Authors: George England
Up he leaped. The rifle barrel flashed and glittered as he whirled it.
Like a reaper, laying a clean swath behind him, the engineer mowed
down a dozen of the beast-men.
Shrieks, grunts, snarls, mingled with his execrations.
Then fair into a jabbering ape-face he flung the bloodstained barrel.
The face fell, faded, vanished, as hideous illusions fade in a dream.
And Stern, with a strength he never dreamed was his, caught up the
fainting girl in his left arm, as easily as though she had been a
child.
Still dragging the spear which pierced his right—his right that yet
protected her a little—he ran.
Stones, darts, spears, clattered in about him. He heard the swish and
tang of them; heard the leaves flutter as the missiles whirled
through.
Struck? Was he struck again?
He knew not, nor cared. Only he thought of shielding Beatrice. Nothing
but that, just that!
"The gate—oh, let me reach the gate! God! The gate—"
And all of a sudden, though how he could not tell, there he seemed to
see the gate before him. Could it be? Or was that, too, a dream? A
cruel, vicious mockery of his disordered mind?
Yes—the gate! It must be! He recognized the giant pine, in a moment
of lucidity. Then everything began to dance again, to quiver in the
mocking sunlight.
"The gate!" he gasped once more, and staggered on. Behind him, a
little trail of blood-drops from his wounded arm fell on the trampled
leaves.
Something struck his bent head. Through it a blinding pain darted.
Thousands of beautiful and tiny lights of every color began to quiver,
to leap and whirl.
"They've—set the building on fire!" thought he; yet all the while he
knew it was impossible, he understood it was only an illusion.
He heard the rustle of the wind through the forest. It blent and
mingled with a horrid tumult of grunts, of clicking cries, of gnashing
teeth and little bestial cries.
"The—gate!" sobbed Stern, between hard-set teeth, and stumbled
forward, ever forward, through the Horde.
To him, protectingly, he clasped the beautiful body in the tiger-skin.
Living? Was she living yet? A great, aching wonder filled him. Could
he reach the stair with her, and bear her up it? Hurl back these
devils? Save her, after all?
The pain had grown exquisite, in his head. Something seemed hammering
there, with regular strokes—a red-hot sledge upon an anvil of
white-hot steel.
To him it looked as though a hundred, a thousand of the little blue
fiends were leaping, shrieking, circling there in front of him. Ten
thousand! And he must break through.
Break through!
Where had he heard those words? Ah—Yes—
To him instantly recurred a distant echo of a song, a Harvard
football-song. He remembered. Now he was back again. Yale, 0; Harvard,
17—New Haven, 1898. And see the thousands of cheering spectators! The
hats flying through the air—flags waving—red, most of them!
Crimson—like blood!
Came the crash and boom of the old Harvard Band, with big Joe Foley
banging the drum till it was fit to burst, with Marsh blowing his
lungs out on the cornet, and all the other fellows raising Cain.
Uproar! Cheering! And again the music. Everybody was singing now,
everybody roaring out that brave old fighting chorus:
".....Now—all to-geth-er,
Smash them—
and
—break—
through!
"
And see! Look there! The goal!
The scene shifted, all at once, in a quite
unaccountable and puzzling manner.
Somehow, victory wasn't quite won, after all. Not quite yet. What was
the matter, then? What was wrong? Where
was
he?
Ah, the Goal!
Yes, there through the rack and mass of the Blues, he saw it, again,
quite clearly. He was sure of
that
, anyhow.
The goal-posts seemed a trifle near together, and they were certainly
made of crumbling stone, instead of straight wooden beams. Odd, that!
He wondered, too, why the management allowed trees to grow on the
field, trees and bushes—why a huge pine should be standing right
there by the left-hand post. That was certainly a matter to be
investigated and complained of, later. But now was no time for kicks.
"Probably some Blue trick," thought Stern. "No matter, it won't do 'em
any good, this time!"
Ah! An opening! Stern's head went lower still.
He braced himself for a leap.
"Come on, come on!" he yelled defiance.
Again he heard the cheering, once wind like a chorus of mad devils.
An opening? No, he was mistaken. Instead, the Blues were massing there
by the Goal.
Bitterly he swore. Under his arm he tightened the ball. He ran!
What?
They were trying to tackle?
"Damn you!" he cried, in boiling anger. "I'll—I'll show you a trick
or two—yet!"
He stopped, circled, dodged the clutching hands, feinted with a tactic
long unthought of, and broke into a straight, resistless dash for the
posts.
As he ran, he yelled:
"
Smash
them—and—break
through!
. ....."
All his waning strength upgathered for that run. Yet how strangely
tired he felt—how heavy the ball was growing!
What was the matter with his head? With his right arm? They both ached
hideously. He must have got hurt, some way, in one of the "downs."
Some dirty work, somewhere. Rotten sport!
He ran. Never in all his many games had he seen such peculiar
gridiron, all tangled and overgrown. Never, such host of tackles.
Hundreds of them! Where were the Crimsons? What? No support, no
interference? Hell!
Yet the Goal was surely just there, now right ahead. He ran.
"Foul!" he shouted savagely, as a Blue struck at him, then another and
another, and many more. The taste of blood came to his tongue. He
spat. "Foul!"
Right and left he dashed them, with a giant's strength. They scattered
in panic, with strange and unintelligible cries.
"The goal!"
He reached it. And, as he crossed the line, he fell.
"
Down
, down!" sobbed he.
An hour later, Stern and Beatrice sat weak and shaken in their
stronghold on the fifth floor, resting, trying to gather up some
strength again, to pull together for resistance to the siege that had
set in.
With the return of reason to the engineer—his free bleeding had
somewhat checked the onset of fever—and of consciousness to the girl,
they began to piece out, bit by bit, the stages of their retreat.
Now that Stern had barricaded the stairs, two stories below, and that
for a little while they felt reasonably safe, they were able to take
their bearings, to recall the flight, to plan a bit for the future, a
future dark with menace, seemingly hopeless in its outlook.
"If it—hadn't been for you," Beatrice was saying, "if you hadn't
picked me up and carried me, when that stone struck, I—I—"
"How's the ache now?" Stern hastily interrupted, in a rather weak yet
brisk voice, which he was trying hard to render matter-of-fact. "Of
course the lack of water, except that half-pint or so, to bathe your
bruise with, is a rank barbarity. But if we haven't got any, we
haven't—that's all. All—till we have another go at 'em!"
"Oh, Allan!" she exclaimed, tremulously. "Don't think of
me!
Of me,
when your back's gashed with a spear-cut, your head's battered, arm
pierced, and we've neither water nor bandages—nothing of any kind to
treat your wounds with!"
"Come now, don't you bother about me!" he objected trying hard to
smile, though racked with pain. "I'll be O. K., fit as a fiddle, in no
time. Perfect health and all that sort of thing, you know. It'll heal
right away.
"Head's clear again already, in spite of that whack with the war-club,
or whatever it was they landed with. But for a while I certainly was
seeing things. I had 'em—had 'em bad! Thought—well, strange things.
"My back? Only a scratch, that's all. It's begun to coagulate already,
the blood has, hasn't it?" And he strove to peer over his own shoulder
at the slash. But the pain made him desist. He could hardly keep back
a groan. His face twitched involuntarily.
The girl sank on her knees beside him. Her arm encircled him; her hand
smoothed his forehead; and with a strange look she studied his
unnaturally pale face.
"It's your arm I'm thinking about, more than anything," said she.
"We've
got
to have something to treat that with. Tell me, does it
hurt you very much, Allan?"
He tried to laugh, as he glanced down at the wounded arm, which,
ligatured about the spear-thrust with a thong, and supported by a
rawhide sling, looked strangely blue and swollen.
"Hurt me? Nonsense! I'll be fine and dandy in no time. The only
trouble is, I'm not much good as a fighter this way. Southpaw, you
see. Can't shoot worth a—a cent, you know, with my left. Otherwise, I
wouldn't mind."
"Shoot? Trust
me
for that now!" she exclaimed. "We've still got two
revolvers and the shotgun left, and lots of ammunition. I'll do the
shooting—if there's got to be any done!"
"You're all right, Beatrice!" exclaimed the wounded man fervently.
"What would I do without you? And to think how near you came to—but
never mind. That's over now; forget it!"
"Yes, but what next?"
"Don't know. Get well, maybe. Things might be worse. I might have a
broken arm, or something; laid up for weeks—slow starvation and all
that. What's a mere puncture? Nothing! Now that the spear's out, it'll
begin healing right away.
"Bet a million, though, that What's-His-Name down there, Big Chief the
Monk, won't get out of
his
scrape in a hurry. His face is certainly
scrambled, or I miss my guess. You got him through the ear with one
shot, by the way. Know that? Fact! Drilled it clean! Just a little to
the right and you'd have
had
him for keeps. But never mind, we'll
save him for the encore—if there is any."
"You think they'll try again?"
"Can't say. They've lost a lot of fighters, killed and wounded,
already. And they've had a pretty liberal taste of our style. That
ought to hold them for a while! We'll see, at any rate. And if luck
stays good, we'll maybe have a thing or two to show them if they keep
on hanging round where they aren't wanted!"
Came now a little silence. Beside Stern the girl sat, half supporting
his wounded body with her firm, white arm. Thirst was beginning to
torment them both, particularly Stern, whose injuries had already
given him a marked temperature. But water there was absolutely none.
And so, still planless, glad only to recuperate a little, content that
for the present the Horde had been held back, they waited. Waiting,
they both thought. The girl's thoughts were all of him; but he,
man-fashion, was trying to piece out what had happened, to frame some
coherent idea of it all, to analyze the urgent necessities that lay
upon them both.
Here and there, a disjointed bit recurred to him, even from out of the
delirium that had followed the blow on the head. From the time he had
recovered his senses in the building, things were clearer.
He knew that the Horde, temporarily frightened by his mad rush, had
given him time to stumble up again and once more lift the girl, before
they had ventured to creep into the arcade in search of their prey.
He remembered that the spear had been gone then. Raving, he must have
broken and plucked it out. The blood, he recalled, was spurting freely
as he had carried Beatrice through the wreckage and up to the first
landing, where she had regained partial consciousness.
Then he shuddered at recollection of that stealthy, apelike creeping
of the Horde scouts in among the ruins, furtive and silent; their
sniffing after the blood-track; their frightful agility in clambering
with feet and hands alike, swinging themselves up like chimpanzees,
swarming aloft on the death-hunt.
He had evaded them, from story to story. Beatrice, able now to walk,
had helped him roll down balustrades and building-stones, fling rocks,
wrench stairs loose and block the way.
And so, wounding their pursuers, yet tracked always by more and ever
more, they had come to the landing, where by aid of the rifle barrel
as a lever they had been able to bring a whole wall crashing down, to
choke the passage. That had brought silence. For a time, at least,
pursuit had been abandoned. In the sliding, dusty avalanche of the
wall, hurled down the stairway, Stern knew by the grunts and shrieks
which had arisen that some of the Horde had surely perished—how many,
he could not tell. A score or two at the very least, he ardently
hoped.
Fear, at any rate, had been temporarily injected into the rest. For
the attack had not yet been renewed. Outside in the forest, no sign of
the Horde, no sound. A disconcerting, ominous calm had settled like a
pall. Even the birds, recovered from their terrors, had begun to hop
about and take up their twittering little household tasks.
As in a kind of clairvoyance, the engineer seemed to know there would
be respite until night. For a little while, at least, there could be
rest and peace. But when darkness should have settled down—
"If they'd only show themselves!" thought he, his leaden eyes closing
in an overmastering lassitude, a vast swooning weakness of blood-loss
and exhaustion. Not even his parched thirst, a veritable torture now,
could keep his thoughts from wandering. "If they'd tackle again, I
could score with—with lead—what's
that
I'm thinking? I'm not
delirious, am I?"
For a moment he brought himself back with a start, back to a full
realization of the place. But again the drowsiness gained on him.
"We've got guns now; guns and ammunition," thought he. "We—could pick
them off—from the windows. Pick them—off—pick—them—off—"