You have maybe one chance in ten thousand for your life." I shut my eyes as I heard the steel clash.

Then very soon came silence.
I looked again, and saw Ringan wiping his blade on a bunch of grass, and a body lying before him.
He was speaking--speaking, I suppose, about the successor to the dead man, whom two negroes had promptly removed.

Suddenly at my shoulder Shalah gave the hoot of an owl, followed at a second's interval by a second and a third.

I suppose it was some signal agreed with Ringan, but at the time I thought the man had gone mad.
I was not very sane myself.

What I had seen had sent a cold grue through me, for I had never before seen a man die violently, and the circumstances of the place and hour made the thing a thousandfold more awful.