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 onlooker. The hot night air, which left breathing a burden to even the untaxed lungs, made the gasping of the two combatants audible and vocal, made it pitiful, like the gasps of the drowning, made it short and guttural, like the tongue-choked chest heaves of an anæsthetised patient. The fighters became two vaguely heaving and gasping white hulks blotched with blood. There seemed something more than sinister in their dogged persistence. It became satanic. It grew into an affront to manhood, an insult to the quiet stars that looked down on it. It became a living nightmare, in which two coiled and striking and threshing Hates emerged from a slime that was antediluvian.

McKinnon turned away, sick and faint. For he had seen one of the red-blotched hulks fall back and lie full length on the deck. He had seen the Laminian's captain lean over that prostrate figure, weakly, swaying forward and then backward, where he would surely have fallen, had one of his sailors not caught him under the armpits and held him up. It was over.

McKinnon heard the guttering yelp of triumph, the unreasoning and vapid snarl of success, of the ship's master who had re-established his disputed mastership.