"Your life is worth everything, now. Mine, nothing. Let me subject myself—"
He waved her away, and making no answer, turned to the Olema.
"Hast thou, O Bara Miyan," he asked in a steady voice, "a swordsman who can with one blow split a man from crown to jaw?"
"Thou speakest to such a one, White Sheik!"
"Take, then, a simitar of the keenest, and cut me down!"
The old man turned, took from the hand of a horseman a long, curved blade of razor-keenness and with a heavy back. The Master glanced significantly at Brodeur, who knelt by the switchboard with one steady hand on a brass lever, the other on the control of a complex ray-focussing device.
Toward Bara Miyan the Master advanced across the turf. He came close.
For a moment the two men eyed each other silently.
"Strike, son of the Prophet!" cried the Master.
Up whirled the Olema's blade, flickering in the sun. The metallic click of the brass switch synchronized with that sweep; Brodeur shifted the reflector by the fraction of a degree.
Bara Miyan's arm grew rigid, quivered a second, then dropped inert. From his paralyzed hand the simitar fell to the grass. Brodeur threw off the ray; and the Master, unsmiling, stooped, picked up the blade and with a salaam handed it back, hilt-first, to the old man.