They looted the best of the provisions, and the girl's deft fingers fashioned for each a strap of sorts from a roil of cellotex fabric. Torcred went up to the driver's cabin, located the engine under the floor, and did things to it that would keep the panzer immobilized until long after the blowing sand should have covered their traces. The woman could untie their men as soon as they gained courage to come out of hiding.... Terrapin and bird-girl set their faces to the east and began to trek again. They trudged on with lightened hearts. They had gone about a mile when a fold of the land revealed a wide swathe of desert dotted with camouflaged steel hemispheres, mostly buried in the sand--a big colony of the pillbox people. They ducked back behind the shelter of the sand-hills and began what looked like the shortest detour. Suddenly Ladna, glancing back the way they had come, cried out sharply. Torcred turned, and saw a plume of dust above the far-off dunes--then a gray scurrying beetle-thing that rose to a crest, vanished, and reappeared on a nearer swell. It was a terrapin, travelling fast, and as it raced closer there was less and less doubt that it was following their own plainly marked trail. Torcred strained his eyes through the heat-shimmer to make out the identifying mark on its blunt nose; he stiffened, and his hand dropped to the knife he had taken from the panzer. "Helsed! He's picked up our trail somehow--but what does he want?" "The fat terrapin, the one that twisted my arm? I think I know," the bird-girl said in a low voice. Torcred's dark face went hard as flint. His mind seethed: there was no hiding here, no use trying to flee from the hundred-mile-an-hour pursuer--or was there? Uncertain, he stood stockstill. The girl pressed shivering against him. Helsed would not open fire, of course, for fear of hitting her; there might be a chance of parleying. If he could only lure the fellow into the open-- The Terrapin swung broadside--on a stone's throw from them. Its door opened, and Helsed half slid out of the seat. He eyed the pair, swarthy brows rising in seeming amusement. "Ah, still together," he observed. "Torcred, my dear fellow--you shouldn't be traveling in such company, even in your present status. Suppose you run along and let me take care of her." Torcred controlled his voice with an effort, "_You're_ a terrapin in good standing, Helsed. Would you discard your honor--" The other smirked. "Don't worry. I'm not a fool like you; I won't take her home with me." Torcred ground his teeth. "You're crazy!" "I had to leave the hunt and make good time to catch you--I don't feel like being disappointed." The viciousness in Helsed's smooth voice crept into the open. "And I have a score to settle with you anyway." He jerked the terrapin's door shut, and its nose gun started to swing around.