Stevens watched the last of them vanish, then felt a hand take his.

"They--they didn't hurt you?"

Silently he drew her through the door and their bare feet felt the loam of the clearing. The night wind fanned their faces. He turned to her. "I made them run," he laughed, and she smiled. Markett was used to the bursts of childlike glee, and she loved her husband. He had insisted upon some sort of ceremony which apparently was tied up with Roald. And beside the usual broad grin was a kind of shrewd, calculating glint. "_They_ can't fight. They've forgotten how. But now they know it."

"Then," she whispered, "we're safe."

"Safe," he repeated broodingly. "From men, yes. But they have their machines. And machines can be set to kill as well as to build. We must move on."

Markett turned slowly and looked at the lean-to where they had been living. She laughed, a little nervously.

"Strange," she said. "At first I didn't like our--home. It was small--smaller than any of the apartments in the District Dwellings. And we always had to go outdoors for water--cold water that I couldn't drink because it hadn't been distilled so that all the salts and taste had been removed. Must we go, Clark?"

He held her tighter. "It was our home," he said, "but we must go on!"

Far to the north, where sane men did not go, where enormous trees guarded the silent paths of animals to the water-hole, there was a fire, man-built, cunningly piled against the bole of a tree and slanted away from the wind so that it would burn through the long night as a bed of glowing embers, little tongues of blue flame leaping up now and again to warn off any bear or wildcat that might seek easy pickings among the silent forms huddled in a circle. Men they were, big men with gnarled beards and knotted shoulder-muscles, sleeping restlessly and lightly, with one hand lying near cunningly constructed spring-guns and flat, gleaming backswords, into whose steel blades had been let threads of blue and red enamel in glowing, wide designs.

The crack of a twig broke the stillness of the forest night. With a grunt, the largest of the men sat up, his fist closing tight around the hardwood hilt of his sword.

"Hibron?" he called softly. "Is it you?"

Through the dusk strode a figure--a huge-boney male whose hair and beard were 

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