le-crossing hound!" Sime's exasperation knew no
bounds. For an instant he had believed that Murray was enacting a
little side-play in the pursuit of a suddenly conceived plan. But he
looked so obviously hangdog--so guiltily defiant....

_Crack!_ Sime's fist struck Murray's solid jaw, scraping the skin off
his knuckles, but Murray swayed to the blow, sapping its force, and
came in to clinch. They rolled on the floor. Murray twisted Sime's
head painfully, bit his ear. But in the next split second he was
whispering:

"Keep your head, Sime. Can't you see I'm stringing him? Take that!"
And he planted a vicious short hook to Sime's midriff.

Balta had squalled orders, and now Martian soldiers were bursting the
buttons off their uniforms in the scrimmage to separate the battlers.
Bruised and battered, they were dragged apart. Murray's one eye was
now authentically closed, and rapidly coloring up. Unsteadily he got
to his feet. With mock delicacy he threw a kiss to his late
antagonist.

"Farewell, Trueheart!" He bowed ironically, and the men all laughed.

Balta grinned too. "Still the same mind, Hemingway? All right, men,
take him up to the observation post. Here, Murray, have a drink."

* * * * *

Sime was led up a seemingly endless circular staircase. After an
interminable climb he saw the purplish Martian sky through the glass
doors of an airlock. Then they were outside, in the rarefied
atmosphere that sorely tried Sime's lungs, still laboring after the
fight and long ascent. The Sun, smaller than on Earth but intensely
bright, struck down vindictively.

"A good place to see the country," laughed the corporal in charge.
"Off with his clothes!"

It was but a matter of seconds to strip Sime's garment from him. They
dragged him to an upright post, one of several on the roof, and with
his back to the post, tied his wrists behind it with rawhide. His
ankles they also tied, and so left him.

It was indeed an excellent point of vantage from which to see the
country. The fortress was high enough to clear the nearby cliffs of
low elevation, and on all sides the Gray Mountains tumbled to the
horizon. To the north, beyond that sharply cut, ragged horizon, lay
the big cities, the industrial heart of the planet. To the south, at
Sime's back, was the narrow agricultural belt, the region of small
seas, of bitter lakes, of controlled irrigation. Here the canals,
natural fissures long observed by a