"Do I care?" he shouted. "Why worry over Chain Lucas, you gilded idiot?" A beatific smile overspread Thorne's face. "Principally," he admitted, "because he is standing directly behind you, Dallis." Iris' choked scream ripped the silence and her gun fell thumping to the floor. Dallis, half-turning, stared transfixed at the tall figure standing quietly in the doorway, hands on the side. IV The golden chains which had given him his name glimmered richly in the soft light, sparkling across his broad chest and about the rich black tunic. A black-masked steel helmet concealed the face no one living had ever seen. For a space wherein a man might count to six, the guilty pair stared motionless at the silent Lucas. Then, knowing himself doomed, Dallis broke the trance and drew. To Thorne, sitting immobile in his self-imposed paralytic trance, it was like the slow-motion haste of a lumbering bear. Dallis, whatever else he might be, was no gunman, little though it would have availed him even had he been. Thorne did not see Lucas draw, but the heavy weapon was in the outlaw's hand even as Dallis swung, slamming its deep, heavy report from the recoiling slides. Dallis' head and right shoulder vanished in a searing blast, shivered to atoms, the gun he had never drawn spinning across the saloon. The hand and forearms went pinwheeling grotesquely with it to thud against the wall and fall to the floor in a hideous splash. He turned dizzily on his heel, a mockery of a man, and fell with a crash between two chairs where the paralyzed bodies of his own victims still sat motionless, blind and deaf to his fall. [Illustration: _Dallis' head and right shoulder vanished in the searing blast._] Iris screamed once, a shriek of horror and fury, then flung herself on Lucas. He wasted no effort, deflecting her blow with his left hand, his right chopping down with the whistling Blandarc to crush the long barrel against her temple, shattering her fragile skull. A mask of glistening scarlet shot instant threads across her livid face. She fell heavily, collapsing across the twitching corpse of her late partner, Dallis. The light gleamed on her outflung arms and upon the blood slowly running down their ivory slopes to drip more slowly still from her lax and impotent fingers. Scorn tinged Lucas' whole bearing as he glanced across at the shocked and silent figure still motionless in his lounge-prison. "You blind fool," he flung contemptuously at Thorne. The latter did not answer for a long, slow minute. Then he nodded. "So it seems, Lucas," he replied, quietly. The big pirate shrugged, flinging back his long cape to holster his gun, and a vivid flower of scarlet bloomed in the doorway as the lining caught the light.