arm which the
pressing of a button in any one of the lookout towers would effect.
Lar Tantril's ranch was not asleep. It was as alert and wary as the
beasts tracking through the jungle outside its fence, and all its
defensive and offensive weapons were at the ready.

No one within the ranch knew it, but within two hundred yards lay the
foe Lar Tantril and his men feared most.

* * * * *

Regularly around the watch-beacon swept, slicing the blackness with an
oval white finger, the farthest edge of which reached a hundred and
fifty yards. Over the "western" lake--and its inky ripples sparkled
somehow ominously. Over the jungle's confusion--and trees, great
bushes, spiky vines and creeper-growths leaped into momentary
visibility, and then were again swallowed up in the tide of night.
Here a cutlas-beaked bird, spotlighted for an instant, froze into
surprised immobility with the pasty, bloated worm it had seized
twisting and dangling from its mouth, to flap squawking away as the
ray glided on: there the coils of a seekan, in ambush on a tree limb,
glittered crimson for the sudden moment of illumination; or a nameless
huge-eyed pantherlike creature was glimpsed as it clawed at a nest of
unfledged haris, while the frantic, screaming mother beat at it with
wings and claws....

But all this was usual and unalarming, merely the ordinary routine of
the jungle at night. Could the beacon have reached out another fifty
yards, the guards on their towers would have seen that which was not
usual--and would have summoned every weapon of the ranch beneath.

Or could the guards have heard, besides the cries and crashings and
yowls of the jungle folk, the man-made sounds which sped silently back
and forth across the ranch within their tight and secret radio
beams--then, too, the alarm would have clanged.

Had the beacon suddenly stretched its path outward another fifty
yards, it would have fallen upon a massive, leafy watrari tree, taller
than most: and the guards, looking close, might have caught in one
notch of the tree's many limbs a glint of metal: might have seen, had
the light held on that glint, a bloated monster of metal and fabric
braced there, hiding behind a screen of leaves.

This giant, not native to the jungle, was posted due "north" from the
ranch. Another waited to the "south," in a similarly large tree; and
another to the "east."

Hawk Carse and his friends were abroad again and wai