They had halted on the edge of an open glade, ringed with young pines in fullest plumage.
Tressa was standing very straight and still in a strange, supple, agonised attitude, her left forearm across her eyes, her right hand clenched, her slender body slightly twisted to the left.
The men gazed pallidly at her with tense, set faces, knowing that the girl was in terrible mental conflict against another mind—a powerful, sinister mind which was seeking to grasp her thoughts and control them.
Minute after minute sped: the girl never moved, locked in her psychic duel with this other brutal mind,—beating back its terrible thought-waves which were attacking her, fighting for mental supremacy, struggling in silence with an unseen adversary whose mental dominance meant death.
Suddenly her cry rang out sharply in the moonlight, and then, all at once, a man in white stood there in the lustre of the moon—a young, graceful man dressed in white flannels and carrying on his right arm what seemed to be a long white cloak.
Instantly the girl was transformed from a living statue into a lithe, supple, lightly moving thing that passed swiftly to the west of the glade, keeping the young man in white facing the wind, which was blowing and tossing the plumy young pines.
“So it is you, young man, with whom I have been wrestling here under the moon of the only God!” she said in a strange little voice, all vibrant and metallic with menacing laughter.
“It is I, Keuke Mongol,” replied the young man in white, tranquilly; yet his words came as though he were tired and out of breath, and the hand he raised to touch his small black moustache trembled as if from physical exhaustion.
“Yarghouz!” she exclaimed. “Why did I not know you there on the golf links, Assassin of the Seventh Tower? And why do you come here with your shroud over your arm and hidden under it, in your right hand, a flask full of death?”
He said, smiling: