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. "Looking for a cow, probably, and -- stay here!"
He dived like a hunting wolf into the leafy wall. Balthus' hair bristled.
"Stay here alone with this corpse and a devil hiding in the woods?" he yelped. "I'm coming with you!"
And suiting action to words, he plunged after the Cimmerian. Conan glanced back at him, but made no objection, though he did not moderate his pace to accommodate the shorter legs of his companion. Balthus wasted his wind in swearing as the Cimmerian drew away from him again, like a phantom between the trees, and then Conan burst into a dim glade and halted crouching, lips snarling, sword lifted.
"What are we stopping for?" panted Balthus, dashing the sweat out of his eyes and gripping his short sword.
"That scream came from this glade, or near by," answered Conan. "I don't mistake the location of sounds, even in the woods. But where--"
Abruptly the sound rang out again -- _behind them_; in the direction of the trail they had just quitted. It rose piercingly and pitifully, the cry of a woman in frantic terror -- and then, shockingly, it changed to a yell of mocking laughter that might have burst from the lips of a fiend of lower Hell.
"What in Mitra's name--" Balthus' face was a pale blur in the gloom.
With a scorching oath Conan wheeled and dashed back the way he had come, and the Aquilonian stumbled bewilderedly after him. He blundered into the Cimmerian as the latter stopped dead, and rebounded from his brawny shoulders as though from an iron statue
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