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T SEEMED to Lachlan that he had been fighting for an eternity—that for unnumbered hours he had been circling the moonlit meadow under Sani'gilagi's summit, parrying, thrusting, battling for his life, while in front of him Lance Falcon danced and shimmered behind a shifting, glimmering veil of steel—a crouching, hideously smiling figure, yet darkly handsome, unreal, elusive as the moonlight, baleful as some nameless phantom of a dream.

To Lachlan all that had happened and was happening was unreal. It seemed to him that his mind and body dwelt apart; that his hand and eye were fighting this fight without direction from his brain; that the moves that he made were not made consciously but were wholly mechanical, as though his body had become an automaton animated by some force within itself over which he had no control.

Yet he knew that never before had he fought so well. His eyes—and apparently Falcon's also—seemed as much at home in the brilliant moonlight as in the full light of day. He knew that he was fighting with all the art of which he was capable, that he was utilizing with almost perfect skill all that O'Sullivan had taught him; and he was not alarmed