ter who goes in there after his quarry
never reappears, or if he does, it's in a damaged condition, blown upon
by ghosts and burned to death! That's one point."

He sat down by the fire and stretched his arms wearily. "The second is a
little more disturbing for us. A Beaker camp about twenty miles south of
here, as far as I can judge, was exterminated just a week ago. The
message was passed to me because I was thought to be a kinsman of the
slain----"

McNeil sat up. "Done because they were hunting us?"

"Might well be. On the other hand, the affair may have been just one of
general precaution."

"The ghosts did it?" Ross wanted to know.

"I asked that. No, it seems that strange tribesmen overran it at night."

"At night?" McNeil whistled.

"Just so." Ashe's tone was dry. "The tribes do not fight that way.
Either someone slipped up in his briefing, or the Reds are overconfident
and don't care about the rules. But it was the work of tribesmen, or
their counterfeits. There is also a nasty rumor speeding about that the
ghosts do not relish traders and that they might protest intrusions of
such with penalties all around----"

"Like the Wrath of Lurgha," supplied Ross.

"There is a certain repetition in this which suggests a lot to the
suspicious mind," Ashe agreed.

"I'd say no more hunting expeditions for the present," McNeil said. "It
is too easy to mistake a friend for a deer and weep over his grave
afterward."

"That is a thought which entered my mind several times this afternoon,"
Ashe agreed. "These people are deceptively simple on the surface, but
their minds do not work along the same patterns as ours. We try to
outwit them, but it takes only one slip to make it fatal. In the
meantime, I think we'd better make this place a little more snug, and it
might be well to post sentries as unobtrusively as possible."

"How about faking some signs of a ruined camp and heading into the blue
ourselves?" McNeil asked. "We could strike for the ghost mountains,
traveling by night, and Ulffa's crowd would think we were finished off."

"An idea to keep in mind. The point against it would be the missing
bodies. It seems that the tribesmen who raided the Beaker camp left some
very distasteful evidence of what happened to the camp's personnel. And
those we can't produce to cover our trail."

McNeil was not yet convinced. "We might be able to fake something along
that line, too----"

"We may have to fake nothing," Ros