the other side of the canon. By afternoon another battle might be on.
“Whatever happens, I must get my grip on the colony again at once!” he realized. “Such of the Folk as are still sound must be rallied. Otherwise nothing but annihilation awaits us all!”
But, even as he faced the exit of Cliff Villa, all at once the door was hurled violently open and a harsh, discordant cry of hatred and defiance burst into the cave.
Stern saw the detested figure of H’yemba standing there, loose-hung, powerful, barbaric, his eyes blinking evilly behind the mica screens that Allan himself had made for him.
With a cry Allan started forward.
“My son!” he gasped.
There, clutched in the smith’s left arm, lay the boy!
Allan heard his child crying as in pain, and rage swept every caution to the winds.
He sprang toward H’yemba, cursing; but the smith, with a beast-laugh, raised his right hand.
“Master!” he mocked. “No nearer or ye die!”
Allan, aghast, saw the flicker of sunlight on a pistol-barrel. With only too true an aim, H’yemba had him covered.
Came a little pause, tense as steel wire. Somewhere down the terrace sounded a murmur of voices. Allan seemed to sense that the rebel had now gathered his forces and that a general attack was imminent.
Time! At all hazards he must gain a moment’s time!
“H’yemba!” cried he. “What is your speech with me, your master?”
“Master?” sneered the smith again. “My slave! Power has passed from you to me. From you, who speak the false, who entrap us here to suffer and die, who slay and ruin us, to me, who will yet lead the people back to their far home, to safety and to life!”
“You lie, hound!”
The smith laughed bitterly.
“That shall be seen—who lies!” he gibed. “But now power is mine. I have your son in my hand. Move only and I fling him from the cliff!”
Allan felt his brain whirl; all things seemed to turn about him. But he fought off his faintness, and in a shaken voice once more demanded:
“What terms, H’yemba?”
“Slavery for you and yours! Your son shall be my serf; your woman my chattel! Ha, that woman! She has already fought me, like one of these strange woods—beasts you have made us kill! See! My hair is burned and my flesh blistered with her fire-beating! But when I hold her in these hands then she shall pay for all, the vuedma!”
Stern’s hand twitched, with the automatic gripped in the fingers, but the blacksmith cried a warning.
“Raise not that hand, slave!” he ordered. “You cannot shoot without the danger of killing this vile spawn of yours! And remember, too, the river lies far below, and very sharp are the waiting rocks!
“Fool that you are, that think yourself so wise! To leave this place with me! With me, skilled in all labors of metal and stone, strong to cut passage-ways—”
“You devil! You hewed a way into my house?”
H’yemba laughed brutally.
“Silently, steadily, I labored!” he boasted. “And behold the reward! Power for me; eternal slavery for you and all your blood—if any live!”
Insane with rage and hate, Allan nevertheless realized that IIOW all depended on keeping his thought and nerve.
One single premature move and his son would inevitably be hurled over the parapet, down two hundred and fifty feet to the river-bed below. At all hazards, he must keep cool!
The smith, after all only a barbarian and of limited intelligence, had not even thought of the obvious command to make Stern drop his pistol on the floor.
Upon this oversight now hung all Allan’s hopes.
Even though the man’s retainers might rush the cave and slaughter all, yet in Allan’s heart burned a clear and steady flame of hot desire to compass H’yemba’s death.
And as the smith now loudly boasted, insulted, vilified, in the true manner of the savage, imperceptibly, inch by inch, Allan was turning his pistol-barrel upward.
Higher, higher, bit by bit it crept toward the horizontal. Unaccustomed to shoot from the hip, Allan realized that right before him lay a supreme test of nerve and marksmanship and skill.
To shoot and kill his boy—the thought was too hideous even to be considered. His father-heart yearned toward the frightened, crying child there in the traitor’s grip.
The unconscious form of Beatrice fever-burned and panting on the bed, seemed calling aloud to him: “Aim true, Allan! Aim true!”
For one false shot inevitably sealed the child’s death. To wound H’yemba and not kill him meant the catastrophe. If the bullet failed to enter brain or heart, H’yemba—though mortally hurt—would of a surety, with his last quiver of strength, sling the boy outward over the dizzying parapet.
Allan prayed; yet his prayer was wordless, formless and unconscious.
He dared not glance down at the automatic. His eyes must hold the smith’s. And he must speak, must parley, at all hazards must still gain another moment’s respite.
What Allan said in those last terrible, eternal seconds he could never afterward recall.
He only knew he was treating with the enemy, making terms, listening, answering—all with mechanical sub-consciousness.
His real personality, his true ego, was absolutely absorbed in the one vital, all-deciding problem of that stiffening pistol-hand.
Suddenly something seemed to cry in his ear:
“You have it now! Fire!”
His hand leaped back with the crashing discharge, loud-echoing in the cave.
H’yemba did not even yell. But at the second when he seemed to crumple all together, falling as an empty sack falls, some involuntary jerk of his finger sent a bullet zooming into the cave.
It shattered beyond Allan in a little shower of steel and lead fragments, mingled with rock-dust.
Before these had even fallen Allan was upon him.
Neglecting for an instant the bruised and screaming child, who lay there struggling on the terrace-path, Allan seized the still-twitching body of the monstrous traitor.
With passionate strength he dragged it to the parapet.
Below, down the path, he caught a swift glimpse of grouped Folk, wondering, staring, aghast.
To them he gave no heed.
He lifted the body, dripping bright blood.
Silent, indomitable, disheveled, he raised it on high.
Then, with a cry: “See, ye people, how I answer traitors!” he whirled it outward into the void.
Over and over it gyrated through vacant space. Then, with an echoing splash, the river took it, and the swift current, white-foaming, boisterous, wild, rolled it and tumbled it away, away forever, into the unknown.
With harsh cries and a wild spatter of bullets aimed high above them, Allan drove the cowed and beaten partizans of H’yemba jostling, fleeing, howling for mercy, down the terrace-path between the cliff and parapet.
Only then, when he knew victory was secure and his own dominance once more sealed on them, did he run swiftly back to his boy.
Snatching up the child, he retreated into the home cave again; and now for the first time he realized his wan and sunken cheeks were wet with tears.
CHAPTER XXVI. THE COMING OF THE HORDE
