Hawk Carse watched him walk to the forward end of the cabin; and, after a little while, he sighed. He could be patient. He was still alive, and he would stay alive, he felt. A chance would come—he did not know how or when; it perhaps would not be soon; it might not come until he had been delivered to Ku Sui, but it would arrive. And then....
Then there would be a reckoning!
The deceptively mild gray eyes of the Hawk were veiled by their lids.
ight had settled over the ranch by the time the Star Devil and Judd's accompanying ship were in the satellite's atmosphere. It was the rare, deep, moonless night of Iapetus, when the only light came from the far, cold, distant stars that hung faintly twinkling in the great void above. Occasionally, the tiny world was lit clearly at night by the rays of Saturn, reflected from one of the eight other satellites; and occasionally, too, there was no night, the central sun of the solar universe sending its distance-weakened shafts of fire to light one side of the globe while ringed Saturn gilded the other.
But this season was the one of dark, full-bodied nights; and it was into the hush of their blackness that the Star Devil and her attendant brigand ship glided.
Below, on the surface of the Satellite, glowed the pin-prick of a camp-fire. When the ships were some fifteen thousand feet up, Judd's orders caused long light-rays to shaft out from the Star Devil and finger the ground. They rested on the ranch house and then passed on to douse with white the figures of three men standing by the fire. Through the electelscope the pirate chief saw them wave their arms in greeting.
Ten minutes later the two ships nestled down close together a hundred yards or more from the ranch clearing, and Judd said to his mate, standing next to him:
"We'll have a little celebration to-night. Break out a few cases of alkite and send three of the boys to the ranch's storeroom after meat for the cook to barbecue."