nces."

"It's hardly funny."

"No, I suppose not. I don't suppose it occurred to you to kill him on
the spot?"

"Kill a _noble_ in hot blood?"

"Sorry. Code of honor again. Forget I mentioned it."

Geoffrey rankled under The Barbarian's barely concealed amusement. To
avoid any more of this kind of thing, he pointedly turned and looked at
the terrain behind them--something he ought to have done a little
earlier. Three tankettes were in sight, only a few miles behind them,
laboring down the slope of a hill.

And at that moment, as though rivetted iron had a dramatic sense of its
own, their tankette coughed, spun lazily on one track as the crankshaft
paused with a cam squarely between positions, and burned up the last
drops of oil and alcohol in its fuel tank.

* * *

Geoffrey and Myka crouched down in a brushy hollow. The Barbarian had
crawled up to the lip of the depression, and was peering through a clump
of weeds at the oncoming trio. "That seems to be all of them," he said
with a turn of his head. "It's possible they kept their speed down and
nursed themselves along to save fuel. They might even have a fuel waggon
coming up behind them. That's the way I'd do it. It would mean these
three are all we can expect for a few hours, anyway, but that they'll be
heavily reinforced some time later."

"That will hardly matter," Geoffrey muttered. Myka had found Dugald's
personal rifle inside the tankette. Geoffrey was rolling cartridges
quickly and expertly, using torn up charges from the turret cannon. He
had made the choice between a round or two for the now immobile heavy
weapon and a plentiful supply for the rifle, and would have been greatly
surprised at anyone's choosing differently. The Barbarian had not even
questioned it, and Myka was skillfully casting bullets with the help of
the hissing alcohol stove and the bullet mold included in the rifle kit.
There was plenty of finely ground priming powder, and even though
Geoffrey was neither weighing the charges of cannon powder nor measuring
the diameter of the cartridges he was rolling, no young noble of any
pretensions whatsoever could not have done the same.

The rub lay in the fact that none of this was liable to do them much
good. If they were to flee through the woods, there would certainly be
time for only a shot or two when the tribesmen found them. If the rifle
was to be used against the three nobles, then it was necessary, in all
dece