"We go. We haven't enough men to beat them if they should get inside
the walls."
Smith brushed his small military mustache, his only sign of
nervousness. Tex saw him start, saw him touch the bristles wonderingly,
then finger his skin, his tunic, his hair.
"Dry," he said, and looked at the fog. "My Lord, dry!"
"Yes," returned Tex grimly. "Kuna brought it back. He couldn't get wet
even when he tried to drink. Something that eats water. Even if the net
holds, we'll die of thirst before we're relieved."
He turned in sudden fury on the distant figure of the woman and emptied
his gun futilely at her swift-moving body.
"Save your ammunition," cautioned Smith, and cried out, sharply.
Tex saw it, the tiny green thing that had fastened on his wrist. He
pulled his knife and lunged forward, but already the snake had grown
incredibly. Smith tore at it vainly.
Tex got in one slash, felt his knife slip futilely on rubbery flesh of
enormous contractile power. Then the venom began to work. A mad look
twisted the officer's face. His gun rose and began to spit bullets.
Grimly, Tex shot the gun out of Smith's hand, and struck down with the
gun-barrel. Smith fell. But already the snake had thrown a coil round
his neck and shifted its grip to the jugular.
Tex sawed at the rubbery flesh. Beaten as though with a heavy whip, he
stood at last with the body still writhing in his hand.
Captain Smith was dead, with the snake's jaws buried in his throat.
Dimly Tex heard the mellow notes of the war-chief's horn. The sky
cleared of the remnants of the suicide squad. The ground attackers
vanished into the swamps. And then the woman whirled her mount sharply
and sped straight for the fort.
Puffs of smoke burst around her but she was not hit. Low over the
parapet she came, so that Tex saw the pupils of her pale-green eyes,
the vital flow of muscles beneath pearly skin.
He fired, but his gun was empty.
She flung one hand high in derisive salute, and was gone. And Breska
spoke softly behind Tex.
"You're in command now. And there are just the fourteen of us left."
* * * * *
Tex stood staring down at the dead and dying caught in the rusty net.
He felt suddenly tired; so tired that just standing and looking seemed
too much drain on his wasted strength.
He didn't want to fight any more. He wanted to drink, to sleep, and
forget.
There was only one possible end. His mouth and throat were dry with
this strange new dryness, his thirst intensified a hundredfold. The
swamp men had only to wait. In another week they could take the fort
without losing a man.
Even with the reduced numbers of the defenders, this fiendish thing
would make their remaining water supply inadequate. And then another
thought struck him.
Suppose it stayed there, so that even if by some miracle the garrison
held out, it made holding the fort impossible no matter how many men,
or how much water there was.
The men were looking at him. Tex let the dead snake drop to the catwalk
and vanish under a pall of scarlet beetles.
"Clean up this mess," said Tex automatically. Breska's black eyes were
brilliant and very hard. Why didn't the men move?
"Go on," Tex snapped. "I'm ranking officer here now."
The men turned to their task with a queer reluctance. One of them, a
big scar-faced hulk with a mop of hair far redder far than Tex's, stood
long after the others had gone, watching him out of narrowed green eyes.
Tex went slowly down into the compound. There were no breaks in the
net, but another few days of rust would finish them.
What was the use of fighting on? If they left now, they might get out
alive. Headquarters could send more men, retake Fort Washington.
But Headquarters didn't have many men. And the woman with the eyes like
pale-green flames wouldn't waste any time.
Some falling body had crushed a beetle-bomb caught in the net. The
scarlet things were falling like drops of blood on Kuna's body. Tex
smiled crookedly. In a few seconds there'd be nothing left of the
flesh Kuna had cherished so dearly.
And then Tex rubbed freckled hands over his tired blue eyes, wondering
if he were at last delirious.
The beetles weren't eating Kuna.
They swirled around him restlessly, scenting meat, but they didn't
touch him. His face showed parchment dry under the whorls of fog. And
suddenly Tex understood.
"It's because he's dry. They won't touch anything dry."
Recklessly, he put his own hand down in the scarlet stream. It divided
and flowed around it, disdaining the parched flesh.
Tex laughed, a brassy laugh with an edge of hysteria in it. Now
that they were going to die anyway, they didn't have to worry about
beetle-bombs.
Feet, a lot of them, clumped up to where he knelt. The red-haired giant
with the green eyes stood over him, the men in a sullen, hard-faced
knot behind him.
The red-haired man, whose name was Bull, had a gun in his hand. He said
gruffly,
"We're leavin', Tex."