that by Heaven she'd not be the prize, either of a brawl or a souvenir-finding contest. To make it good, she had concluded by telling Verrill that he'd be far better occupied if he got the Venus Council to assign him to one of the committees for improving the living-standards of the Terrestrians, and won the Fire of Skanderbek as a token of their gratitude.

But however earnestly she besought him to forget it all, Verrill was just as unhappily determined to go through with it. "I can't back down. Dawson will surely take a crack at stealing the Fire himself—and that would make it tough for me. And for you."

"Oh, let the fool try!" she cried, desperately. "He'd never come back from the territory of those wildmen."

Verrill shook his head. "He might come back. Even though I did give him a trouncing, he's anything but a clown. You wouldn't accept the Fire of Skanderbek if he offered it—but he'd give it to someone else, and then—well, a lot of women do dislike you! There's nothing I can do, except to beat him to it."

And so, Verrill went to do as he had to do.

The space-freighter veered from her course only a little; instead of landing in the sun-blasted plain at the foot of the mountains into which Verrill was to go, she launched a crew-boat which took him to the trading-post at the foot of barren limestone bulwarks.

Dawson was not at the post. But while a head start was a happy omen, Verrill knew that it had its limits, since his plan to ingratiate himself with the barbarians until he could seize the fetish-ruby and return to the post involved so much time that the gain of hours or days meant little.

Ingratiate himself—steal the Fire of Skanderbek—and get out—infinitely simpler than Linda's suggestion, probably an utterly impossible one, of deserving it finally as a gift. His first look at the bearded mountaineers convinced him that no amount of do-gooding could ever move them to gratitude.

Those lounging in the compound of the fortified trading-post wore homespun pants and sheepskin jackets. They fairly clanked with trade daggers, trade pistols, and trade hatchets; some carried trade muskets, and some had the new repeating rifles. Their tanned and hairy faces and bitter eyes made it plain that looting and robbing, brawling and mayhem and murder were their very breath of life.

They spoke the international language which had developed 

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