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minutes.”
    “Aw, Smitty—”
    “Don’t be a dope. Why should you go on board when there may be fifteen or twenty guys with guns wanting nothing better than to cut you down?”
    “Well, you’re going, aren’t you?”
    “There’s maybe a pound difference in our weights, and an inch or two difference in our sizes,” the giant pointed out. “Here you stay!”
    “Oh, all right,” said Nellie.
    Smitty was suspicious of the obedience.
    “And don’t try to pull any fast ones!” he warned.
    Then he went to the boat.

    If he had crossed the empty yard, in broad daylight, he’d have been sure to be seen, so he didn’t do this. He went to that four-story, empty building belonging to the yard, took out a pane of glass under cover of the shed’s shelter, and crawled inside.
    When he emerged again, he was at the water’s edge, down the length of the building, right beside the boat’s rusty hull. A cargo door was open in the side of the iron cliff. He slid through that and into the thing.
    There was a lookout, all right. It just happened that for a couple of minutes he had been engaged in loading and lighting his pipe, being careful to keep his head turned from the cargo door so smoke wouldn’t drift out and advertise that the supposedly abandoned hull was tenanted.
    So he didn’t see Smitty. Not till too late, that is.
    He turned with his mouth gaping in surprise so that the pipe dropped out; then he tried to yell as a vast and unexpected figure loomed between him and daylight.
    Smitty hit him!
    The giant’s horsepower was such that he didn’t have to bother to hit anybody with care or skill. He just hit. And the person on the receiving end stayed hit for a long time. A favorite blow of his was to smack straight down on top of a man’s head with his fist, like a sledge hitting the end of a stake. He did this, almost negligently, to the lookout. The man slithered to the rusted plates of the cargo hold and lay quite still.
    Smitty went deeper into the gloom. Voices sounded from the stern. He groped back there. A bulkhead, closed, was between him and the voices. He could hear the voices, but not words.
    He put the little pocket microphone of his belt radio to the bulkhead, clicked on a tiny amplifying combination, then was able to hear the words, too.
    “No matter how you look at it, we have to get that crowd working for Benson,” somebody was saying. “We have to get Benson, too, before he gets to the Negro River.”
    “Yeah?” came a sardonic reply. “That sounded easy when we were in Brazil. But we get up here and we hear a little more about the guy, and it don’t sound so easy any more. He’s a one-man army, I guess. And the gang working for him is no pushover, either. Even that little blonde gal is said to be a tornado when she gets going.”
    “Hooey!” said the first voice. “Any time I can’t handle a dame, especially one no bigger’n a half-pint of beer, I’ll go into an old ladies’ home.”
    Smitty growled deep in his throat. Whenever anything threatened little Nellie, the giant got as angry as an elephant defending its young.
    “Well, there’s no use debating it,” came a third voice. “It’s got to be done. That crowd calling themselves Justice something-or-other could make a lot of trouble, so they have to be eliminated.”
    “How about those damned little Indians?”
    “We can handle them, all right. But we won’t even bother with ’em unless they get in our way. They’re after Benson, too, I guess. Maybe they’ll do some of our work for us.”
    It was quite an interesting conversation, Smitty decided.
    “Where’s this Heber?” growled one of the voices.
    “He’s at Benson’s, now. Can’t get at him till he leaves the place. It’s harder to get into that Bleek Street joint than to break out of Leavenworth.”
    A very interesting conversation, Smitty thought. But then came words that were much more interesting, but in a reverse kind of manner. Because they didn’t come