The Afterglow

CHAPTER XXVII. WAR!

At sight of the advance-guard of the Horde now already loping, crouched and ugly, over the narrow bridge to Settlement Cliffs Allan's first impulse was one of absolute despair.

He had expected an attack ere night, but at least he had hoped an hour's respite to recover a little of his strength and to muster all the still valid men of the Folk for resistance. Now, however, he saw even this was to be denied him. For already the leaders of the Horde scouts had passed the center of the bridge.

Three or four minutes more and they would be inside the palisade, upon the cliff!

“God! If they once get in there, we're gone!” cried Allan. “We're cut off from everything. Our animals will be slaughtered. The boy will die! They can bombard us with rocks from aloft. It means annihilation!”

Already he was running up the path toward the palisade. Not one second was to be lost. There was no time even to call a single man of the Folk to reenforce him. Single-handed and alone he must meet the invaders' first attack.

Panting, sweating, stumbling, he scrambled up the steep terrace. And as he ran his thoughts outdistanced him.

“Fool that I was to have left the bridge!” choked he. “My first act when I set foot on solid land should have been to cut the ropes and drop the whole thing into the rapids! I might have known this would happen--fool that I was!”

The safety, the life, of the whole colony, including his wife and son, now depended solely on his reaching the southern end of the bridge before the vanguard of the Horde.

With a heart-racking burst of energy he sprang to the defence, and as he ran he drew his hunting-knife.

Reeling with exhaustion, spent, winded, yet still in desperation struggling onward, he won the top of the cliff, swung to the left along the path that led to the bridge, and--more dead than alive--rushed onward in a last, supreme effort.

Already he saw the Anthropoids were within a hundred feet of the abutment. He could plainly see their squat, hideous bodies, their hairy and pendent arms, and the ugly shuffle of their preposterous legs, as at their best speed they made for the cliff.

Three or four poisoned darts fell clicking on the stones about him. Howls and yells of rage burst from the file of beast-men.

One of the horrible creatures even--with apelike agility--sprang up into the guy ropes of the bridge, clung there, and discharged an arrow from its bamboo blow-gun, chattering with rage.

Stern, running but the faster, plugged him with a forty-four. The Anthropoid, still clinging, yowled hideously, then all at once dropped off and vanished in the depths.

Full drive, Allan hurled himself toward the entrance of the bridge. It seemed to him the beasts were almost on him now.

Plainly he could hear the slavering click of their tushes and see the red, bleared winking of their deep-set eyes.

Now he was at the rope-anchorage, where the cables were lashed to two stout palms.

He emptied his automatic point-blank into the pack.

Pausing not to note effects, he slashed furiously at the left-hand rope.

One strand gave. It sprang apart and began untwisting. Again he hewed with mad rage.

“Crack!”

The cable parted with a report like a pistol-shot. From the bridge a wild, hideous tumult of yells and shrieks arose. The whole fabric, now unsupported on one side, dropped awry. Covered from end to end with Anthropoids, it swayed heavily.

Had men been on it, all must have been flung into the rapids by the shock. But these beast-things, used to arboreal work, to scaling cliffs, to every kind of dangerous adventuring, nearly all succeeded in clinging.

Only three or four were shaken off, to catapult over and over down into the foaming lash of the river.

And still, now creeping with hideous agility along the racked and swinging bridge that hung by but a single rope, they continued to make way, howling and screaming like damned souls.

One gained the shore! At Allan it bounded, crouching, ferocious, deadly. He saw the tiny, venomous lance raised for the throw.

“Flick!”

He felt a twitch on his arm. Was he wounded? He knew not. Only he knew that with blind rage he had flung himself on the second rope, and now with demon-rage was hacking at it desperately.

The snapping whirl of the cable as it parted flung him backward.

He had an instant's vision of the whole bridge-structure crumpling. Then it vanished. From the depths rose the most awful scream, quickly smothered, that he had ever heard.

And as the bestial bodies went tumbling, rolling, fighting, down the rapids, he suddenly beheld the bridge footway hanging limp and swaying against the further cliff.

“Thank God! In time, in time!” he panted, staggering like a drunken man.

But all at once he beheld two of the Horde still there in front of him--the one that had flung the dart and another. They were advancing at a lope.

Allan turned and fled.

His ammunition was all spent, he knew that to face them was madness.

“I must load up again,” thought he. “Then I'll make short work of them!”

Fortunately he could far outstrip them in flight. That, and that alone, had already saved him in the past week of horrible pursuit through the forests to northward. And quickly now he ran down the terrace again--down to the caves below. As he ran he shouted in Merucaan:

“Out, my people! Out with you! Out to battle! Out to war!”

Half way upward down to Cliff Villa he met Frumuos toiling upward. Him he greeted and quickly informed of the situation.

“The bridge is down!” he panted. “I cut it! The further shore is swarming with enemies. Two have reached this side!”

“What is this, O Kromno?” asked the man anxiously, pointing at Allan's shoulder. “Have they wounded you?”

Allan looked and saw a poisoned dart hanging loosely in his left sleeve. As he moved he could feel the point rubbing against his naked skin.

“Merciful Heaven!” he exclaimed. “Has it scratched me?”

With infinite precautions he loosened and threw off his outer garment. He flung it, with the dart still adhering, down over the cliff.

“Look, Frumuos!” he commanded. “Search carefully and see if there be any scratch on the skin!”

The man obeyed, making a minute inspection through his mica eye-shields. Then he shook his head.

“No, Kromno,” he answered. “I see nothing. But the arrow came near, near!”

Stern, tremendously relieved, gestured toward the caves.

“Go swiftly!” he commanded. “Bring up every man who still can fight. All must have full burdens of cartridges. Even though the bridge be down, the enemy will still attack!”

“But how, since the great river lies between?”

“They can climb down those cliffs and swim the river and scramble up this side as easily as we can walk on level ground. Go swiftly! There is no time to lose!”

“I go, master. But tell me, the two who have already reached this side--shall we not first slay them?”

Allan thought. For the first time he now realized clearly the terrible peril that lay in these two Anthropoids already inside the limits of the colony.

He peered up the pathway. No sign of them above. Their animal cunning had warned them not to descend to certain death.

Now Allan knew they were at liberty inside the palisades, waiting, watching, constituting a deadly menace at every turn.

In any one of a thousand places they could lie ambushed, behind trees or bushes, or in the limbs aloft, and thence, unseen, they could discharge an indefinite number of darts.

It was now perilous in the extreme even to venture back to the palisade. Any moment might bring a flicking, stinging messenger of death. Those two, alone, might easily decimate the remaining men of the colony--and now each man was incalculably precious.

“Go, Frumuos,” Allan again commanded. “For the moment we must leave those two up there. Go, muster all the fighting men and bring them up here along the terrace. I must think! Go!”

Suddenly, before the messenger had even had time to disappear round the first bend in the path, Allan found his inspiration.

“Regular warfare will never do it!” he exclaimed decisively. “They have thousands where we have tens. Before we could pick them off with our firearms they'd have exhausted all our ammunition and have rushed us--and everything would be all over.

“No; there must be some quicker and more drastic way! Even dynamite or Pulverite could never reach them all, swarming over there through miles of forest. Only one thing can stand against them--fire!

“With fire we must sweep and purge the world, even though we destroy it! With fire we must sweep the world!”