Brood Of The Dark Moon Part 25

"Is ended!" snapped Chet. "Stay if you want to; you'll never finish your work. The rest of us will leave in the morning. Towahg will be back here to-night.

"Nothing much to get together," he told Harkness. "I'll see to it; you stay with Diane."

Their bows, a store of extra bone-tipped arrows, and food: as Chet had said there was not much to prepare for their flight. They had spent many hours in arrow making: there were bundles of them stored away in readiness for an attack, and Chet looked at them with regret, but knew they must travel fast and light.

Out of his rocky "laboratory" Kreiss came at dusk to tramp slowly and moodily down to the shelters.

"I shall leave when you do," he told Chet. "Perhaps we can find some place, some corner of this world, where we can live in peace. But I had hoped, I had thought--"

"Yes?" Chet queried. "What did you have on your mind?"

"The gas," the scientist replied. "I was working with a rubber latex. I had thought to make a mask, improvise an air-pump and send one of us through the green gas to reach the ship. And there was more that I hoped to do; but, as you say, my work is ended."

"Bully for you," said Chet admiringly; "the old bean keeps right on working all the time. Well, you may do it yet; we may come back to the ship. Who can tell? But just now I am more anxious about Towahg. Right now, when we need him the most, he fails to show up."

The ape-man was seldom seen by day, but always he came back before nightfall; his chunky figure was a familiar sight as he slipped soundlessly from the jungle where the shadows of approaching night lay first. But now Chet watched in vain at the arched entrance to the leafy tangle. He even ventured, after dark, within the jungle's edge and called and hallooed without response. And this night the hours dragged by where Chet lay awake, watching and listening for some sign of their guide.

Then dawn, and golden arrows of light that drove the morning mist in lazy whirls above the surface of the lake. But no silent shadow-form came from among the distant trees. And without Towahg--!

"Might as well stay here and take it standing," was Chet's verdict, and Harkness nodded a.s.sent.

"Not a chance," he agreed. "We might make our way through the forest after a fashion, but we would be slow doing it, and the brutes would be after us, of course."

They made all possible preparations to withstand a siege. Chet, after a careful, listening reconnaissance, went into the jungle with bow and arrows, and he came back with three of the beasts he had called Moon-pigs. Other trips, with Kreiss as an a.s.sistant, resulted in a great heap of fruit that they placed carefully in the shade of a hut. Water they had in unlimited supply.

How they would stand off an enemy who fought only with the terrible gleam of their eyes no one of them could have said. But they all worked, and Diane helped, too, to place extra bows at points where they might be needed and to put handfuls of arrows at the firing platforms s.p.a.ced at regular intervals along the barricade.

Chet smiled sardonically as he saw Herr Kreiss laboring mightily and alone to rig a catapult that could be turned to face in all directions.

But he helped to bring in a supply of round stones from a distance down the sh.o.r.e, though the picture of this medieval weapon being effective against those broadsides of mental force was not one his mind could easily paint.

And then Towahg came! Not the silent, swiftly-leaping figure that moved on muscles like coiled steel springs! This was another Towahg who dragged a bruised body through the gra.s.s until Harkness and Chet reached him and helped him to the barricade.

"Gr-r-ranga!" he growled. It was the sound he had made before when he had seen or had tried to tell them of the ape-men. "Gr-r-ranga!

Gr-r-ranga!" He pointed about him as if to say: "There!--and there!--and there!"

"Yes, yes!" Chet a.s.sured him. "We understand: you met up with a pack of them."

Whereupon Towahg, with his monkey mimicry, gave a convincing demonstration of himself being seized and beaten: and the tooth-marks on nearly every inch of his body gave proof of the rough reception he had encountered.

Then he showed himself escaping, running, swinging through trees, till he came to the camp. And now he raised his bruised body to a standing position and motioned them toward the forest.

"Gr-r-ranga come!" he warned them, and repeated it over again, while his face wrinkled in fear that told plainly of the danger he had seen.

Chet glanced at Harkness and knew his own gaze was as disconsolate as his companion's. "He's met up with them," he admitted, "though, for the life of me, I can't see how he ever got away if it was a crowd of messenger-apes who could petrify him with one look. There's something strange about that, but whatever it is, here's our guide in no shape to travel."

Towahg was growling and grimacing in an earnest effort to communicate some idea. His few words and the full power of his mimicry had been used to urge them on, to warn them that they must flee for their lives, but it seemed he had something else to tell. Suddenly he leaped into his grotesque dance, though his wounds must have made it an agonizing effort, but his joy in the thought that had come to him was too great to take quietly. He knew how to tell Chet!

And with a protruded stomach he marched before them as a well-fed German might walk, and he stroked at an imaginary beard in reproduction of an act that was habitual with one they had known.

"Schwartzmann?" asked Chet. He had used the name before when he and Towahg had led their enemy's "army" off the trail. "You have seen Schwartzmann?"

And Towahg leaped and capered with delight. "Szhwarr!" he growled in an effort to p.r.o.nounce the name; "Szhwarr come!"

Chet made a wild leap for their bows and supplies.

"Come on!" he shouted. "That's the answer. It isn't the ones from the pyramid; they're coming later. It's Schwartzmann and his bunch of apes.

They've followed the messenger, they're on their way, and, in spite of his being all chewed up, Towahg can travel faster than that crowd. He'll guide us out of this yet!"

He was thrusting bundles of supplies--food, arrows, bows--into the eager hands of the others, while Towahg alternately licked his wounds and danced about with excitement. Diane's voice broke in upon the tense haste and bustle of the moment. She spoke quietly--her tone was flat, almost emotionless--yet there was a quality that made Chet drop what he was holding and reach for a bow.

"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 pa.s.sed in and out. But even here the wall had been doubled and carried past itself: no place was left for an easy a.s.sault, 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--"