them all. Max, behind, had sense enough to level the long barrel of a repeating rifle. "Please!" roared a Venusian who seemed to be a leader. "We do naught to you!"

"Better not," cautioned Disbro loftily. "We're more profitable as friends than as enemies."

"Friends!" agreed the leader. "Friends!"

"If you try any funny business—" went on Disbro. "Well, watch!"

He snapped his right-hand gun up and fired. The bullet snipped away a leaf the size of an opened umbrella. As the great green blob drifted down, Disbro fired again and again, until, ripped to rags, the leaf fell limply among the Venusians. They moaned, like awe-struck fog horns.

"Understand?" taunted Disbro. "Savvy? I could kill you all as easy as look at you."

"Friends!" promised the leader again.

"Max," muttered Disbro, "these birds quit very easily without a fight. But keep me covered from up here."

Planter's rope still dangled along the hull. Disbro slid down, coming to his feet on the raft-heap below. The Venusians gave back in wary confusion. Disbro allowed himself to smile upward.

"See what an ape you are, Max?" he chuckled. "You got a look at one of these, and thought it was a girl! You're not much of a picker, Max."

To the Venusian chief he said: "I think I'll muscle in on your territory."

Mara, the crossbow-girl, brought Planter to the place she called the Nest.

It was hollowed out in the thickest part of the towering jungle, as a rabbit's form is hollowed among tall grasses. The floor was of plaited and pressed withes, supported on stumps and roots of many tall growths. Rounding upward and outward from this were walls, also of wooden poles and twigs, woven into the growing tangle. The roof was similarly made, but strengthened and waterproofed with earth, dried and baked by some sort of intense heat.

The space thus blocked off was shaped like the rough inside of a hollow pumpkin, and in size was comparable to the auditorium of a large theater. Within it were set up smaller huts and bowers. There were common cooking-fires, in ovens of stone and mud-brick, and a great common light suspended from the ceiling by a long heavy chain. This was a metal lamp, fed by 

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