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redskins where they levered at the travois and its burden.
    A second later saw complete tumult, with Indians flying everywhere, the two wolves on top of the ridge scrabbling frantically to maintain their positions as suddenly they were obliged to take the full weight of the clock, the leader of the party yelling and screaming where he had fallen to the stony slope, and Silberhutte himself, completely off-balance, hands still tied behind him, slipping and sliding diagonally down the steep incline away from the havoc he had created.
    To add to the confusion, with a snapping of thongs and a rending of hide, the clock suddenly broke free. It toppled over and stood for a moment on its head, then crashed down and outward, end over end, in a series of leaps and bounds back the way it had come. Fearing that it would dislodge his sheltering boulder which would then crush him, de Marigny immediately ascended out of the clock's path. This in turn made him visible to the frantic wolf-warriors.
    They saw him — and at once the air rang with their savage cries of fury and outrage. He got the impression that they half-blamed him for their present problems.
    Quickly rising higher still, de Marigny took in the scene below at a glance. The clock had finally come to rest face-up where its base had jammed against a huge boulder. Already three of the Indians were scrambling down the slope after it. Two more were picking their way toward a wide crevasse. But where was Silberhutte?
    De Marigny's heart almost leaped into his mouth when he saw his friend's predicament. For the Texan was stretched out full-length on the perilous slope, face-down and motionless, his head and shoulders already hanging over the lip of the crevasse — and that crevasse yawned at least a hundred feet deep! The toes of the Texan's boots were dug into loose shale which threatened at every moment to slide him headfirst into space, and there was nothing he could do — no move he could make — without precipitating his own death.
    De Marigny glanced longingly once more at the time-clock, glared at the Indians picking their way down to it, then turned his attention back to Silberhutte. The shale was beginning to slip .. .
    Suddenly the Texan felt the whole unstable surface moving beneath him. He held his breath, gazed straight down into the abyss, willed himself to remain perfectly still where he had fallen, and offered up a silent prayer to those lucky stars which had ever guided and protected him. The movement beneath him subsided, but not before he had moved out another inch or two over the lip of the crevasse.
    He could hear the wolf-warriors cautiously approaching him from the rear but dared not turn his head to look back. If they took him a second time, then in all likelihood he'd end up in Ithaqua's clutches anyway. The pit was greatly preferable to that . . . but the fire of life burned bright in Hank Silberhutte, and it was not a spark easily extinguished.
    Now he could feel fingers fumbling at his booted feet, could hear the hoarse breathing of the heathens where they crouched fearfully behind him, precariously perched on the shale. Then - impossible, miraculous sound - he heard a cry from close at hand:
    `Hang on, Hank! Just another second!'
    De Marigny? De Marigny! . . .
    Yet even as hope surged up in the Texan, in the same moment he felt the shale move again, and this time there was no stopping it. He slid forward, heard the frenzied shrieks of the redmen as they also began to slide, cursed his useless hands that were bound behind him, finally plummeted into air filled with falling shale fragments.
    Only at that very last second did the Warlord close his eyes - for no man likes to see death hurtling upon him - but in the next moment he opened them again as his chin sank into fur and jarred against solid flesh beneath.
    Slimly muscular legs wrapped about his waist like a vice as, almost in his ear, that same triumphant voice shouted: `Got you, Hank!'
    And de