Torcred realized that if he lost time his psychological advantage might go with it. He snapped at the two remaining panzer-men, his voice rasping strangely from his dry throat, "Quick! Do you want to live?"
They stared at him dumbly; it was almost beyond their power to grasp that this bloodstained, primitive being had got inside their defenses, that the far-ranging guns whose breeches thrust into the compartment were useless.
Torcred took a step toward them, swinging his bar ominously. The man who was clutching his right arm asked sullenly, "What are you? What do you want?"
"I am Torcred," and he added with brief thought, "the Terrible. And we want very little from you—food, water, weapons from your stores. You can keep your lumbering panzer; we've got no use for it." The two men exchanged fearful glances, sure now they had to do with a mad creature. He gave them no chance to think it out. "Right now, we want to look around in peace. Ladna! Find something and tie them up."
The girl, dagger in hand, opened the door of the rear compartment; a whimper of terror came from the darkened interior, where two women and an indeterminate number of offspring hugged one another in paralyzed panic. Ladna spoke to them with a soothing softness that amazed Torcred, rummaged inside and came out with a coil of strong wire. The solitary panzer, an economy in itself, carried a little of everything.
Under the menace of Torcred's club, the terrorized panzer-men submitted. Then the two invaders found the machine's provisions, and satisfied first their raging thirst and afterwards the hunger that had been forgotten in the face of the greater need for water. But Ladna broke off eating to bandage Torcred's slashed shoulder with strips torn from a gray garment.
It was then he remembered to scold her. "What did you mean," he demanded between bites, "by rushing in here, after I distinctly told you to keep in the clear?"
Her blue answering gaze held an impudence that was a new thing to him. "I saw you had stopped it, Torcred the Terrible, so I came. And—where would you have been if I hadn't?" Her strong slender fingers closed for a moment painfully on his wounded shoulder.
He was silent, remembering with a queer excitement what her warning cry had been. "Torcred!" not "Terrapin!" ...