This brought quick results. He was summoned pre-emptorily to the captain's office; and, knowing that the company commander would not dare to have him assassinated there, he went. In that office there were a dozen people; it was evident that the captain intended this rebuke to be a warning to all upstarts, forever.
"Lieutenant Traska Gannel, I have had my eye upon you and your subversive activities for some time," the captain ordered. "Now, purely as a matter of form, and in accordance with Paragraph 5, Section 724 of General Regulations, you may offer whatever you have of explanation before I reduce you to the ranks for insubordination."
"I have a lot to say," Kinnison replied, coolly. "I don't know what your spies have reported, but to whatever it was I would like to add that having this meeting here as you are having it proves that you are as fat in the head as you are in the belly—"
"Silence! Seize him, men!" the captain commanded, fiercely. He was not really fat. He had only a scant inch of equatorial bulge; but that small surplusage was a sore point indeed. "Disarm him!"
"The first man to move dies in his tracks," Kinnison countered; his coldly venomous tone holding the troopers motionless. He wore two hand weapons more or less similar to DeLameters, and now his hands rested lightly upon their butts. "I cannot be disarmed until after I have been disrated, as you know very well; and that will never happen. For, if you demote me, I will take an appeal, as is my right, to the colonel's court, and there I will prove that you are stupid, inefficient, cowardly, and unfit generally to command. You really are, and you know it. Your discipline is lax and full of favoritism; your rewards and punishments are assessed, not by logic, but by whim, passion, and personal bias. Any court that can be named would set you down into the ranks, where you belong, and would give me your place. If this is insubordination and if you want to make something out of it, you pussy-gutted, pusillanimous, brainless tub of lard, cut in your jets!"
The maligned officer half rose, white-knuckled hands gripping the arms of his chair, then sank back craftily. He realized now that he had blundered; he was in no position to face the rigorous investigation which Gannel's accusation would bring on. But there was a way out. This could now be made a purely personal matter, in which a duel would be de rigueur. And in Boskonian dueling the superior officer, not the challenged, had the choice of weapons. He was a master of the saber; he had outpointed Gannel regularly in the regimental games. Therefore he choked down his wrath and:
"These personal insults, gratuitous and false as they are, take the matter out of military channels," he declared smoothly. "Meet me, then, tomorrow, half an hour before sunset, in the Place of Swords. It will be with sabers."
"Accepted." Kinnison meticulously followed the ritual. "To first blood or to the death?" This question was superfluous—the stigma of the Lensman's epithets, delivered before such a large group, could not possibly be expunged by the mere letting of a little blood.
"To the death"—curtly.
"So be it, O Captain!" Kinnison saluted punctiliously, executed a snappy about-face, and marched stiffly out of the room.