attested. He could have sworn it once belonged to an Englishman,
and to an Englishman of long before by token of the heavy gold
circlets still threaded in the withered ear-lobes.

"Now your head . . . " the devil-devil doctor began on his
favourite topic.

"I'll tell you what," Bassett interrupted, struck by a new idea.
"When I die I'll let you have my head to cure, if, first, you take
me to look upon the Red One."

"I will have your head anyway when you are dead," Ngurn rejected
the proposition. He added, with the brutal frankness of the
savage: "Besides, you have not long to live. You are almost a
dead man now. You will grow less strong. In not many months I
shall have you here turning and turning in the smoke. It is
pleasant, through the long afternoons, to turn the head of one you
have known as well as I know you. And I shall talk to you and tell
you the many secrets you want to know. Which will not matter, for
you will be dead."

"Ngurn," Bassett threatened in sudden anger. "You know the Baby
Thunder in the Iron that is mine." (This was in reference to his
all-potent and all-awful shotgun.) "I can kill you any time, and
then you will not get my head."

"Just the same, will Vngngn, or some one else of my folk get it,"
Ngurn complacently assured him. "And just the same will it turn
here in the and turn devil-devil house in the smoke. The quicker
you slay me with your Baby Thunder, the quicker will your head turn