n and one other, Ken knew they must be--were
clasped together, and the long, lithe, muscular body smote them
squarely, sent them whirling and helpless in different directions in
the sea-gloom. One of them was driven down by the force of the blow,
and that one the sealman chose to finish first. It lashed at him, its
strong teeth bared to rip the sea-suit, concentrating on him all the
rage and all the thirst for vengeance it had.

But by then, down below, the torpoon's motors were throbbing at full
power; the thin directional rudders were slanting; the torpoon was
turning and pointing its nose upward; and Ken Torrance, his face bleak
as the Arctic ice, was grasping the trigger of the nitro-shell gun.

He might perhaps have saved the doomed man had he swept straight up
then and fired, but a quick mounting of the odds distracted him for a
fatal second. Out of the deeper gloom at the left came a swiftly
growing shadow, and Ken, with a sinking in his stomach, knew it for a
second sealman.

Then another similar shadow brought his eyes to the right.

Two more sealmen! Three now--and how many more might come?

At once Ken knew what he must do before ever he fired a shell at one
of the brown-skinned shapes. The man just attacked had to be
sacrificed in the interests of the rest. The torpoon swerved, thrust
up toward the ice ceiling under the full force of her motors; and when
halfway to it, and her gun-containing bow was pointed at a spot in the
ice only twenty feet in front of the foremost of the men stroking
desperately towards the distant exit-hole, Ken pressed the trigger;
and again, and again and again....

Twelve shells, quick, on the same path, bit into the ice. Almost
immediately came the first explosion. It was swelled by the others.
The ice shivered and crumbled in jagged splinters--and then there was
a new column of light reaching down from the world of air and life
into the darkness of the undersea. A roughly circular hole gaped in
the ice sixty or seventy feet nearer the swimming men than the old
one.

"That'll give 'em a chance," muttered Kenneth Torrance. He plunged the
torpoon around and down. "And now for a fight!"

* * * * *

Without pause, now, there was, straight ahead, a hard, desperate duel,
a fitting last fight for any torpoon or any man riding one. Each of
the seven shells left in the nitro-gun's magazine had to count; and
the first of them gave a good example.