"It was all over in a moment. That sinister patch of purple light had gone directly over the head and shoulders of the Spider. There was not a cry, not even a murmur. The Spider was gone!"
CHAPTER 1.
THE FLYING DEVIL OF
BLENNERHOF.
IT WAS a lane of dead grass perhaps ten feet wide—a straight, even strip of sere yellow extending for nearly half a mile across the green hillside. Up near the crest of the slope it terminated as abruptly and as evenly as it had begun down in the valley. Had it not been a lonesome spot in an obscure Austrian countryside one might have believed that some huge carpet had lain out there in the sun until the grass beneath it had perished.
Half-way down the dope a dead cow lay athwart the yellow lane, and around the carcass a group of four men were gathered. Only one of them, he who talked and gesticulated so excitedly, was dressed in the native costume of the countryside. The other three, a rather motley trio of physiques and faces, might have passed for tourists, and yet this was a territory remote from the beaten paths of travel. In other ways—in cut of clothes, in speech, in faces half concealed by low-pulled cloth caps, they did not seem to fit in with the general scene either as interested strangers or cursory wayfarers. One
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