the girl could not be of the fourth couple--the
missing two that had never appeared. She was no more than eighteen.
And whence had come the giant black who had attacked her?

"Stick up your hands. Quick!"

* * * * *

Allan whirled to the sudden challenge. The man in the doorway was
pointing a ray-gun steadily at him! Dane's hands went up, and he
gasped inanely: "Who are you?"

"What is going on here? Where did you come from?" The newcomer's
English was precise, too precise. No hulking brute, this. A yellow
man, slitted eyes slanted and malevolent; broad, flat nose above thin
lips that were purple against the saffron skin. The uniform he wore
showed signs of some attempt to keep it in repair, and to its
threadbare collar still clung a tarnished insignia: the seven-pointed
star, emblem of the enemy Allan had fought on a yesterday that was two
decades gone.

"Well? Have you lost the power of speech?" The ray-gun jerked forward
impatiently.

An obscure impulse prompted Allan's reply. "Almost. I've spoken to no
one for twenty years."

"So-o,"--softly. The Oriental's eyes flicked past Dane, and a sudden
light glowed in them. "You have been alone for twenty years in this
city we thought was empty, but you were on hand to fight with Ra-Jamba
for this delightful creature." Something leered from his face that
sent the hot blood surging to Allan's temples. The Easterner stepped
catlike into the room, shutting the door behind him with his free
hand.

"That is true," the American said, with what calmness he could
muster. Through the dizzy whirl of his mind he clung to one thought:
he must conceal the existence of the little group on Sugar Loaf
Mountain at all costs. "I had just discovered that it was safe to
leave the room, similar to this, in which I had hidden from the gas,
when I heard a scream. I reached here just in time to--"

"To interfere with Ra-Jamba's pleasure, and save the little white
dove--for me. My thanks." The yellow man bowed mockingly. "Too bad,"
he purred, "that you should be robbed of the spoils of your fight."
Then he asked irrelevantly. "So some of you Americans found a way to
cheat our gas. How many?"

Allan temporized. There had been several similar refuges prepared, he
said, but he did not know whether they had been used. This was the
first he had visited beside his own. But how was it that the
questioner knew so little about what had happened here? Had his peop