split up into small groups and drift apart. Finally his own quarter-deck was the scene of a bloody mutiny. His officers had been butchered and Frenchy Logrieux was abandoned on Cerberus.

He was sitting on the edge of a big spire of glassy rock, overhanging a gulf, when the space-flyer landed. Weeks of exposure to the weather, of living on fruits and tubers, had given him the appearance of a wild man.

"Nom du Nom," he had screamed with delight, flinging himself bodily against a glassite porte. "But it's me old friend, the Doc! How's the kidnaper? And this little wench that ye—"

He paused uncertainly, having lurched over the threshold, for the woman sitting quietly on the edge of the bed was surely not that wretched, pitiable slip of a human being he had glimpsed on the sick-bed months ago. To Frenchy's mind, this was a creature of Heaven's fashioning, a graceful feminine being such as he had never seen outside of Paris, and he could never return there. Such of her rounded limbs as he saw were flushed with glowing health. The eyes were of a cerulean blue as seen only on earth. Yet the cascading wealth of cloudy hair was the same.

"This lydee, I mean," he stammered. "Why, where'd ye get her, Doc? She's class, she is! A beauty if I ever see one—jes' like a dream, if ye don't mind my sayin'—"

Rufus Thallin rose from his seat and frowned irritably. He had seen the pleased smile flicker over the woman's face. It might have been hard for him to explain his own irritation.

"I'm certain the lady doesn't care to hear of it," he said gruffly. Alyce shot him a malignant glance.

"Oh, but I do!" she cried indignantly. "And the man is human, just as I am human, though you treat me like a dog."

"Come on outside, Frenchy," snapped Rufus angrily. "I want to talk to you." The amazed pirate followed him into the chilled gloom of the Cerberusian landscape.

"She hates me!" he explained hurriedly. "And it's necessary that she keeps on hating me. Sometimes she tries to kill me, and she always keeps plotting—"

"Oh yeh?" grated Frenchy Logrieux, bringing his big doughy hands up in a strangling motion. "Whyn't ye give her this, Doc? The best lookin' wench in the world, won't do that to Frenchy. I'll fix her up good and proper, Doc, if ye'll only get me back to a little asteroid I know of—"

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