. . . So, for many seconds. The grey magnetic haze was a dirty brown
now. The man was seeing through blood. He could not make a blow tell.
He could not see Carlin. . . . She was not talking to him. . . . She
was calling upon some strange name. . . . His arm was numbed
again--like a blow from a leaden sling. There was a suffocating knot
in his throat and the smell of blood in his head . . . that old smell
of blood he had known when his father whipped him long ago. . . .

He tried to chop straight down to break in upon the king's rhythm. It
answered quicker than his thought. . . . Yes, it was Malcolm M'Cord,
she was calling. . . . He saw her like a ghost now. She was utterly
tall--her arms raised! . . . Then he heard a rifle crack--then a
breath of moisture upon his face--the sealed bud smashed before
him--the rest whipping the ground.

Skag went to Carlin who had fallen, but he was pulled off abruptly.

"I say, Lad, let me have a look at you. . . . The child's right
enough. Let her rest--"

The grim face was before him, two steady hands at work on him, pulling
back his collar, taking one of Skag's hands after another--looking even
between the fingers, feeling his thighs.

"I can't find that he cut you, Lad," he said gently.

Skag pushed him away. Carlin was moaning.

"I'm thinking your lad's sound, deerie," M'Cord called to her. "A
minute more, to be sure." . . .

He kept a trailing hold of Skag's wrist, staring a last minute in his
eyes.

No break anywhere in the younger man's flesh.

The afterglow was thickening. A servant came down the path to call
them to dinner. The servant had never seen such a spectacle--the
Hakima sitting with Hand-of-a-God and Son-of-Power, together--on the
lawn already wet with dew--their knees almost touching. . . .

"The like's not been known before, Lad--even of a man with a sword,"
Malcolm M'Cord was saying. "You must have stood up to him two minutes.
No swordsman has done as much. . . . And it was only a _lakri_ you
had--and a swordsman's blade goes soft and flat against a cobra's
scales! . . . You see, they take wings when the fighting rage flows
into them. It's like wings, sir. . . . Yes, you'll have a lame arm
where the hood grazed. It couldn't have been the drive of the head or
he would have bitten through--"

Even Skag, as he glanced into Carlin's face from time to time, forgot
that Hand-of-a-God had done it again--one more king cobra wit