ations.
No imaginable crisis in his affairs could have convinced him to
self-slaughter. He was brave, but cautious.

Even now, if Nicky Easton, poising the bombshell with its appalling
threat, had murmured a sardonic "Well?" Davidge would probably have
smiled, shrugged, and said:

"You've got the bead on me, partner. I'm yours." He would have gone
along as Nicky's prisoner, waiting some better chance to recover his
freedom.

But the mal-pronunciation of the shibboleth strikes deep centers of
racial feeling and makes action spring faster than thought. The
Sicilians at vespers asked the Frenchmen to pronounce "cheecheree,"
and slew them when they said "sheesheree." So Easton snapped a
fulminate in Davidge when his Prussian tongue betrayed him into that
impertinent, intolerable alien "Vell?"

Davidge was helpless in his own frenzy. He leaped.

Nicky could not believe his eyes. He paused for an instant's
consideration. As a football-player hesitates a sixteenth of a second
too long before he passes the ball or punts it, and so forfeits his
opportunity, so Nicky Easton stood and stared for the length of time
it takes the eyes to widen.

That was just too long for him and just long enough for Davidge, who
went at him football fashion, hurling himself through the air like a
vast, sprawling tarantula. Nicky's grip on the bomb relaxed. It fell
from his hand. Davidge swiped at it wildly, smacked it, and knocked it
out of bounds beyond the deck. Then Davidge's hundred-and-eighty-pound
weight smote the light and wickery frame of Nicky and sent him
collapsing backward, staggering, wavering, till he, too, went
overboard.

Davidge hit the deck like a ball-player sliding for a base, and he
went slithering to the edge. He would have followed Nicky over the
hundred-foot steel precipice if Mamise had not flung herself on him
and caught his heel. He was stopped with his right arm dangling out in
space and his head at the very margin of the deck.

In this very brief meanwhile Jake Nuddle, who had been panic-stricken
at the sight of the bomb in Nicky's hand, had been backing away
slowly. He would have backed into the abyss if he had not struck a
stanchion and clutched it desperately.

And now the infernal-machine reached bottom. It lighted on the huge
blade of the ship's anchor lying on a wharf waiting to be hoisted into
place. The shell burst with an all-rending roar and sprayed rags of
steel in every direction. The upward stre