As quickly as that, it was over. Yet Tex, panting and wiping the sticky sweat from his forehead, wasn’t happy.
He wished she hadn’t smiled.
Men with blow-torches scoured the fort clean of beetles and green snakes. One party sprayed oil on the heaps of bodies below and fired them. The netting was cleared, their own dead burned.
Tex, who was a corporal, got his men together, and his heart sank as he counted them. Thirty-two left to guard a fort that should be garrisoned by seventy.
Another attack like that, and there might be none. Yet Tex had an uneasy feeling that the attack had more behind it than the mere attempt to carry the fort by storm. He thought of the woman whose brain had evolved all these hideous schemes—the beetle-bombs, the green snakes. She hadn’t risked her neck for noth
