A murmur, doubtful, wondering, obscure, spread through the people. By the greenish flare-light Stern could see looks of wonder and dismay. Some frowned, others stared at him or at the smith, and many muttered. "What the devil and all have I broken _now?_" wondered Allan. "Plague take these barbarous customs! Jove, they're worse than the taboos of the old Maoris, in the ancient days! What's up?" He had not long to wonder, for of a sudden H'yemba wheeled on him, pointed him out with vibrant hands, and in a voice of terrible anger cried: "The law, the law of old! No man shall be chief who does not take a wife from out our people! None who weds one of the Lanskaarn, the island folk, or the yellow-haired Skeri beyond the Vortex, none such shall ever rule us. Yet this man, this stranger who speaks such great things very hard to be believed, scorns our custom. No woman from among us he has taken, but instead, that vuedma of his own kind! What? Will ye--" He spoke no further, for Allan was upon him with one leap. At sound of that word, the most injurious in their tongue, the fires of Hell burst loose in Stern. Reckoning no consequences, staying for no parley or diplomacy, he sprang; and as he sprang, he struck. The blow went home on the smith's jaw with a smash like a pile-driver. H'yemba, reeling, swung at him--no skill, no science, just a wild, barbaric, sledge-hammer sweep. It would have killed had it landed, but Allan was not there. In point of tactics, the twentieth century met the tenth. And as the smith whirled to recover, a terrible left-hander met him just below the short ribs. With a grunt the man doubled, sprawled and fell. By some strange atavism, which he never afterward could understand, Allan counted, in the Folk's tongue: "Hathi, ko, zem, baku" and so up to "lamnu"--ten. Still the smith did not rise, but only lay and groaned and sought to catch the breath that would not come. "I have won!" cried Allan in a loud voice. "Here, you people, take this greun, this child, away! And let there be no further idle talk of a dead law--for surely, in your custom, a law dies when its champion is beaten! Come, quick, away with him!" Two stout men came forward, bowed to Allan with hands clasped upon their breasts in signal of fresh allegiance, and without ceremony took the insensible smith, neck-and-heels, and lugged him off as though he had only been a net heavily laden with fish. The crowd opened in awed silence to let them pass. By the glare Allan noticed that the man's jaw hung oddly awry, even as the obeah's had hung, in Madison Forest. "Jove, what a wallop that must have been!" thought he, now perceiving for the first time that his knuckles were cut and bleeding. "Old Monahan himself taught me that in the Harvard gym a thousand odd years ago--and it still works. _One_ question settled, mighty quick; and H'yemba won't have much to say for a few weeks at least. Not till his jawbone knits again, anyhow!"