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38 of the song welling up to the stars above him, and all the soft, purring murmur of wooden dwellings settling into the hush of sleep after the day's heat sounding through the clearing.

Two hours later he found that Grange had not forgotten, when young Forbes, a green English boy in Revillon's Store, burst in on him with gasping breath and starting eyes.

"Pile out—quick, Sergeant," he said. "Ducane and Robison are killing each other."

Tempest distanced the boy back up the silent street and over the flapping boards that made a following rattle like musketry in the hills. He thrust between the half-breeds who clustered thick round the door, and saw the two men who struggled breast to breast, knee to knee; the white face livid with fury and fear, the dark face like a bursting plum.

The quarrel had been born in a flash, and the end of it was likely to be as swift; for Robison had his knife out as Tempest jumped forward with his lithe finish of movement, and gripped each man by the shoulder.

"That's enough," he said, and his voice carried through the noise. "Quit! Sharp!"

The men were blind and deaf with the wrath that held them. Ducane wrenched away Robison's knife with a quick wrist-turn, and then Tempest's face was thrust in his with eyes blazing like the flash before the bullet.

"Quit!" he said only. But the threat behind the word drove terror into Ducane.

He fell away, dropping the knife, and Tempest flung himself on Robison. The breed was too big and too heavy for him; but he would not have called for assistance when he did if a sudden demon of mischief had not lit the idea in his brain. Robison was a malignant hater, and there was no man in Grey Wolf would have cared to bring himself under the harrow of that hate undesired. They stood back, waiting on Tempest's call. And when it came it hit the only man who did not look for it.

"Ducane," shouted Tempest. "Lend a hand here."

And Ducane it was, half-sobered and sick, who helped pinion the big breed and guide his resisting feet down to