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“Have patience, my lotus flower,” he purred. “Only one is left. Soon the goddess of fortune and love will clear him from my path. By the nine-headed Dragon, I have never seen a game of Li-Fan last so long. But it draws to an end. Then we shall have our joy together, you and I.”

In that instant the fire flared. Allan saw an open window in the background, and beneath it a slim white form lying, bound and helpless. Fierce joy leaped in him, and fiercer hate, Naomi was as yet untouched, the game was being played for her as stake. He had come in time to save her!

But how? There were eight of the Easterners in the room. He had his ray-gun, and might cow them with it and free the girl. But as soon as he had gotten her out of the room, they would surge out after the whites. He could fight for a while, but the end was inevitable. And even if by some miracle he and Naomi escaped, they would be tracked to Sugar Loaf.

The sticks were clicking in a continuous rattle as the final bout of the game waxed fast and furious. And as fast and furious was the whirl of Allan’s thoughts. He strove to remember the layout of this building. The helicopter hangar was next above this level. Outside the windows of this floor a narrow ledge ran. The nebulous scheme that had entered his dazed brain as he read the bronze plate below took clearer form, shaped itself to meet this new need.

* * * * *

Allan crept away to safe distance, leaped to his feet and flitted upward. He was in the empty, echoing space of the hangar level. The fuel tanks bulged huge in the dimness. Here were reels of the feed hose he needed–flexible metal that had withstood the years; here a faucet nozzle, and a long coil of fine wire. Haste driving him, he made the connections. Then he was descending again, dragging behind him a long black snake of hose whose other end was clamped to a vat of oxygen impregnated gasoline.

The rustle of the hose along the hall floor was muffled by the greasy slime. Dane got the nozzle to just outside the door of the room where Naomi lay captive. The rattle of the playing sticks still continued. Jung Sin’s voice sounded, in a language that Allan did not understand. But there was no mistaking the triumphant note in the silky, jeering tones. The yellow man was winning, and winning fast.

Dane twisted one end of the wire around the faucet handle. Then he was unwinding the coil as he tried the door of the chamber next to the one where the fire burned, found it open, darted across the room and softly raised the sash. The sill here, like the one beneath which Naomi lay, was a bare two feet above the ground.

He was out on the ledge, sliding along it toward the fire-reddened oblong five feet away. He crammed his body close against the wall, kept his eyes away from the unfenced edge of that eighteen-inch shelf. Beyond, an abyss waited, twelve thousand feet of nothingness down which a single misstep, an instant’s vertigo, would send him hurtling. Suddenly the rattle of sticks stopped, and he heard the black’s long howl of disappointed rage. The game was over!

Allan reached the window, glimpsed a leering semicircle of animal faces, saw Jung Sin coming toward him. Then he had swung in.

“Back, Jung Sin! Back!” Allan was straddled over Naomi’s form, the ray-gun thrust out before his tense threat, his face livid, his eyes blazing. “Get back, or I ray you!”

* * * * *