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The cruiser Vanator careened through the teround, or twisted by the force of the elee, was due entirely to the caprice of Nature For all the duration of the storm she rode, a helpless derelict, upon those storers and vicissitudes they underwent, she and her crew ht have borne char of the hurricane It was then that the catastrophe occurred-a catastrophe indeed to the crew of the Vanator and the kingdom of Gathol
TheHelium, and they had been hurled about and buffeted in their lashings until all orn to exhaustion There was a brief lull in the stor which one of the crew attes which had held him to the precarious safety of the deck The act in itself was a direct violation of orders and, in the eyes of the othersuddenness, took the form of a swift and terrible retribution Scarce had the man released the safety snaps ere a swift ar it over and over, with the result that the foolhardy warrior went overboard at the first turn
Unloosed fro of the ship and the force of the wind, the boarding and landing tackle had been trailing beneath the keel, a tangled e and leather Upon the occasions that the Vanator rolled cos would be wrapped around her until another revolution in the opposite direction, or the wind itself, carried the in the stor ship
Into this fell the body of the warrior, and as a drowning led cordage that caught hith of desperation he clung to the cordage, seeking frantically to entangle his legs and body in it With each jerk of the ship his hand holds were all but torn loose, and though he knew that eventually they would be and that he ht with the madness that is born of hopelessness for the pitiful second which but prolonged his agony
It was upon this sight then that Gahan of Gathol looked, over the edge of the careening deck of the Vanator, as he sought to learn the fate of his warrior Lashed to the gunwale close at hand a single landing leather that had not fouled the tangled mass beneath whipped free fro at its outer end The Jed of Gathol grasped the situation in a single glance Below him one of his people looked into the eyes of Death To the jed's hand lay the means for succor