girl looked, Stern drew his revolver.
Speaking no further word, he laid the ugly barrel firm across the sill.
Carefully he sighted, as best he could in that gloom lit only by the stars. Coldly as though at a target-shot, he brought the muzzle-sight to bear on that deep, crawling shadow.
Then suddenly a spurt of fire split the night. The crackling report echoed away. And with a bubbling scream, the shadow loosened from the limb, as a ripe fruit loosens.
Vaguely they saw it fall, whirl, strike a branch, slide off, and disappear.
All at once a pattering rain of darts flickered around them. Stern felt one strike his fur jacket and bounce off. Another grazed the girl’s head. But to their work they stood, and flinched not.
Now her revolver was speaking, in antiphony with his; and from the branches, two, three, five, eight, ten of the ape-things fell.
“Give it to ’em!” shouted the engineer, as though he had a regiment behind him. “Give it to ’em!” And again he pulled the trigger.
The revolver was empty.
With a cry he threw it down, and, running to where the shotgun stood, snatched it up. He scooped into his pocket a handful of shells from the box where they were stored; and as he darted back to the window, he cocked both hammers.
“Poom! Poom!”
The deep baying of the revolver roared out in twin jets of flame.
Stern broke the gun and jacked in two more shells.
Again he fired.
“Good Heaven! How many of ’em are there in the trees?” shouted he.
“Try the Pulverite!” cried Beatrice. “Maybe you might hit a branch!”
Stern flung down the gun. To the corner where the vials were standing he ran.
Up he caught one—he dared not take two lest they should by some accident strike together.
“Here—here, now, take this!” he bellowed.
And from the window, aiming at a pine that stood seventy-five feet away—a pine whose branches seemed to hang thick with the Horde’s blowgun-men—he slung it with all the strength of his uninjured arm.
Into the gloom it vanished, the little meteorite of latent death, of potential horror and destruction.
“If it hits ’em, they’ll think we are gods, after all, what?” cried the engineer, peering eagerly. But for a moment, nothing happened.
“Missed it!” he groaned. “If I only had my right arm to use now, I might—”
Far below, down there a hundred feet beneath them and out a long way from the tower base, night yawned wide in a burst of hellish glare.
A vast conical hole of flame was gouged in the dark. For a fraction of a second every tree, limb, twig stood out in vivid detail, as that blue-white glory shot aloft.
All up through the forest the girl and Stern got a momentary glimpse of little, clinging Things, crouching misshapen, hideous.
Then, as a riven and distorted whirl burst upward in a huge geyser of annihilation, came a detonation that ripped, stunned, shattered; that sent both the defenders staggering backward from the window.
Darkness closed again, like a gaping mouth that shuts. And all about the building, through the trees, and down again in a titanic, slashing rain fell the wreckage of things that had been stone, and earth, and root, and tree, and living creatures—that had been—that now were but one indistinguishable mass of ruin and of death.
After that, here and there, small dark objects came dropping, thudding, crashing down. You might have thought some cosmic gardener had shaken his orchard, his orchard where the plums and pears were rotten- ripe.
“One!” cried the engineer, in a strange, wild, exultant voice.
CHAPTER XXIX. THE BATTLE ON THE STAIRS
ALMOST like the echo of his shout, a faint snarling cry rose from the corridor, outside. They heard a clicking, sliding, ominous sound; and, with instant comprehension, knew the truth.
“They’ve got up, some of them—somehow!” Stern cried. “They’ll be at our throats, here, in a moment! Load! Load! You shoot—I’ll give ’em Pulverite!”
No time, now, for caution. While the girl hastily threw in more cartridges, Stern gathered up all the remaining vials of the explosive.
These, garnered along his wounded arm which clasped them to his body, made a little bristling row of death. His left hand remained free, to fling the little glass bombs.
“Come! Come, meet ’em—they mustn’t trap us, here!”
And together they crept noiselessly into the other room and thence to the corridor-door.
Out they peered.
“Look! Torches!” whispered he.
There at the far end of the hallway, a red Mare already flickered on the wall around the turn by the elevator-shaft. Already the confused sounds of the attackers were drawing near.
They’ve managed to dig away the barricade, somehow,” said Stern. “And now they’re out for business— clubs, poisoned darts and all—and fangs, and claws! How many of ’em? God knows! A swarm, that’s all!”
His mouth felt hot and dry, with fever, and the mad excitement of the impending battle. His skin seemed tense and drawn, especially upon the forehead. As he stood there, waiting, he heard the girl’s quick breathing. Though he could hardly see her in the gloom, he felt her presence and he loved it.
“Beatrice,” said he, and for a moment his hand sought hers, “Beatrice, little girl o’ mine, if this is the big finish, if we both go down together and there’s no to-morrow, I want to tell you now—”
A yapping outcry interrupted him. The girl seized his arm. Brighter the torchlight grew.
“Allan!” she whispered. “Come back, back, away from here. We’ve got to get up those stairs, there, at the other end of the hall. This is no kind of place to meet them—we’re exposed, here. There’s no protection!”
“You’re right.” he answered. “Come!”
Like ghosts they slid away, noiselessly, through the enshrouding gloom.
Even as they gained the shelter of the winding stairway, the scouts of the Horde, flaring their torches into each room they passed, came into view around the corner at the distant end.
Shuffling, hideous beyond all words by the fire-gleam, bent, wizened, blue, the Things swarmed toward them in a vague and shifting mass, a ruck of horror.
The defenders, peering from behind the broken balustrade, could hear the guttural jabber of their beast- talk, the clicking play of their fangs; could see the craning necks, the talons that held spears, bludgeons, blow- guns, even jagged rocks.
Over all, the smoky gleams wavered in a ghastly interplay of light and darkness. Uncanny shadows leaped along the walls. From every corner and recess and black, empty door, ghoulish shapes seemed creeping.
Tense, now, the moment hung.
Suddenly the engineer bent forward, staring.
“The chief!” he whispered. And as he spoke, Beatrice aimed.
There, shambling among the drove of things, they saw him clearly for a moment: Uglier, more incredibly brutal than ever he looked, now, by that uncanny light.
Stern saw—and rejoiced in the sight—that the obeah’s jaw hung surely broken, all awry. The quick- blinking, narrow-ridded eyes shuttled here, there, as the creature sought to spy out his enemies. The nostrils dilated, to catch the spoor of man. Man, no longer god, but mortal.
One hand held a crackling pine-knot. The other gripped the heft of a stone ax, one blow of which would dash to pulp the stoutest skull.
This much Stern noted, as in a flash; when at his side the girl’s revolver spat.
