rted streams of blue flame. They fell upon Yuruk
and splashed over him upon the heap of the slain. In the mound was a
dreadful movement, a contortion; the bodies stiffened, seemed to try to
rise, to push away--dead nerves and muscles responding to the blasting
energy passing through them.

Out from the stars rained bolt upon bolt. In the chamber was the sound
of thunder, crackling like broken glass. The bodies flamed, crumbled.
There was a little smoke--nauseous, feebly protesting, beaten out by the
consuming fires almost before it could rise.

Where had been the heap of slain capped by the black eunuch there was
but a little whirling cloud of sad gray dust. Caught by a passing
draft, it eddied, slipped over the floor, vanished through the doorway.
Motionless stood the blasting stars, contemplating us. Motionless
stood Norhala, her wrath no whit abated by the ghastly sacrifice. And
paralyzed by what we had beheld, motionless stood we.

"Listen," she said. "You two who love the maid. What you have seen is
nothing to that which you SHALL see--a wisp of mist to the storm cloud."

"Norhala"--I found speech--"can you tell us when it was that the maid
was captured?"

Perhaps there was still time to overtake the abductors before Ruth was
thrust into the worse peril waiting where she was being carried. Crossed
this thought another--puzzling, baffling. The cliffs Yuruk had pointed
out to me as those through which the hidden way passed were, I had
estimated then, at least twenty miles away. And how long was the pass,
the tunnel, through them? And then how far this place of the armored
men? It had been past dawn when Drake had frightened the black eunuch
with his pistol. It was not yet dawn now. How could Yuruk have made his
way to the Persians so swiftly--how could they so swiftly have returned?

Amazingly she answered the spoken question and the unspoken.

"They came long before dusk," she said. "By the night before Yuruk had
won to Ruszark, the city of Cherkis; and long before dawn they were on
their way hither. This the black dog I slew told me."

"But Yuruk was with us here at dawn yesterday," I gasped.

"A night has passed since then," she said, "and another night is almost
gone."

Stunned, I considered this. If this were true--and not for an instant
did I doubt her--then not for a few hours had we lain there at the foot
of the living wall in the Hall of the Cones--but for the balance of that
day and that night, a