CHAPTER IV

SPACE THE HEALER

There were a hundred ways to build hate in the mind of the convalescent, and Rufus Thallin used them all. He circled back among the worlds of the planetary system, and began skirting the habitable planets to arouse her curiosity. That was the way he encountered Frenchy Logrieux again.

Luck had not gone well with the little pirate. Several rash encounters with armed merchantmen had cost many piratical lives. There had been no plunder, and much grumbling had ensued among the remaining buccaneers. The ships began to split up into small groups and drift apart. Finally his own quarter-deck was the scene of a bloody mutiny. His officers had been butchered and Frenchy Logrieux was abandoned on Cerberus.

He was sitting on the edge of a big spire of glassy rock, overhanging a gulf, when the space-flyer landed. Weeks of exposure to the weather, of living on fruits and tubers, had given him the appearance of a wild man.

"_Nom du Nom_," he had screamed with delight, flinging himself bodily against a glassite porte. "But it's me old friend, the Doc! How's the kidnaper? And this little wench that ye--"

He paused uncertainly, having lurched over the threshold, for the woman sitting quietly on the edge of the bed was surely not that wretched, pitiable slip of a human being he had glimpsed on the sick-bed months ago. To Frenchy's mind, this was a creature of Heaven's fashioning, a graceful feminine being such as he had never seen outside of Paris, and he could never return there. Such of her rounded limbs as he saw were flushed with glowing health. The eyes were of a cerulean blue as seen only on earth. Yet the cascading wealth of cloudy hair was the same.

"This lydee, I mean," he stammered. "Why, where'd ye get her, Doc? She's class, she is! A beauty if I ever see one--jes' like a dream, if ye don't mind my sayin'--"

Rufus Thallin rose from his seat and frowned irritably. He had seen the pleased smile flicker over the woman's face. It might have been hard for him to explain his own irritation.

"I'm certain the lady doesn't care to hear of it," he said gruffly. Alyce shot him a malignant glance.

"Oh, but I do!" she cried indignantly. "And the man is human, just as I am human, though you treat me like a dog."

"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!

Dripping water, he lurched up along the trail, his bleeding fists clenched at his sides. Young Rufus Thallin had cast off his exhaustion with his first few lungfuls of air, and as he raced up the broken trail of glassen fragments his grim face became as dark as a thundercloud.

He saw the space-flyer, cushioned on its jets of rocket blasts, could make out Frenchy's dark face hovered over the controls. Then the flames died away with a final swoosh and the space cruiser settled. The pirate was fighting the controls insanely, his nervous fingers flying everywhere in an effort to get a response from the rockets.

Rufus darted across the blackened rock, still warm from those first flame spurts, and his big fingers searched deftly along the outer rim of the airlock. Both the inner and outer doors of the airlock slammed open. The girl was lying on the bed, her arms and legs having been bound hurriedly from strips of her torn skirt.

Now he halted in the doorway, shouted for the pirate to come out.

"I've got a gun, Frenchy!" he yelled. "Come out with your flippers in the air, if you want to live! You didn't think I'd leave the space-flyer so you could run it, did you?"

A roaring figure came out suddenly. Frenchy had a knife in one large crooked hand and was going to chance the ray. Rufus pulled the trigger of the flame-gun, but it had become jammed with silt in the sandy floor of the pool. He used it to parry the metal that darted down toward his heart.

Arms interlocked, they went hurtling from the airlock to the black table of lavalike rock. The smashing jar of collision wrenched their bodies apart. For a moment the pirate seemed about to flee, and Rufus would have let him go. Then the beady eyes fastened upon the space cruiser, and he came for Rufus swinging. One of them would go back to earth with the girl. Frenchy Logrieux didn't intend to spend the rest of his life as a castaway.

So the pirate came forward furiously, hacking the air before him with the long knife, and big Rufus Thallin backed slowly away. He was not fool enough to walk in close where Frenchy's snaking blade could find a vital spot. He was being backed up a slow incline to the edge of the precipitous spire where the pirate had been perched when they came. His footing narrowed to a mere ledge, with precarious depths to either side. Soon he would be able to retreat no more.

Glancing hurriedly about, he saw another parallel spire jutting over the gulf, some ten feet away. Poising quickly, Rufus leaped across the intervening gulf and landed catlike. Then he began to run down the incline toward the cruiser.

Frenchy Logrieux's blade was out of reach now, but he took a chance, poised for a moment, and hurled his weapon in a glittering streak. Expecting this move, young Rufus dragged his toe in the rugged slope, fell to his hands and knees. The blade clattered off into lower depths.

It is the unexpected that counts for most in a struggle. That was why Rufus Thallin spun around and again leaped the gulf between the twin glassy spires that overlooked the precipice. As he landed, his big fist shot out like a hammer, landing squarely on the swarthy chin.

Crumpling slowly, Frenchy tottered over into the depths and disappeared.

When Rufus went back up the trail he saw Alyce Marshall, standing in the outer porte. She had managed to free herself of the hasty bonds and was watching him strangely. He shook her away as she came to help apply bandages to a bleeding gash on his arm.

Alyce Marshall stamped a slender foot and her face became livid with cold fury.

"You heartless devil!" she shrieked. "I wish he'd killed you! He at least had the desire to be a decent, respectable citizen again, even if you--"

Rufus had frozen as the import of her words reached his mind, was watching her. She gasped to a stop, looked startled. He came closer to her, his eyes narrowed and suspicious. She glanced fleetingly toward the space-wireless, and that stopped his advance.

"The dirty rat!" he cried wrathfully. "He communicated with the space police. Offered to sell me out, if they'd give him a fresh start. He did that, didn't he, and they made a deal with him? Of course they'd do that!"

She was not retreating and her little head was held high.

"Other people besides you can make bargains!" she cried. "And they'd have kept them with Frenchy Logrieux, even as my father would keep your bargain. Why don't you take me back to earth now? I'm not ill any longer, and I'm certain you can buy any number of sleek space-ships in return for my body."

"Well, why shouldn't I?" demanded Rufus furiously. "That's what I intended to do when we came here. If your father lives up to his word that is just what is going to happen!"

"Don't worry about my father!" burst out Alyce Marshall proudly. "He'll pay everything he promised. And I don't like to hear you cast evil reflections about him in everything you say. He said he'd give every space cruiser he had if I were sound and well again, and he'll do it, if you ask him to."

"What makes you think I won't?" demanded Rufus, striding for the controls. "At least I'm not going to be fool enough to wait here for the space police to come and trap me."