Jericho caught up the wounded man, ignoring a ray burn that raced like a livid purple snake across the blackness of his shoulders. He jerked his head at the door. "We come in by a secret passage," he explained in a rush of words. "We didn't find you in the cells, so we come hunting." The Falcon choked back the lump in his throat, and his eyes were misty as he looked at the men to whom loyalty was neither a word nor a gesture, only a thing that was in them when the need arose. "How--?" he began. "I did it, Curt," Jean's voice said. Jean was crying then, crying like a child whose first dreams are gone, crying like one whose new dreams are but the faintest of sounds in her consciousness. Through the vizi-screen she had seen all that had happened, and the sickness in her eyes would be long leaving. "Jean," the Falcon said. "Please, Jean--" She was smiling then, smiling through the tears that would not stop. And the Falcon, watching her features on the screen, knew the torture that was hers. "I'll be waiting, Curt," she said. "But hurry--Oh, please hurry!" "Wait for me, Jean, _wait for me_." And the Falcon and his brood were running down the hall, running toward the secret spot where a pirate ship waited to take them back to their fight and their loves and their freedom--and to the far horizons of their starway destiny. End of Project Gutenberg's Prey of the Space Falcon, by Wilbur S. Peacock