In the gaunt desolation of those dark Kentucky hills, the Dixie Limited, crack flyer, stood gutted of all living passengers... The Spider, the only survivor, stood alone at that bleak scene, vowing silently, solemnly, to destroy the ambition-mad arch-criminal who had plotted this wholesale ruin. For this, and manifold like disasters, were occurring everywhere in the land — at the direction, Richard Wentworth knew, of some diabolical brain which was unleashing hordes of primitive barbarians to lay waste civilization. But later, at the very moment when the Spider should have struck his most telling blow, he was pacing a narrow cell in the death-house at Sing Sing!