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All at once he spoke

"Up to the village with it!" he co his pistol-hand toward the causeway and the fortified gates "I can't risk leaving it here Coht now!"

Then Ka the sense if not the words of the coure of a ht the dilated pupils of his pinkish eyes see out soible to Stern, he blocked the way Stern heard the name "Kaineer, a huge and sudden anger seizing him Already super-excited by the labors of the day and by the nervous strain of having recovered the sunken biplane, all this talk of Kamrou, all this persistent opposition just at the most inauspicious moment worked powerfully upon his irritated nerves

Cool reason would have dictated diplomacy, parley, and, if possible, truce But Stern could not believe the Folk, for so long apparently loyal to hiainst their vital interest and his own by deserting hi nothing of the patriarch's entreaties or of the girl's reht his arm and tried to hold him back, he faced this cooly insolent barbarian

"You, da on the trigger of the auto to quit for you, or Kamrou, or anybody? Quit, now?"

"Think a civilized whiteto knuckle under to any savage that happens to blow in and try to boss this job? If so, you've got another guess coet cold lead in just one er and back again The patriarch cried again to him, and for a moment Stern saw the barbarian's eyes flicker uneasily toward the revolver But the cale take one step backward

"All right, then!" shouted Stern, "seeing red" in his overpowering rage "You want it--you'll get it--take it, so!"

Up he jerked the autoet by the torch-light, not ten feet distant; a sure shot

But before he could pull trigger the strange two-pronged torch was tossed on high by solooly