworld, had dropped everything to race to Hamlettown and take up the trail, a trail that led him now to this lone cottage.

Wentworth made a slow, careful circuit of the house, but found no lurking guard. Touching his guns, he stole forward. In his body was no crouching stealth, no furtiveness; directly he moved, with swift strides, yet without a sound.

At the lighted window he paused an instant, listening, heard a man's slow, heavy feet pacing, pacing. Then he crossed to the door, and his hand slid to a compact kit of chrome steel tools beneath his arm. From it he drew a lock pick, a slender long flat rod with a hooked end. A moment he manipulated it in the keyhole; there was a soft rasp and the door yielded beneath his hand.