fangs.
For a full two minutes the struggle continued.
Boots had one white demon squeezed tight to his chest, the smothering weight of its flank protecting his face. His fingers were buried in the throat of a second But he could not breathe wet fur, and the jaws of a third enemy were worrying at his right arm muscles. From shoulder to heel he felt them tearing and biting.
Taken at a tremendous disadvantage, blind, smothered and over-matched, Boots was in a very fair way to be torn to pieces when, suddenly, another rush of feet came plunging through the rain.
He did not hear them come. The first Boots knew of a change in conditions was that most of his snarling, growling tormentors had inexplicably ceased to either snarl, growl or bite. Then he realized that the weight of them also was off him.
The dirty cowards! They had given up the fight and run!
That left only the pair in his actual grip. With a gasp of fierce joy, Boots tightened his hold, rolled off from Kennedy-who, he greatly feared, was by this time smothered in the mud-and got his knees under him. Incidentally, he clamped the head of one kicking, white monster under the knees. The one whose throat he had been squeezing had ceased to struggle and he dropped it.
With his face free at last of the blinding fur, Boots knelt up straight and looked for the rest of the pack.
Though rain still fell in torrents, the lightning's illumination was becoming more spasmodic, and Boots was hardly sure that what he saw was real.
Was he actually surrounded by a circle of strange, tall, white men? At each recurrent flash he seemed to see them. Tall men-inhumanly tall-the rain sluiced off bare, gleaming shoulders-the rounded muscles shone wet and white-their faces were stern, pallid, eyes fixed on him-their hands waved-they were pointing at him.
Through his Celtic brain flashed a wild suspicion that there stood the very beasts which had attacked him. Werewolves-creatures neither man nor brute, but able to take the form of either.
Under his knee, the white thing he held there wriggled feebly. He had already strangled one. Here was another whose diabolical tricks he could stop.
Dropping his hands, Boots shifted to find its throat and keeled over quietly in the squelching, trampled grass. His last conscious emotion was self-scorn that he hadn't finished the 'manwolf' before, like any common weakling, he died of his many wounds.
'Cheer up, or I'll think you hard to content. 'Tis the wonder of wonders, Mr. Kennedy, that they've let us live at all, and Biornson's face fair ruined by the rock you hove at him.'
Swathed in bandages, lying on a grass-stuffed pallet in the cubical, brick-walled chamber which for three days had been their prison, Boots looked kindly reproof at his fellow captive.
Biornson himself had just paid them a brief call, and after his leaving, Kennedy's sullen countenance appeared more somber than usual. Now he stared at the Irishman with the shadow of some strange dread in his eyes.
'Tlapallan!' he muttered softly. 'Tlapallan! Did he really say Tlapallan, or did I dream it?'
'He did that,' the other confirmed. 'And why, may I ask, should his saying it fill you with despair? It's a fine, hard word, I'll admit, but I'd never get it off my tongue like Biornson did, or you either, but — '
'Tlapallan!' Kennedy repeated it as if the other had not spoken. 'He called this place Tlapallan-and if that is true-but it can't be! Quetzalcoatl-Tlapallan-no, no; one can't believe the impossible-and yet — '
His head drooped and his voice lowered to an indistinguishable mutter.
Here was a phase of the older man's character entirely new to Boots, who eyed him with an amazement bordering on alarm. Their position was puzzling enough in all conscience, but Kennedy's manner and speech of the last few minutes hinted of some new riddle, some potentiality for harm in a mere word which Boots found vaguely disturbing.
For three days they had been held close prisoners. The cell of their confinement, bare, built of yellow polished bricks, or rather tiles, was in the daytime lighted to a golden gloom by one small, round window, offering a barren view across a brick-paved alley to a wall of highly polished white stone. As for what that alley might lead to, or what might lie beyond the wall, they knew practically nothing.
This place was no part of the hacienda. The experience of Kennedy, who had been in his senses when brought here, told them that. They were, it was almost equally sure, somewhere beyond that pass which Boots had so eagerly desired to explore. Here ended their certainties and began a mystery beside which that of the ravine faded to commonplace insignificance.
After the calling off of the white hounds-in sober sense, and remembering the beast they had seen in the patio, Boots dismissed his thought of 'werewolves' as nonsense-Kennedy had staggered to his feet. Though half- strangled from being crushed in the mud, he was otherwise unhurt.
No sooner was he up, however, than his arms were seized, a bandage was whipped over his eyes, and, the grip of those so much stronger than he that struggle was futile, he was dragged helplessly away.
Like a child between two grown folk, he could hear the men who held him murmuring together over his head. 'Great lumbering louts!' he said viciously, in describing the affair. 'They must have been even larger than you are, Boots, and goodness knows you're big' enough. They went muttering along like a couple of silly fools- talked the same gibberish as that girl with the opals. When I tried to ask a question, one of the brutes struck me in the face.'
He had expected to be taken back to the ravine, and when, having walked a considerable distance, mostly down-hill, they came to a place where his feet found hard pavement under them, he at first took it for the courtyard of the hacienda.
As the march continued, however, turning corners, descending interminable flights of stairs, passing through covered ways-he knew them by the echoes and the fact that they were out of the rain-down yet more open stairs, and still onward, he became hopelessly bewildered.
At last, when he had began to believe the downward march would last forever, his arms were released and he was given a push that sent him headlong.
There was the closing of a door, and silence. He tore the bandage from his eyes. Darkness was, all around. Fearing to move, lest he fall into some chain, Kennedy remained crouched for another seemingly endless period, till dawn light replaced his imaginary chasms with the desolate, bare cell they still inhabited.
He was then alone, but later Boots joined him, being carried in on a stretcher, one mass of bandages from head to foot. Had he come from the operating-room of a city hospital, these dressings could have been no more skillfully adjusted, but the stretcher-bearers differed somewhat from the orderlies of such an establishment.
Boots, being then and for several hours afterward unconscious, did not see them, but Kennedy described them after his own characteristic fashion. Savages, he said, plumed, beaded, half-clad, and barbarous. Let their skin be as white as they pleased, they couldn't fool him. Nothing but buck Indians of a particularly muscular and light-hued type, but Indians and no better.
His tone inferred that an Indian was a kind of subhuman creature, whose pretensions to equality with himself should be firmly suppressed. But, though their physical proportions were not comparable to those of the giants who had called off the hounds, they were sufficiently stalwart, and Kennedy reserved his opinion of them for Boots' ears.
One who spoke fairly intelligible English instructed him to care for the 'big red man,' and informed him that if the patient failed to recover the fault would be his, Kennedy's, since the 'sons of Tlapotlazenan' had done their part. He hinted, moreover, that these same offspring of an alphabetical progenitor would regard losing the patient as a personal affront, and probably take it out of the one responsible in a very painful manner.
The stretcher-bearers then departed, and, with one exception, that cell had received no visible callers since. Food and drink were set inside the door at night by a jailer whom they never saw. Refuse of the previous twenty- four hours was removed in the same manner.
Such conditions might not, one would think, be conducive to the rapid recovery of a man whose flesh had been ripped to shreds in a dozen places. But Boots seemed to be doing rather well. He awoke clear-headed, had developed no fever, and, though practically unable to move, he insisted that this was due more to a superfluity of bandages than the wounds they covered. Kennedy, however, perhaps recalling the stretcher-bearer's warning, would allow none of them to be displaced, and waited on his companion with a solicitude that astonished the recipient.
Late in the afternoon of the third day they heard a trampling of feet on the bricks outside. The door opened,
