"Ho ho," said Godwin throatily in Arabic, "you'll have to back that threat with action, little man!" The fellow halted, turned a sickly green hue, and buckling at all his joints pitched over in a dead faint. The other was affected in quite another fashion, and leaped toward Godwin, scimitar flashing. Godwin yanked out his long sword and batted down the first attack. The Saracen was a swift and elusive fencer. His point darted through Godwin's guard and slashed a long wound down the biceps of his left arm, laying bare the dark flesh for a moment before red gore covered it and trickled out through the fur. Godwin yelled and swung his weapon in an arc, knocking off the other's helmet and inflicting a nasty gash across his scalp. The Saracen stabbed straight. Godwin twisted his body sidewise, and the keen blade cut through all but a thread or two of the belt that held his scabbard. Before the enemy could recover from his lunge, Godwin brought his wounded left arm over and down in a hammer blow. The doubled paw caught the man exactly on the center of his skull, and he fell like an arrow-pierced hare, kicked a time or two, and lay still. Two foemen remained beneath the sail. One of these had been knocked unconscious and now lay smothering to death. The other, crippled by the falling mast, was slowly dragging his broken body along in search of the open air when the fire burst into crimson bloom about him. He wailed like a tormented soul on a spit, broke his nails on the deck in a mad endeavor to crawl to safety, and at last struck his forehead on the coaming of a hatchway. Forgetting the rats below, he threw all his waning vitality into a heave that sent the hatch cover up and flat on the deck. Then he pushed himself over the edge and fell, to escape the flames among the ravenous horde of great gray rodents. * * * * * In the frightful din of crackling flames, gibbering rats, and lapping sea, Godwin never heard him scream at all. He stared narrowly around him now, scratching absent-mindedly for an annoying flea in the small of his back, and saw that no one moved on the deck of the plague ship. By good fortune, by the grace of God, and by his own skill and brute force, he had obliterated the crew. Even the men who had fainted had inhaled flame and died. Godwin stood alone on the deck, while beneath him sounded the perpetual vociferant clamor of the rats. The flames spreading dangerously close to his bare flat feet, he skipped along the bulwarks and up to the poop, which was as yet untouched by fire. Here he watched it eat out across the deck, devouring sail and broken mast and at last portions of the deck itself. The heat in the hold became unbearable for the rats then, and they began to fight savagely to get at the open hatchway, the sail above which had burnt away. Their bodies piled up beneath its square of smoky light, and the pile grew and grew....