by Don Wilcox
“No telling how many villagers have seen us by this time,” said Joe. “They seemed to be on the move all along the river this morning. But their seeing us won’t make any difference if we can march that black-haired cometeer to justice.”
Joe had sketched a rough map of the region from the air. As soon as they left the ship the map became indispensable. The clearing a mile to the south was familiar.
“That’s where the spear deaths took place yesterday morning!” Joe exclaimed. “The river is just beyond.”
“It is also where we saw villagers gathering this morning,” said Donna. Then she pressed Joe’s hand in a gesture of restraint. “Look!”
A long line of villagers with spears was moving out into the forest from a river trail.
From a clump of bushes Joe and Donna watched.
“I have counted three hundred,” Donna whispered, and still more are coming.”
The long line moved swiftly, stealthily, single file, its members spaced about thirty yards apart. It passed at a distance of a quarter of a mile from their hiding place. It began to circle. Soon Joe knew that a huge trap of spears and horns was being formed.
“They expect to find the dehorners inside the circle,” said Joe. “They’ll gradually close in, like hunters on a round-up.”
Donna trembled against Joe’s shoulder. “It is the largest Ring of Death I ever saw. They must know that they are about to enclose the black-metal ship.
“Then they’ll enclose the Black Cometeer,” Joe said, “also Scar-Hands and all the rest of the gang.”
“But our ship they will not enclose! Donna exclaimed. “Luck was with us when we hid it.”
“But what about us?”
“We are already enclosed,” said Donna. “We will soon find ourselves at the center of the ring.”
“Face to face with the Cometeer, said Joe, “I hope.”
CHAPTER XIX
The ray pistol shot noiselessly. A spray of leafy bushes fell over with a quiet swish. The bolt of disintegration had cut the stalks like a hot steel blade through candles.
“Our camouflage,” Joe whispered. Then seeing that Donna did not know the word, he added, “We will disguise ourselves as bushes.”
Donna smiled. “If you had not shaved in camp yesterday, more bushes would not be needed.”
They cloaked themselves in the bushes of shrubbery. They ran and walked and crept, by turns, taking advantage of every screen the forest provided. Within a few minutes they were nearing the center of the guarded area, and not once had they been seen.
Joe knew it was a race against time and chance. If the dehorners, working somewhere within the circle got wind that a great Ring of Death was closing in, they would leap to their ship and fly off.
A naggie path cut across a bit of open meadow. The wide patch of blue sky was what Joe had been looking for.
“A ship could find its way through that opening,” Donna observed.
“Then it’s in that ravine where the stream curves into the cliff,” Joe said.
A moment later they were feasting their eyes on the famous Black Comet. Its blue-black metal sides shone where patches of sunlight filtered through the overhanging trees. It was set with its nose toward the meadow clearing. Its plastic windows revealed the gleam of its interior trappings.
“I don’t hear anyone,” Donna whispered. “But they must have left someone on guard. Joe, where are you going?”
“Inside. You’d better wait here.”
He held the ray pistol ready. He slipped from one tree to the next. He discarded his shoulder covering of shrubbery as he neared the final curve of the ravine. He stood in the ship’s shadow, then, and braced his hand against its cool polished side.
The open airlocks awaited him. Three quiet steps. The brilliant lights of the interior dazzled his eyes. He clung to the handrail and paused, on the third step. The smell of machinery mingled with an odor slightly reminiscent of a butcher ship. Looking back into the passenger compartment, he saw the horns.
There were five or six bundles of them, stacked like faggots, lying on a mat on the floor. A spot of sunlight through the window highlighted them, and in their varied shades of pink and white they gleamed.
The sight was breathtaking. More than five hundred persons must have been dehorned to make such a pile. This outrage could grow into a permanent strife between planets.
A barely audible snore sounded from the control cabin. Joe moved forward a few steps until he saw the strange peaceful face of a hornless man—a Mercurian, no doubt—lying asleep beside the controls.
The keys that dangled from the man’s fingertips gave Joe his cue. It was plain that those keys would fit the slots in the control panel.
Another low snore.
Joe slipped the keys from the sleeper’s hand. He crept back to the airlocks. He heard a stirring and groaning. But he was away, now, keys pocketed, ray pistol on the alert, and nothing could stop him.
“You keep the keys,” he said to Donna as they hurried on. “I might run into a bullet or a flash of disintegration. But if you can tell your uncle what I’ve seen—”
“And if the ship cannot get away—”
“We’ll have them, by George!”
They camouflaged themselves again and chanced a view from a hilltop. The villagers with spears were a long way off, as yet. They could be seen plodding along, jabbing at clumps of bushes and searching among the crags and other natural hiding places. In an hour or less they would close in, and when they did so, they meant to have a gang of dehorning criminals cornered.
“I can see Uncle Londeenoko pacing,” said Donna, “trying to hurry them along.”
“If I thought he would listen to reason, I’d have you go to him,” said Joe.
“He will listen to reason when we make the criminals confess, not before. I will stay with you.”
They moved cautiously down into the next wooded valley. The mischief makers would be between here and the nearest river village, unaware that they were being surrounded. It was the logical place for them to work, just over the hill from their parked ship, near enough to the river trail to kidnap new victims. For many a curious Martian would gravitate toward the scene of yesterday’s killing, a short distance down the river.
“Watch everything,” Joe warned. He was growing tense. “If they catch one hint that these woods are being combed, they’ll by-pass us and make for their ship.”
It would have been a surer bet to hide near the Black Comet and wait till the larger circle brought them in. But the hope of catching them in the act drove Joe on.
“We are on the right trail,” said Donna. “Listen!”
A muffled cry came from a victim tied to the trunk of a tree. It was a half grown boy. His horns were gone. Bandages had been slapped over his mouth to keep him from shouting. But his choked cry could be heard faintly.
Another one! A Martian girl in her adolescence was bound to the very next tree. Her clothing was torn, her hair was in sad disarray, her eyes were tear-filled. She had ceased to struggle or try to call.
A third, a fourth, and a fifth! All of them were gagged so they couldn’t cry an alarm.
“We can’t take time to release them yet,” Donna warned. “The gang must be just ahead.”
She and Joe ran, then, and the beat of their footsteps mingled with the thump of falling apples. They ran back of the line of victims.
A sixth victim was an old man, whose scalp had been gashed. Donna knew him”
“Free him, Joe. He may die before we get back to him.”
Joe slashed with his knife. “Which way are the masked men?” he demanded.
The bewildered old man wasn’t sure.
Released, he slumped, and lay at the foot of the tree, feeling his hornless head, weeping.
A seventh victim, and an eighth. Then no more.
“Which way did they go?” Donna cried. “We will capture them.”
The seventh victim nodded ahead, the eighth victim indicate
d that he thought they had gone back. Now the line of victims had run out. And no gang could be seen in any direction.
But over the rise, several yards beyond, the spear-men appeared, closing in with their Ring of Death.
“The gang must be hiding down in that thicket,” said Joe, “or else we’ve followed the line the wrong way.”
“Come!” Donna called.
Now free of all camouflage, they retraced their steps on the run, cutting back toward the first victim they had found.
Joe slashed the bonds of the sobbing boy, and jerked the bandages off his mouth.
“Which way did they go? Have you seen them lately?”
“I could hear them,” said the boy. “But they stayed back of these trees, out of my sight. I could hear them gathering up the loose horns.”
“Which way?” Donna cried.
“That way, I think. Or that way.” They ran back to the girl with the tear-filled eyes, to set her free.
“Tell us—”
But Donna’s demand was checked by an unexpected outburst of vicious temper. The girl gathering her torn clothes about her, pointed at Joe.
“You did it!” she wailed. “I know you without your mask. I saw you at the Festival—”
“Quiet, you idiot!” Donna caught the girl’s face in her hands and shook her. “If you can’t tell us where they went, don’t talk. They must be here—”
“They must have slipped through our fingers,” Joe said. “To the ship!”
They ran to the crest of the rise. A line of spear-men was marching toward them. The Black Comet had already been passed, and no doubt a number of men had stayed to guard it.
“We are trapped,” said Donna.
“Not as long as I have this!” Joe jerked his pistol.
“Do not shoot them, Joe.” She caught his free hand, and they backed away from the advancing line.
Joe spoke through clenched teeth. “I could melt those spears right out of their hands.”
“No, Joe. It is too dangerous. If you cost them one finger or the tip of one horn—”
Swish! A brown spear came through the air, straight like a bullet.
Joe shot at it. Whether by luck or good marksmanship, the disintegration ray caught it and dissolved it in the air.
Thirty or forty Martians must have seen it pass into nothingness.
Another spear started through the air. With less luck than before, Joe nevertheless shot the point off. Then with crisscrossing strokes, the ray cut it into a dozen pieces. The advancing Martians saw the scraps fall to the ground. Several of the men stopped in their tracks.
But one flank of a dozen or more, being ordered to charge, lowered their heads and came forward on a run.
“Stop!” Donna cried. “Stop! We are not the ones!
They would not have stopped, however, but for Joe’s swift work with the pistol. The disintegration ray sliced through the base of five small trees. The timbers twisted and toppled to form a barricade of branches.
The Martians stopped abruptly. They began to back away. For any weapon capable of dropping trees to the ground might conceivably play havoc with men’s horns, or arms or legs.
This momentary halt gave Donna her chance to call out, “We know whom you are looking for. We are looking for them too. Let us join you.”
“You are Donna Londeen!” one of the spear-men answered. “Your uncle, Londeenoko, does not deny that you may be assisting with these crimes.”
“My uncle should know better,” Donna flung back at them. “Let your circle close in, and you will find the criminals you are searching for somewhere in that ravine. They have made victims of eight more of our people.”
“Eight more! You had better be right or it will be bad for you. March ahead of us,” the spokesman ordered. “We will hold our spears until we have talked with Londeenoko.”
Ten minutes later the circle closed in from all sides, to become a wall of spears and horns around the newly released victims.
The round-up was complete, then. But oddly, it had netted no one but Joe and Donna.
CHAPTER XX
Londeenoko’s voice was heavy with anger. For two or three minutes he simply roared without saying anything. His massive face grew red with rage. He paced around within the ring, and Joe and Donna kept turning to face him.
Joe still held his gun. More than a dozen times in the past few minutes he had felled branches of apples or whole trees in the paths of Martians who showed too much eagerness to hang him on their spears.
The effect had been noteworthy. Although he was a marked man, well remembered from the festival, they were inclined to treat him with respect. Although he was, from all appearances, their prisoner, they preferred to keep their distance. No one volunteered to walk into the center of the ring and take his gun away.
The eight dehorned Martians were now being treated for injuries outside the circle, and were the objects of much attention. Some of the spear-men were urging them to step forth and identify Donna and Joe as the horn thieves. But these victims were too dazed or humiliated or just plain mad to agree on anything. Amid the wrangling, their immediate testimony came to nothing.
It took the hard-boiled, red-faced Londeenoko to weld the mob spirit of these several hundred angry men into a swift, if ruthless, legal action. Unquestionably, they believed this hornless man deserved to be perforated with spears or horns. But first, he deserved to be duly convicted.
Londeenoko’s roar gradually became more distinct. Then Joe realized he was raving more at Donna than himself.
“. . . such a disgrace! It is criminal beyond words! And to think that your own father was the most honored judge we ever knew. What would he say if he knew his own daughter had betrayed us—”
“Stop!” Joe shouted. “You can’t say those things to her.”
“Who says I can’t?”
“You are not the judge,” Joe said savagely. “If you were, you might, want to hear the truth. You might listen—”
Joe’s voice was lost in the angry uproar. Three spears came flying through the air. One went wild over Joe’s head. Another made Donna dodge, and even so, it thumped through her horns. The third would have struck through her breast if Joe hadn’t caught it with a ray from his pistol. With phenomenal accuracy he took it, and was gone.
Londeenoko roared for order, and he marched twice around the circle to give the spear throwers his best tongue lashing.
Then he came back to Donna and Joe.
“Your crimes will cease from this hour,” he said. “After all we have seen, after all the horrible evidence you have created against yourselves, there is nothing to do but order the two of you to be put to death at once.”
“Suppose we refuse to die,” Joe snarled.
“At one word from me, the spears will strike you from all directions.”
Joe breathed fire. “Are you so sure? With one sweep of my weapon there will be no spears. And there will be no men!”
“You are not that swift.”
“Shall I show you?”
But Donna cried, “No, Joe. Don’t kill them. Make them listen. Tell them that if they kill us they will not end this trouble. The horn thieving will go right on.”
Londeenoko’s eyebrows jumped. “So you admit your gang is so highly organized—”
“We admit nothing,” Joe snapped, “except that we know who the horn thief is. I’ll bring him and his gang to you if you give me a chance.”
The half grown boy, recently dehorned, squeeked his comment to this boast.
“Give him a chance, and I will help him, because he set me free.”
It was a small, piping voice, but it weighed heavily, in that moment, against the roar of Londeenoko. The big, crusty man hesitated. The boy happened to be one of his many grandchildren. If there was one thing that Londeenoko tried to avoid, it was an argument from his children and grandchildren. They had a way of banding together and upsetting his firmest decisions.
“We will hold court here an
d now,” Londeenoko growled. “I will appoint my officers—”
“Here comes the judge!” someone shouted.
Judge Mobar, attended by one servant, came stalking up through a thicket from the direction of the river. The circle broke to make a place for him.
As usual, he was a dramatic figure in his official robe, wearing the overlapping squares of bright green paint on his face. His eyes were depths of darkness. His dark hair was bushy over his ears. His horns were highly polished.
Three apples hung upon his horns, and this might have been taken to signify that he had come on a long jaunt through the forest.
The young judge took command immediately.
His servant escorted him across to Londeenoko, who gave him the dignified greeting befitting any judge.
“I did not know you were in this part of the valley,” Londeenoko said, half apologetically.
“I see that you have captured the foreigner who is known to have proposed our most horrible crime wave,” said the judge. “I trust you did not intend to let him escape.”
“No verdict has been reached,” said Londeenoko.
“Verdict? Do you imply,” the young judge said sharply, “that you would have held court without me?”
Joe’s voice was lost in the angry uproar. Three spears came flying the air. One went wild overhead. Another made Donna dodge, and even so, it thumped through horns. The third would have struck through her breast if Joe hadn’t caught it with a ray from his pistol. With phenomenal accuracy he took it, and it was gone.
Londeenoko roared for order, and he marched twice around the circle to give the spear throwers his best tongue lashing.
Then he came back to Donna and Joe.
“Your crimes will cease from this hour,” he said. “After all we have seen, after all the horrible evidence you have created against yourselves, there is nothing to do but order the two of you to be put to death at once.”
“Suppose we refuse to die,” Joe snarled.
“At one word from me, the spears will strike you from all directions.”
Joe breathed fire. “Are you so sure? With one sweep of my weapon there will be no spears. And there will be no men!”