Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" and whimpered. Calhoun laid him gently on a bed of leaves which was not occupied by a murdered man. "Lie still!" he commanded. "Exercise is bad for you!" He walked away. Murgatroyd whined faintly, but lay still as if exhausted. "I'm going to move you," Calhoun told the girl, "so you won't be sighted if that man from the city comes back. And I've got to keep out of sight for a while or your friends will mistake me for him. I count on you to vouch for me later. Basically, I'm making an ambush." Then he explained irritably, "I daren't try to trail him because he might not backtrack to return here!" He lifted the girl and placed her where she could see the glade in its entirety, but would not be visible. He settled down himself a little distance away. He was acutely dissatisfied with the measures he was forced to take. He could not follow the murderer and leave Helen and Murgatroyd unprotected, even though the murderer might find another victim because he was not trailed. In any case Murgatroyd's life, just now, was more important than the life of any human being on Maris III. On him depended everything. But Calhoun was not pleased with himself. * * * * * There was silence except for the normal noises of living wild things. There were fluting sounds, which later Calhoun would be told, from crawling creatures not too much unlike the land-turtles of Earth. There were deep-bass hummings, which came from the throats of miniature creatures which might roughly be described as birds. There were chirpings which were the cries of what might be approximately described as wild pigs--except that they weren't. But the sun Maris sank low toward the nearer hill-crests, and behind them, and there came a strange, expectant hush over all the landscape. At sundown on Maris III there is a singular period when the creatures of the day are silent and those of the night are not yet active. Nothing moved. Nothing stirred. Even the improbable foliage was still. It was into this stillness and this half-light that small and intermittent rustling sounds entered. Presently there was a faint murmur of speech. A tall, gaunt young man came out of the brushwood, supporting a pathetically feeble old man, barely able to walk. Calhoun made a gesture of warning as the girl Helen opened her lips to speak. The slowly moving pair--the young man moving exhaustedly, the older man staggering with weakness despite his help--came into the glade. The younger helped the older to sit down. He stood panting. A woman and a man came together, assisting each other. There was barely light enough from the sun's afterglow to show their faces, emaciated and white. A fifth feeble figure came tottering out of another opening in the brush. He was dark-bearded and broad, and he had been a powerful man. But now the plague lay heavily upon him.