to Mercer just as he was struggling to his feet again, and in a
moment more between us we had felled his two assailants. Mercer's face was
very white, and I saw blood streaming from a wound on his head; but he
grinned as he faced me.

"Have we--got 'em--all?" he gasped. He dashed the blood away from his eyes
with the flat of his hand. "I fell--damn it--right at the start, and hit
my head. Where are they all? Have we got 'em?"

Miela alighted in the boat beside us.

"Two are running," she said. "They are together. Hasten."

We jumped out of the boat. Miela flew up, and we followed her guidance
through the dense woods. We could make much better speed, I knew, than the
Mercutians. "We'll get them all, Ollie," I shouted at Mercer. "They're not
far ahead. See up there--Miela's evidently over them now."

We came up to them after a few hundred yards. It was the old man, and one
of those whom I had first encountered. They did not wait for us to attack
them, but stopped stock still, flinging their arms wide in token of
surrender.

Miela came down among us, and we went back to where we had lain hidden in
the palmettos. There we had left a number of short lengths of rope. While
we were tying the arms of these two prisoners behind them and fettering
their ankles so they could not run Anina joined us.

"Two--in water," she cried; and then added something to Miela.

"Two were in the water. Now they are in the woods, running. Anina will
show you."

Miela stood guard in the boat over our first two prisoners, while Mercer
and I rounded up the others. It was half an hour or more before we had
them all trussed up, but none of the ten escaped. We were a long time
reviving two of those we had injured, but finally we had them all lying or
sitting in the boat.

Mercer's head had stopped bleeding. He washed it, and I found his injury
no more than an ugly scalp wound.

"I fell and cut it on something," he explained lugubriously. "Couldn't see
for the blood in my eyes. But we got 'em, didn't we?"

Under Miela's direction Mercer and I shoved the boat out into the stream.
I need not go into details regarding the propelling mechanism of this
craft. Miela explained it hastily to me as we got under way. It used a
form of the light-ray from a sort of strange battery. The intense heat of
the ray generated a great pressure of superheated steam in a thick metal
cylinder underneath the keel.

This steam escaped through a nozzle under water