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"Yet?"
"He is dying."
Remo knelt and shook the man.
"Magarac, can you hear me?"
Theodore Magarac stared sightlessly at nothing. His thin lips began to writhe. "She came . . ."
Remo knelt to catch the dying man's words. "Who is she?" he asked.
"Eldress. She . . . did . . . this . . ."
"What did she look like?"
"Didn't . . . see . . . her."
Then he died. He had been breathing in and out shallowly. Then the air began coming out of his mouth and nose in a long, slow exhalation, like a balloon slowly deflating. Ten seconds after his lungs went flat, Remo and Chiun heard his heart skip a beat, then stop beating altogether.
"Gone," said Remo, coming to his feet. "And I don't see a mark on him."
The Master of Sinanju began looking around the inside of the tepee. They found a modest cache of junk food, three back copies of The Girls of Penthouse, and not much else.
Remo heard a crunching sound and lifted a foot.
"What did I step on?" he asked.
Chiun looked at a mushy spot on the rug.
"A bug."
"Musts been a loose snack," Remo said. "I don't see much here." He stepped out of the tepee and looked around.
The Harvesters were busily cooking thunderbugs. They seemed oblivious to the death of their leader. In fact, they seemed oblivious to everything but thunderbugs.
Grabbing a passing Harvester, Remo asked, "Anybody visit Theodore lately?"
The man frowned and brushed back his pigtails before speaking. "There was a woman at the tepee."
"How long ago?"
"Ten or fifteen minutes."
"See what she looked liked?"
"I only saw her back."
"How was she dressed?"
"Like an Indian."
Remo looked around at the Harvesters dressed in their buckskins and growled, "That narrows it down a heap."
Remo returned to the tepee.
"Guy says there was a squaw hanging around not fifteen minutes ago," he told Chiun.
The Master of Sinanju lifted a wizened claw. "Look what I found in the man's hand, Remo."
Remo looked. It was a carved rosewood box covered with ivory inlays and lined with white velvet. Otherwise it was empty.
"He clutched this as he died," said Chiun.
"Mean anything?"
"I do not know . . ."
"Well, someone murdered this guy."
"I see no marks on him," said Chiun.
"Yeah. But he's not wasted enough to be a HELP victim. Besides, he wasn't sick when we saw him yesterday."
"We will extract the truth from the others."
The Harvesters were only too happy to answer their questions, even with their mouths full. They couldn't seem to stop eating thunderbugs.
"Yeah, I saw her too," a youth in a mohawk haircut admitted. "But only from the back. She had on a nice dress."
"Ever see her before?" Remo asked.
"I don't think so," he said, picking black bug meat from between his teeth with a toothpick. "She's probably a Snapper."
"What makes you say that?"
"I don't know. It was just a feeling. But she wasn't a Harvester."
"That's right. She wasn't one of us."
"I got news for you," Remo told them. "The only difference between you and the Snappers is that they're dead from eating bugs and you're not. Yet."
"Only Snappers catch HELP. And if they are dead, it is because Gitchee Manitou had decreed it. We will give them a proper burial once we are full of his children."
Remo asked, "If only Snappers catch HELP, what killed Theodore Magarac?"
"Who?"