The two brown men jumped as though they had been shot, and their faces turned a milky chocolate with fear. They both shivered violently, and then one, the taller of the two, gasped something in a tongue Dawson had never heard. Both of them spun around and leaped frantically toward the door. They jerked open the door and went through it like a couple of brown streaks of lightning.
Wild hope leaped up in Dawson, but it lived for no more than three or four seconds. From beyond the open door came snarls like those of a trapped and wounded tiger. Almost instantly the snarls were followed by the unmistakable thuds of something crashing against human flesh. Back into the room came the two brown men, like a couple of acrobats doing back flips. They both hit the floor and went slithering across it to bang up against the opposite wall. In a crazy, abstract sort of way Dawson noticed that the one holding the gun still clung to it.
Then Dawson took his eyes off the two and looked toward the door opening. The door had been flung wide, and standing framed in it was a giant figure. A death giant, no less, for he was unmistakably Japanese. He was positively huge, but he was Jap from the top of his close-shaven head all the way down to his splayed-toed feet. A savage leer twisted his thick lips back over his buck teeth. And in the slits that were his eyes was a fiendish gleam that made Dawson swallow in spite of himself, and his icy heart start downward like an express elevator.
For a long moment the two air aces locked eyes with the giant figure. And then the Jap's shoulders shook with silent mirth.
"Yes, it is very amusing to scare chickens, and watch them flee," he said in halting English, and threw a look of scorn at the two brown men cringing on the floor over by the far wall. "But we Japanese are not chickens. We are masters. All others are the chickens. We ... do this!"
The Jap suddenly spit out the last, and with his big yellowish brown hands he went through the motions of slapping a chicken down on the block and chopping off its head. Freddy Farmer gasped in spite of himself. The Jap heard him, burned him with his eyes, and once again his huge shoulders shook with silent mirth.
"You do not like to lose your head and neck, Captain Farmer?" he said, and almost pleasantly, too. "Then you were a fool to come to Oahu. But you are a fool in many things. Both of you are fools! You will both agree, as you die!"