ecution of his plan; its entire
success depended on how substantial that wall would prove to be.

A brief examination by the means of touch alone told him the hut was
constructed by first forming a cage-like skeleton of fairly thick but
pliable boughs, then interlacing the openings with grass. The horizontal
"beams" were roughly three feet apart; the roof, as Tharn had earlier
been careful to gauge, was something like fifteen feet above the floor
at its highest point.

Tharn's original plan had been to force an opening in one of these walls
large enough for Trakor and him to wriggle through into the open air.
But his ears and nose told him that this hut was practically ringed with
patrolling sentries, several of which were perched among branches
directly above the hut itself. The minute he and Trakor appeared outside
they would be buried under an avalanche of spider-men.

But there was another way--a way daring and imaginative and infinitely
dangerous. But in its daring lay the very chances for its success--while
danger was so common a phenomenon in jungle life as to rouse little more
than indifference among its dwellers.

Using the relatively sturdy skeletal branches foot--and hand--holds
Tharn began to climb up that rounded wall. After some eight feet of this
the inner side of the conical roof began and the cave lord was hard
pressed to cling to the inward sloping surface.

But his steel thews served their purpose, and a moment or two later he
had gained the single heavy section of branch at the very point of the
roof. Here the thick grass rope which held the entire hut in the air
entered from above, its ends tied securely about the cross piece on
which Tharn was now perched.

From a hidden pouch in the folds of his loin cloth Tharn took a bit of
keen-edged flint: the primitive razor with which he painstakingly
scraped each second day his sprouting beard. With this he began to saw
through the taut rope holding the hut aloft!

Gradually the straining rope began to part. Once it gave, the entire
structure, weighted by its five occupants, would plummet toward the
ground nearly a hundred feet below. There were enough intervening
branches to break the fall sufficiently to keep them from being dashed
to instant death; but for those three sleeping spider-men it would be a
mad, whirling journey that, once it ended, would daze them long enough
for Tharn and Trakor to break for freedom.

Three strands remained, then tw