He whirled like a Dervish, but found only a drooping, blood-red plant like nothing ever created by nature confronting him.

"I am getting jumpy," Colonel Glinka growled. "A little jumpy in my business is good, but too much is bad for the health." And he went, straightway, and closed the back door of the conservatory and dragged a heavy rack of trailing orchids in front of it, humming a furious little march from The Guardsman as he worked.

"You must know," he said loudly, "that I do not altogether believe you, Stefanik, when you imply that you have abandoned this research. Nor will they. For who, then, are these degenerate wretches who stand upon the hills and gawk at us, and why must you feed them? I know that they were not created by you, but it is possible that they are paid to be your guinea pigs. Perhaps you are all in the pay of the British. Am I right?"

He listened. There was no answer.

Completing his examination of the conservatory, he entered the main villa and searched it thoroughly, as he had been trained to do, looking in every cupboard and closet and under the beds.

When he had exhausted these hiding places, he left by the front door and closed it after him, with a narrow, jamming wedge that he had made of half a lead pencil.

There were many places to hide in the garden, but Colonel Glinka took them one by one, glancing behind him from time to time in order to make certain that he was not being followed around and around the house in a grim sort of Maypole dance.

"I know that you are out here, Comrade," he said.

Presently he had arrived back where he had started, sweating profusely, and was about to retrace the entire circuit when he caught a glimpse of something moving in the undergrowth of patchouli near the gate. He aimed the Malacca cane and pressed a part of its handle with his thumb. A bullet whined off the steel gatepost.

"Stop there, my friend!" he commanded.

Abdul Hakkim ben Salazar slowly rose from the bushes with his hands high above his head.

"You got me, Joe," he said.

The gate was wide open; Stefanik's route of escape now painfully obvious.

Colonel Glinka stared thoughtfully up at the darkening ridges where the sun set in that sanguinary glory observable only in these latitudes, and the dusk crept swiftly up from the seaward-reaching ravines.

"So," Colonel Glinka said. "That is where he has gone, thinking to elude me forever. But you—" he waggled the cane at Abdul, who was already shaking his head in the negative—"will lead me to him. You know his habits, and, what is more, you are almost certainly familiar with every hiding place on this island, since it is your whim to be chased all over it by the females."

"Too dark, Effendi," Abdul said. "If we go out now, they will not only chase us; they will catch us, for they are able to see very well in the dark."

"Who will catch us?"

"These people. They are worse than Tuaregs. For all I know, they may be descended from the Tuaregs, and everyone knows that a Tuareg would as soon cut a man's throat as kiss the hem of his burnoose."

"So now they are Tuaregs." Colonel Glinka nodded, with a slow, ferocious smile. "Yet you have hinted that they are the spawn of Comrade Stefanik's genius, the children of genetical science, stamped with 'Made in the Seychelles' upon their bottoms. Perhaps they were grown in the conservatory, from Tuareg seed."

Abdul grimaced. "I do not remember saying that, though sometimes I say things that I don't remember later. Perhaps they are not Tuaregs, then. To tell the truth, they were already living here when I came to work for the Sidi Doctor Stephens, and so naturally I thought that he had made them, for there were no people upon this island in the old days. Only the seabirds and a few wild goats, perhaps."

Colonel Glinka clasped his hand to his forehead. "Stop, stop, or I shall go mad!"

Abdul Hakkim obediently sat down and crossed his legs, starting to