The four steeds dashed away into the dusky gloom of the grotesque toadstool forest. Ethan ran wildly after them, but in a moment they were out of sight. The cries of Chiri receded into the distance.
His dark face contorted, his gray eyes wild, Ethan ran back around to the front of the little house. The last of the white warriors there had fallen, and Hank Martin and the others were coming running to meet him.
"Those red devils have got Chiri and Kim Idim!" Ethan cried hoarsely. "While we fought here, they slipped around and into the back of the house. They rode toward the west—we've got to follow!"
"Of course!" shouted Pedro Lopez fiercely, starting instantly forward. "Por Dios, they'll regret the day they dared molest the friends of a cavalier of Spain!"
Swain and John Crewe also started unhesitatingly forward with Ethan. But Ptah held them back, the little Egyptian's dark, crafty face urgent in expression.
"Wait!" he cried. "If they were mounted, we cannot soon overtake them. And by rushing blindly after them without knowing where we go, we shall but run ourselves into peril."
"Ptah's right," drawled Hank Martin keenly. "We need to get hosses somewhere. And we need to find out where they'll have likely taken Kim Idim and the gal."
Ethan saw the force of their reasoning, yet every fiber in him quivered with the urge to rush at once through the toadstool forest after the red abductors.
For two long years Ethan had dreamed of seeing Chiri once more. And now, when that dream had come true, when he had even held her for a moment in his arms, she had been snatched from him to an unguessable fate.
"I think one of them white warriors ain't quite dead yet," Hank Martin was saying. "We might larn somethin' from him."
They hurried back to the dozen sprawled bodies on the trampled grass. The lanky trapper turned one of them over. It was a warrior whose breast bled from two gaping wounds, but whose eyes were still open.
The dying man glared up at them in hate, as they bent over him. Ethan spoke to him, using the language of Tzar which he had learned in the age a million years before this, and which he hoped was still spoken in this further time.
"Where did you and your Masters come from?" he asked tensely.
"From the city Luun—dog!" gasped the dying man, in a tongue much the same as that which Ethan had used.
"Where is Luun? And who rules there, you whites or the red Masters?" Ethan exclaimed.
"The Masters rule, of course," muttered the Luunian warrior. "Ever since they came to Earth a hundred thousand years ago, the Masters have been the rightful rulers of this world and we humans serve them willingly in our cities, of which Luun is the greatest.
"The city Luun," the gasping voice continued, "lies a half-day's march from here across the great plain that stretches west of this forest. It was from Luun that we came today, to capture the old man and girl who the Masters had heard were living alone in this forest."
The Luunian raised himself by a convulsive effort, and his dimming eyes glared up at them in undying hate.
"I have told you the way to Luun,
