"Come on outside, Frenchy," snapped Rufus angrily. "I want to talk to you." The amazed pirate followed him into the chilled gloom of the Cerberusian landscape.
"She hates me!" he explained hurriedly. "And it's necessary that she keeps on hating me. Sometimes she tries to kill me, and she always keeps plotting—"
"Oh yeh?" grated Frenchy Logrieux, bringing his big doughy hands up in a strangling motion. "Whyn't ye give her this, Doc? The best lookin' wench in the world, won't do that to Frenchy. I'll fix her up good and proper, Doc, if ye'll only get me back to a little asteroid I know of—"
"Keep your hands off her!" commanded Rufus, shuddering a bit as the scarred hands fell on his metallin shirt. "And we'll see about the other."
Shaved and freshly clothed, Frenchy Logrieux was handsome in a dark furtive way. His gallantry and thinly veiled compliments seemed to amuse Alyce Marshall, yet they drove Rufus Thallin into a silent fury. He resolved that the space-flyer would leave Cerberus without Frenchy Logrieux, and that was all there was to it.
He needed a fresh water supply for the space-flyer. It had landed in a big valley of tremendous naked rocks. Each night it rained on Cerberus and the water flowed into a large crystal pool at the other end of the valley. Frenchy showed him a path leading down to the water.
"Ought to do, after it's distilled," commented Rufus, bending over to examine the chemical rings deposited on the rock by higher water levels. It was Frenchy's opportunity. Rufus saw the swart features in the pool's reflection, then felt the shock of a blow that hurled him down into the deep pool.
He sank swiftly, for the water was not as heavy as that of earth. Long arms pumped like pistons, stirring up filmy clouds of white silt from the submarine floor. But he quit struggling. No use trying to swim in that thin fluid. He'd have to climb!
Lungs near to bursting, he jammed his hands into the crevices of the precipitous walls and began to pull upward. His fingers tore on knife-edged formations of lime and silicate, leaving crimson smears in the water below, but he kept climbing.
At last his head broke water and he gulped in precious lungfuls of rarefied atmosphere. Frenchy Logrieux was nowhere in sight. The thin air was being split by a clap of thunder. Rocket blasts!