"The Purple Ones, again!" I cried. "What are they--decorated rattlesnakes?" Then, with a sickening sensation of terror, I remembered the horrible, half-human purple corpse that I had seen the soldiers bringing into Astran. "Are the Purple Ones men?" "In form, they are men and women," Melvar said, "but they dwell alone in the thickets like beasts. All of them are old and hideous. They are savage, and they have the strength each of many men. Our soldiers must always hunt them, and fight them to the death. A single man, even though armed, could do nothing against one of them, for they are terribly strong, and they fight like demons. Their country is not known, and no children of their kind are ever found. The priests say that they are of a race of dwarfs that dwell beneath the Silver Lake." Here was another of the baffling mysteries of this strange world. In fact, I was coming upon unpleasant mysteries much faster than I could comfortably stomach them. Lone, purple, savage animals, in the form of emaciated humans, who prowled about the country like wolves, and like wolves were hunted down by the Astranians! Again I shuddered at the memory of the limp purple corpse the soldiers had carried, and with a strange chill of the heart, I remembered the human footprints that had been left where my ponies were taken in the desert, and of the eerie, insane laughter that I had heard, or thought I heard, above the whistling roar. My thoughts ended with the construction of a mad hypothesis of a race of purple folk who lived beyond the Silver Lake, who were accustomed to make slave raids on the whites in torpedo-shaped airships, and who made a practise of releasing, or turning out, the superannuated ones of their kind to prey on the people of the crystal city. It seemed, in fact, quite plausible at the time, but I was far from the hideous truth. I could see no reason, if one race could attain a civilization high enough to synthetize diamonds for building stone, why another might not be able to build ships as marvelous as the red torpedoes. But my reason rebelled at the acceptance of the ideas of demonic and supernatural horrors my emotional self tried to force upon it. * * * * * The Touch of the Metal