"Stay there!" he sang in answer. "Not nearer—just there and I can't lose! . . . It isn't in the cards to lose, Carlin—"
Yet his mind knew he could not win. The cobra's head and hood recoiled with each blow. It took Skag's highest speed—as an outfielder takes a drive bare-handed, his hands giving with the ball. The head moved past all swiftness, even the speed greatest swordsmen know. It was like something that laughed. Before the whirring lakri, the cobra head played like a flung veil between and through and around.
. . . So, for many seconds. The grey magnetic haze was a dirty brown now. The man was seeing through blood. He could not make a blow tell. He could not see Carlin. . . . She was not talking to him. . . . She was calling upon some strange name. . . . His arm was numbed again—like a blow from a leaden sling. There was a suffocating knot in his throat and the smell of blood in his head . . . that old smell of blood he had known when his father whipped him long ago. . . .
He tried to chop straight down to break in upon the king's rhythm. It answered quicker than his thought. . . . Yes, it was Malcolm M'Cord, she was calling. . . . He saw her like a ghost now. She was utterly tall—her arms raised! . . . Then he heard a rifle crack—then a breath of moisture upon his face—the sealed bud smashed before him—the rest whipping the ground.
Skag went to Carlin who had fallen, but he was pulled off abruptly.
"I say, Lad, let me have a look at you. . . . The child's right enough. Let her rest—"
The grim face was before him, two steady hands at work on him, pulling back his collar, taking one of Skag's hands after another—looking even between the fingers, feeling his thighs.
"I can't find that he cut you, Lad," he said gently.
Skag pushed him away. Carlin was moaning.
"I'm thinking your lad's sound, deerie," M'Cord called to her. "A minute more, to be sure." . . .