Two of the horsemen aimed lances, preparing to ride him down. Travis sighted a tree midway between them and pressed the firing button. This time there was a flash, a flicker of light, to mark the disappearance of a living thing. One of the lancers' ponies reared, squealed in fear. The other kept on his course. "Menlik!" Travis shouted. "Hold up your man! I do not want to kill!" The shaman called out, but the lancer was already level with the vanished tree, his head half turned on his shoulders to witness the blackened earth where it had stood. Then he dropped his lance, sawed on the reins. A rifle bullet might not have halted his charge, unless it killed or wounded, but what he had just seen was a thing beyond his understanding. The tribesmen sat their horses, facing Travis, watching him with the feral eyes of the wolves they claimed as forefathers, wolves that possessed the cunning of the wild, cunning enough not to rush breakneck into unknown danger. Travis walked forward. "Menlik, I would talk--" There was an outburst from the horsemen, protests from Hulagur and one or two of the others. But the shaman urged his mount into a walking pace toward the Apache until they stood only a few feet from each other--the warrior of the steppes and the Horde facing the warrior of the desert and the People. "You have taken a woman from our yurts," Menlik said, but his eyes were more on the alien gun than on the man who held it. "Brave are you to come again into our land. He who sets foot in the stirrup must mount into the saddle; he who draws blade free of the scabbard must be prepared to use it." "The Horde is not here--I see only a handful of people," Travis replied. "Does Menlik propose to go up against the Apaches so? Yet there are those who are his greater enemies." "A stealer of women is not such a one as needs a regiment under a general to face him." Suddenly Travis was impatient of the ceremonious talking; there was so little time. "Listen, and listen well, Shaman!" He spoke curtly now. "I have not your woman. She is already crossing the mountains southward," he pointed with his chin--"leading the Reds into a trap." Would Menlik believe him? There was no need, Travis decided, to tell him now that Kaydessa's part in this affair was involuntary. "And you?" The shaman asked the question the Apache had hoped to hear. "_We_," Travis emphasized that, "march now against those hiding behind in their ship out there." He indicated the northern plains. Menlik raised his head, surveying the land about them with disbelieving, contemptuous appraisal. "You are chief then of an army, an army equipped with magic to overcome machines?" "One needs no army when he carries this." For the second time Travis displayed the power of the weapon he carried, this time cutting into shifting rubble an outcrop of cliff wall. Menlik's expression did not change, though his eyes narrowed.