"The bloody fool! Don't he realize that with machine-guns and grenades we can just take his platinum and walk off with it?"
Nelson turned angrily on the evilly eager little Cockney. "We'll do nothing of the sort! If we do agree to fight for this man, we'll—"
Suddenly Nelson stopped short, startled and shaken by abrupt remembrance. Remembrance of his weird dream of only an hour before, the dream in which human and unhuman voices had spoken in his mind!
"They should all die now, little sister! For he even now seeks them out to hire them as our foes!"
That alien, unhuman mental voice — had it been real after all? For Shan Kar had just provisionally hired them to fight enemies of whom they knew nothing! Into what mysterious struggle were they entering?
Chapter II
STRANGE BEASTS
The haunting memory of fantastic nightmare still oppressed Eric Nelson as he sat moodily late that night in the single drink-shop surviving in the battered village.
He was bone-weary from the long day's urgent work of rounding up pack-ponies. That and habit were why he had insisted to Li Kin that they stop at this mud-walled tavern whose fat Cantonese proprietor had somehow hoarded a few cases of imitation Scotch.
"Sloan and the others will need us to help pack," murmured Li Kin. He looked tired, his fine eyes blinking behind the thick spectacles. "We should go."