Brood of the Dark Moon
"We can't go," Diane was saying; "we can't go. Poor Towahg! He couldn't
tell us how close they were on his trail; he hurried us all he could."
Chet saw her hand raised; he followed with his eyes the finger that
pointed toward the jungle, and he saw as had Diane the flick of moving
leaves where black faces showed silently for an instant and then
vanished. They were up in the trees--lower--down on the ground. There
were scores upon scores of the ape-men spying upon them, watching every
move that they made.
And suddenly, across the open ground, where the high-flung branches made
the great arch that they called the entrance, a ragged figure appeared.
The figure of a man whose torn clothes fluttered in the breeze, whose
face was black with an unkempt beard, whose thick hand waved to motion
other scarecrow figures to him, and who laughed, loudly and derisively
that the three quiet men and the girl on the knoll might hear.
"_Guten tag, meine Herrschaften_," Schwartzmann called loudly, "_meine
sehr geehrten Herrschaften!_ You must not be so exclusive. Many _guten_
friends haff I here with me. I haff been looking forward to this time
when they would meet you."
CHAPTER XIX
"_One for Each of Us_"
For men who had come from a world where wars and warfare were things of
the past, Chet, and Harkness had done effective work in preparing a
defense. The knoll made a height of land that any military man would
have chosen to defend, and the top of the gentle slope was protected by
the barricade.
On each side of the inverted U that ended at the water's edge an opening
had been left, where they passed in and out. But even here the wall had
been doubled and carried past itself: no place was left for an easy
assault, and on the open end the water was their protection.
Within the barricade, at about the center, the top of the knoll showed
an outcrop of rocks that rose high enough to be exposed to fire from
outside, but their little shelters were on nearly level ground at the
base of the rocks. The whole enclosure was some thirty feet in width and
perhaps a hundred feet long. Plenty to protect in case of an attack, as
Chet had remarked, but it could not have been much smaller and have done
its work effectively.
There was no one of the four white persons but gave unspoken thanks for
the barricade of sharp stakes, and even Towahg, although his fangs were
bared in an animal snarl at the sound of Schwartzmann's voice, must have
been glad to keep his bruised body out of sight behind the sheltering
wall.
No one of them replied to Schwartzmann's taunt. Harkness wrinkled his
eyes to stare through the bright sunlight and see the pistol in the
man's belt.
"He still has it," he said, half to himself: "he's got the gun. I was
rather hoping something might have happened to it. Just one gun; but he
has plenty of ammunition--"
"And we haven't--" It was Chet, now, who seemed thinking aloud. "But, I
wonder--can we bluff him a bit?"
* * * * *
He dropped behind the barricade and crawled into one of the huts to come
out with three extra pistols clutched in his hand. Empty, of course, but
they had brought them with them with some faint hope that some day the
ship might be reached and ammunition secured. Chet handed one to Diane
and another to Kreiss; the third weapon he stuck in his own belt where
it would show plainly. Harkness was already armed.
"Now let's get up where they can see us," was Chet's answer to their
wondering looks; "let's show off our armament. How can he know how much
ammunition we have left? For that matter, he may be getting a little
short of shells himself, and he won't know that his solitary pistol is
the thing we are most afraid of."
"Good," Harkness agreed; "we will play a little good old-fashioned poker
with the gentleman, but don't overdo it, just casually let him see the
guns."
Schwartzmann, far across the open ground, must have seen them as plainly
as they saw him as they climbed the little hummock of rocks. He could
not fail to note the pistols in the men's belts, nor overlook the
significance of the weapon that gleamed brightly in the pilot's hand.
Chet saw him return his pistol to his belt as he backed slowly into the
shadows, and he knew that Schwartzmann had no wish for an exchange of
shots, even at long range, with so many guns against him. But from their
slight elevation he saw something else.
The grass was trampled flat all about their enclosure, but, beyond, it
stood half the height of a man; it was a sea of rippling green where the
light wind brushed across it. And throughout that sea that intervened
between them and the jungle Chet saw other ripples forming, little
quiverings of shaken stalks that came here and there until the whole
expanse seemed trembling.
"Down--and get ready for trouble!" he ordered crisply, then added as he
sprang for his own long bow: "Their commanding officer doesn't want to
mix it with us--not just yet--but the rest are coming, and there's a
million of them, it looks like."
* * * * *
The apes broke cover with all the suddenness of a covey of quail, but
they charged like wild, hungry beasts that have sighted prey. Only the
long spears in their bunchy fists and the shorter throwing spears that
came through the air marked them as primitive men.
The standing grass at the end of the clearing beyond their barricade was
abruptly black with naked bodies. To Chet, that charging horde was a
formless dark wave that came rolling up toward them; then, as suddenly
as the black wave had appeared, it ceased to be a mere mass and Chet saw
individual units. A black-haired one was springing in advance. The man
behind the barricade heard the twang of his bow as if it were a sound
from afar off; but he saw the arrow projecting from a barrel-shaped
chest, and the ape-man tottering over.
He loosed his arrows as rapidly as he could draw the bow; he knew that
others were shooting too. Where naked feet were stumbling over prostrate
bodies the black wave broke in confusion and came on unsteadily into the
hail of winged barbs.
But the wave rushed on and up to the barricade in a scattering of
shrieking, leaping ape-man, and Chet spared a second for unspoken thanks
for the height of the barrier. A full six feet it stood from the ground,
and the ends that had been burned, then pointed with a crude ax, were
aimed outward. Inside the enclosure Chet had wanted to throw up a bench
or mound of earth on which they could stand to fire above the high
barrier, but lack of tools had prevented them. Instead they had laid
cribbing of short poles at intervals and on each of these had built a
platform of branches.
* * * * *
Close to the barricade of poles and vines, these platforms enabled the
defenders to shield themselves from thrown spears and rise as they
wished to fire out and down into the mob. But with the rush of a score
or more of the man-beasts to the barricade itself, Chet suddenly knew
that they were vulnerable to an attack with long lances.
A leaping body was hanging on the barrier; huge hands tore and clawed at
the inner side for a grip. From the platform where Diane stood came an
arrow at the same instant Chet shot. One matched the other for accuracy,
and the clawing figure fell limply from sight. But there were
others--and a lance tipped with the jagged fin, needle-sharp, of a
poison fish was thrusting wickedly toward Diane.
This time Harkness' arrow did the work, but Chet ordered a retreat.
Above the pandemonium of snarling growls, he shouted.
"Back to the rocks, Walt," he ordered; "you and Diane! Quick! The rest
of us will hold 'em till you are ready. Then you keep 'em off until we
come!" And the two obeyed the cool, crisp voice that was interrupted
only when its owner, with the others, had to duck quickly to avoid a
barrage of spears.
* * * * *
Kreiss was wounded. Chet found him dropped beside his firing platform
working methodically to extract the broad blade of a spear from his
shoulder where it was embedded.
Chet's first thought was of poison, and he shouted for Towahg. But the
savage only looked once at the spear, seized it and with one quick jerk
drew the weapon from the wound; then, when the blood flowed freely, he
motioned to Chet that the man was all right.
The savage wadded a handful of leaves into a ball and pressed it against
the wound, and Chet improvised a first-aid bandage from Kreiss' ragged
blouse before they put him from sight in one of the shelters and ran to
rejoin Harkness and Diane on the rocks.
But the first wave was spent. There were no more snarling, white-toothed
faces above the barricade, and in the open space beyond were shambling
forms that hid themselves in the long grass while others dragged
themselves to the same concealment or lay limply inert on the open,
sunlit ground.
And within the enclosure one solitary ape-man forgot his bruised body
while he stamped up and down or whirled absurdly in a dance that
expressed his joy in victory.
"Better come down," said Chet. "Schwartzmann might take a shot at you,
although I think we are out of pistol range. We're lucky that isn't a
service gun he's got, but come down anyway, and we'll see what's next.
This time we've had the breaks, but there's more coming. Schwartzmann
isn't through."
But Schwartzmann was through for the day; Chet was mistaken in expecting
a second assault so soon. He posted Towahg as sentry, and, with Diane
and Harkness, threw himself before the door-flap of the shelter where
Kreiss had been hidden, and was now sitting up, his arm in a sling.
"Either you're a 'mighty hard man to kill,'" he told Kreiss, "or else
Towahg is a powerful medicine man."
"I am still in the fight," the scientist assured him. "I can't do any
more work with bow and arrow, but I can keep the rest of you supplied."
"We'll need you," Chet assured him grimly.
* * * * *
They ate in silence as the afternoon drew on toward evening.
Back by their little fire, with Towahg on guard, Chet shot an
appreciative glance at a white disk in the southern sky. "Still getting
the breaks," he exulted. "The moon is up; it will give us some light
after sunset, and later the Earth will rise and light things up around
here in good shape."
That white disk turned golden as the sun vanished where mountainous
clouds loomed blackly far across the jungle-clad hills. Then the quick
night blanketed everything, and the golden moon made black the fringe of
forest trees while it sent long lines of light through their waving,
sinuous branches, to cast moving shadows that seemed strangely alive on
the open ground. Muffled by the jungle-sea that absorbed the sound
waves, faint grumblings came to them, and at a quiver of light in the
blackness where the clouds had been, Harkness turned to Chet.
"We had all better get on the job," Chet was saying, as he took his bow
and a supply of arrows, "we've got our work cut out for us to-night."
And Harkness nodded grimly as the flickering lightning played fitfully
over far-distant trees. "We crowed a bit too soon," he told Chet;
"there's a big storm coming, and that's a break for Schwartzmann. No
light from either moon or Earth to-night."
The moon-disk, as he spoke, lost its first clear brilliance in the haze
of the expanding clouds.
"Watch sharp, Towahg!" Chet ordered. And, to the others: "Get this fire
moved away from the huts--here. I'll do that, Walt. You bring a supply
of wood; some of those dried leaves, too. We'll build a big fire, we
have to depend on that for light."
* * * * *