Charles Beadle

“ They’ll never get that out of their nuts. They have that antlike efficiency and persistence—just like these darned spiders. As soon as you smash their web they start right in spinning another; and their souls are like the spiders’—no call of humanity, no pity for others or themselves will move ’em.”
“Yes, I guess that’s right,” assented Tony, thinking of the von Muhlhauser’s cold indifference to his own fate or his men’s.
“Sure I’m right,” said Vansittart with a touch of heat in his voice. “Well, let me get back to the beginning as far as we’ve been able to dope it out from the Herr Doktor. ”

“ On the monkeys, the blacks, some of his own people as well as several strangers, Belgian Service people and a Portuguese explorer who had had the ill luck to blunder, as we did, into his web. He admits—remark the delicacy!—that he hasn’t quite succeeded yet—as those who don’t die go mad. ”

“ He’d got a pull wit’ a feller called Jack Gunner; had some split game wit’ him ter get ol’ Silas Gunner’s dough. Dunno ’zackly how Bodiker got his hold on Jack Gunner. Card game and a woman, I heard, which would ha’ put him in bad wit’ the old man. ”

“ Allus scared ter death.
“If I git a dirty job ter do I likes ter get it over,” stated Sawyer naively. “But him! He was scared stiff of that—of Plessons there. Don’t yer remember how he kicked when yer wanted ter take Plessons on? Didn’t want no witnesses. Then he reckons it ’ud be safer and got sore wit’ me ’cause I butted in before the bell rang? But ye’re a regular feller, Mr. Westlake ”

“ At last he shambled off, saying he was going to bed and would see us in the morning.
“Nobody else in the joint except a couple of drunken stokers from a British boat, and out of curiosity we started pumping the proprietor. He said the fellow was all right, and after a bit of stalling showed us a raw diamond he’d bought from the man for about a hundred dollars. Peach of a little stone worth a couple of thousand at least. Kind of made our mouths water. Funny,” he broke off the narrative. “I’m pretty well fixed, yet I got all worked up over that. It isn’t the cash ”

“ They had the luck of the ——, or Odin maybe; he is said to provide specially for his chosen; for at the time locusts hit the valley, and apparently the spiders were so gorged that they were sluggish. Anyway they marched down in a formation expressly designed by the Herr Professor—mark this!—himself—you bet!—with the Kommandant and officers in the center, about them the white soldiers, protected again by a double rank of blacks; for Herr Professor had a hunch that maybe the spiders were poisonous. Well, they got through with a few dozen blacks bitten up and a few whites ”

“ They’re efficient all right. First thing Herr Doktor starts after an anti-toxin to counteract the spiders’ poison and gets it. That by the way is how that Flaxman fellow got away. He was a medical orderly, stole a phial of the anti-toxin and hopped with a parcel of stones. ”