eling men ahead. The look of the country, what they could see of
it in the darkness, was unchanged. The trail seemed bending steadily to
the right, and after a time they came to the bank of a river which the
trail followed. It was a broad stream, perhaps a quarter of a mile across,
with a considerable current sweeping down to the sea.

They kept to the trail along the river bank for nearly another hour. Then
Anina abruptly halted, pulling Mercer partly behind a tree trunk.

"Another fire," she whispered. "They stop again."

They could see the glow of the fire, close by the river bank among the
trees. Very cautiously they approached and soon made out the vague
outlines of a boat moored to the bank. It seemed similar to the one in
which they had come down the bayous from the Great City, only slightly
larger.

"Other men," whispered Anina. "From Lone City."

Mercer's heart sank. A party from the Lone City--more of Tao's men to join
those he had set free! All his fine plans were swept away. The men would
all go up to the Lone City now in the boat, of course. There was nothing
he could do to stop them. And now Tao would learn of the failure of his
plans.

Mercer's first idea was to give up and return to the shore of the sea; but
Anina kept on going cautiously forward, and he followed her.

The fire, they could see as they got closer, was built a little back from
the water, with a slight rise of ground between it and the boat. There
were some thirty men gathered around; they seemed to be cooking.

"You stand here, Ollie," Anina whispered. "I go hear what they say. Stand
very quiet and wait. I come back."

Mercer sat down with his back against a tree and waited. Anina disappeared
almost immediately. He heard no sound of her flight, but a moment later he
thought he saw her dropping down through the trees just outside the circle
of light from the fire. From where he was sitting he could see the boat
also; he thought he made out the figure of a man sitting in it, on guard.
The situation, as Mercer understood it from what Anina told him when she
returned, seemed immeasurably worse even than he had anticipated.

Tao had been making the Water City the basis of his insidious propaganda,
rather than the Great City, as we had supposed. He had been in constant
communication by boat with his men in the Water City; and now affairs
there were ripe for more drastic operations.

This boat Mercer had come upon was intended to be Ta