"Sneak me a few at a time. I'll empty them, put them together again and you sneak them back." She said, slow and troubled: "_She_ set the power of the goddess to guard them." "Listen to me, Martha," he said. "I mean _listen_. You'll be doing it for me and they told me the power of the goddess doesn't work on outsiders. Isn't that right?" There was a long pause, and she said at last with a sigh: "I sure wish I could see your eyes, Charles. I'll try it, but I'm damned if I would if Dinny didn't stink so bad." She slipped away and Charles tried to follow her with his mind through the darkness, to the silly little rope of vine with the feathers and bones knotted in it--but he couldn't. Too tense again. Kennedy stirred and muttered complainingly as an icy small breeze cut through the chinks of the palisade, whispering. His eyes, tuned to the starlight, picked up Martha bent almost double, creeping toward the smithy-prison. She wore a belt of fifty-caliber cartridges around her neck like a stole. Looked like about a dozen of them. He hastily scooped out a bowl of clean sand and whispered: "Any trouble?" He couldn't see the grin on her face, but knew it was there. "It was easy," she bragged. "One bad minute and then I checked with you and it was okay." "Good kid. Pull the cartridges out of the links the way I showed you and pass them through." She did. It was a tight squeeze. He fingered one of the cartridges. The bullet fitted nicely into the socket of an arrowhead. He jammed the bullet in and wrenched at the arrowhead with thumb and forefinger--all he could get onto it. The brass neck began to spread. He dumped the powder into his little basin in the sand and reseated the bullet. Charles shifted hands on the second cartridge. On the third he realized that he could put the point of the bullet on a hearth-stone and press on the neck with both thumbs. It went faster then; in perhaps an hour he was passing the re-assembled cartridges back through the palisade. "Time for another load?" he asked. "Nope," the girl said. "Tomorrow night." "Good kid." She giggled. "It's going to be a hell of a big bang, ain't it, Charles?" XIV "Leave the fire alone," Charles said sharply to Kennedy. The little man was going to douse it for the night. There was a flash of terrified sense: "They beat you. If the fire's on after dark they beat you. Fire and dark are equal and opposite." He began to smile. "Fire is the negative of dark. You just change the sign, in effect rotate it through 180 degrees. But to rotate it through 180 degrees you have to first rotate it through one degree. And to rotate it through one degree you first have to rotate it through half a degree." He was beaming now, having forgotten all about the fire. Charles banked it with utmost care, heaping a couple of flat stones for a chimney that would preserve the life of one glowing coal invisibly.