with his mate for their lives.

The sword-club struck--and on the floor lay the half body of a dwarf,
writhing with vanishments and reappearings of legs and arms. Beside
him was the shattered tripod from which Larry had wrenched his weapon.
I flung myself upon it, dashed it down to break loose one of the
remaining supports, struck in midfall one of the unseen even as his
dagger darted toward me! The seat splintered, leaving in my clutch a
golden bar. I jumped to Larry's side, guarding his back, whirling it
like a staff; felt it crunch once--twice--through unseen bone and
muscle.

At the door was a booming. Into the chamber rushed a dozen of the
frog-men. While some guarded the entrances, others leaped straight to
us, and forming a circle about us began to strike with talons and
spurs at unseen things that screamed and sought to escape. Now here
and there about the blue rugs great stains of blood appeared; heads of
dwarfs, torn arms and gashed bodies, half occulted, half revealed. And
at last the priestess lay silent, vanquished, white body gleaming with
that uncanny--fragmentariness--from her torn robes. Then O'Keefe
reached down, drew Lakla from her. Shakily, Yolara rose to her feet.
The handmaiden, face still blazing with wrath, stepped before her;
with difficulty she steadied her voice.

"Yolara," she said, "you have defied the Silent Ones, you have
desecrated their abode, you came to slay these men who are the guests
of the Silent Ones and me, who am their handmaiden--why did you do
these things?"

"I came for him!" gasped the priestess; she pointed to O'Keefe.

"Why?" asked Lakla.

"Because he is pledged to me," replied Yolara, all the devils that
were hers in her face. "Because he wooed me! Because he is mine!"

"That is a lie!" The handmaiden's voice shook with rage. "It is a lie!
But here and now he shall choose, Yolara. And if you he choose, you
and he shall go forth from here unmolested--for Yolara, it is his
happiness that I most desire, and if you are that happiness--you shall
go together. And now, Larry, choose!"

Swiftly she stepped beside the priestess; swiftly wrenched the last
shreds of the hiding robes from her.

There they stood--Yolara with but the filmiest net of gauze about her
wonderful body; gleaming flesh shining through it; serpent woman---and
wonderful, too, beyond the dreams even of Phidias--and hell-fire
glowing from the purple eyes.

And Lakla, like a girl of the Vikings, lik