anner was persuasive. One did one's best to satisfy a person who spoke
such Spanish and made such ominous gestures. One did as one was
commanded. One dared do no other.

As for the servants whom Alan rallied to his standard they were slaves
rather than servants. They recognized in him their preordained master,
were wax to his hands, mats to his feet. They obeyed his word as
obsequiously, faithfully and unquestioningly as if he could by a clap of
his lordly hands banish them to strange deaths.

They talked in low tones about him among themselves behind his back.
This was no American they said. No American could command as this
green-eyed one commanded. No American had such gift of tongues, such
gestures, such picturesque and varied and awesome oaths. No American
carried small bright flashing daggers such as he carried in his inner
pockets, nor did Americans talk glibly as he talked of weird poisons,
not every day drugs, but marvelous, death dealing concoctions done up in
lustrous jewel-like capsules or diluted in sparkling, insidious gorgeous
hued fluids. The man was too wise--altogether too wise to be an
American. He had traveled much, knew strange secrets. They rather
thought he knew black art. Certainly he knew more of the arts of healing
than the doctor himself. There was nothing he did not know, the
green-eyed one. It was best to obey him.

And while Alan Massey's various arts operated Dick Carson passed through
a series of mental and physical evolutions and came slowly back to
consciousness of what was going on.

At first he was too close to the hinterland to know or care as to what
was happening here, though he did vaguely sense that he had left the
lower levels of Hell and was traversing a milder purgatorial region. He
did not question Alan's presence or recognize him. Alan was at first
simply another of those distrusted foreigners whose point of view and
character he comprehended as little as he did their jibbering tongues.

Gradually however this one man seemed to stand out from the others and
finally took upon himself a name and an entity. By and by, Dick thought,
when he wasn't so infernally-tired as he was just now he would wonder why
Alan Massey was here and would try to recall why he had disliked him so,
some time a million years ago or so. He did not dislike him now. He was
too weak to dislike anybody in any case but he was beginning to connect
Alan vaguely but surely with the superior cleanliness and