Part 10 (1/2)

”I saw hiht No weapon had touched hiroin, belly and neck the last as if his head had been almost severed from his body What do you make of that?”

Conan made no reply, and the forester, aware of the reticence of barbarians on certain ic, and soic It was the mystery of his death that took the heart out of the Picts Not abefore Velitrium They hurried back across Black River Those that struck Thunder River arriors who had coh to take the city by the the road, behind their main force, and I know none followed ot into the town You brought the settlers through all right, but their woot into Velitrium just ahead of those painted devils If the youth Balthus and old Slasher hadn't held them up awhile, they'd have butchered every woman and child in Conajohara I passed the place where Balthus and the dogamid a heap of dead Picts I counted seven, brained by his axe, or dises, and there were others in the road with arrows sticking in theht that must have been”

”He was a man,” said Conan ”I drink to his shade, and to the shade of the dog, who knew no fear” He quaffed part of the wine, then eesture, and soblet ”The heads of ten Picts shall pay for his, and seven heads for the dog, as a better warrior thaninto theblue eyes knew the barbaric oath would 94

be kept

”They'll not rebuild the fort”

”No; Conajohara is lost to Aquilonia The frontier has been pushed back Thunder River will be the new border”

The woodshed and stared at his calloused hand, worn fro ar hi the lost river; co him with those other wild aze

”Barbarism is the natural state ofsomberly at the Cimmerian ”Civilization is unnatural It is a whim of circumstance And barbarism must always ultier The Black Stranger I

THE PAINTED MEN

One lade lay ee of the bushes There had been no sound to warn the grey squirrels of his coay-hued birds that flitted about in the sunshi+ne of the open space took fright at his sudden appearance and rose in a clalanced quickly back the way he had coht had betrayed his position to so his feet with care For all his massive, muscular build he moved with the supple certitude of a panther He was naked except for a rag twisted about his loins, and his limbs were criss-crossed with scratches froe was knotted about his thickly-muscled left araunt, and his eyes burned like the eyes of a wounded panther He lihtly as he followed the dim path that led across the open space

Half-way across the glade he stopped short and whirled, catlike, facing back the way he had co-drawn call quavered out across the forest To another man it would have seemed merely the howl of a wolf But this man kneas no wolf He was a Cimmerian and understood the voices of the wilderness as a city-bred e burned redly in his bloodshot eyes as he turned once lade, ran along the edge of a dense thicket that rose in a solid clu, deeply ee of the thicket, lying between it and the path When the Cilade To the average eye there were no signs to show that he had passed; but there was evidence visible to his wilderness-sharpened eyes, and therefore to the equally keen eyes of those who pursued hi in his eyes the berserk fury of a hunted beast which is ready to turn at bay

He walked down the trail with corass-blade beneath his foot Then, when he had reached the further end of the great log, he sprang upon it, turned and ran lightly back along it The bark had long been worn away by the elen to show the keenest forest-eyes that he had doubled on his trail When he reached 96

the densest point of the thicket he faded into it like a shadoith hardly the quiver of a leaf to rey squirrels chattered again on the branches then flattened their bodies and were suddenly lade was invaded As silently as the first man had appeared, three otherThey were dark- skinned men of short stature, with thickly-muscled chests and arle's feather was thrust into each black ns, and heavily ar themselves in the open, for they le-file, treading as softly as leopards, and bending down to stare at the path They were following the trail of the Cimmerian, but it was no easy task even for these hulade, and then one stiffened, grunted and pointed with his broad-bladed stabbing spear at a crushed grass- blade where the path entered the forest again All halted instantly and their beady black eyes quested the forest walls But their quarry ell hidden; they saw nothing to awake their suspicion, and presently theythe faintcareless through weakness or desperation

They had just passed the spot where the thicket crowded closest to the ancient trail when the Cied his knife between the shoulders of the last man The attack was so quick and unexpected the Pict had no chance to save himself

The blade was in his heart before he kneas in peril The other thirled with the instant, steel-trap quickness of savages, but even as his knife sank home, the Ciht hand The second Pict was in the act of turning as the axe fell It split his skull to the teeth

The rele-feather, ca at the Cimmerian's breast even as the killer wrenched his axe froainst the chief and folloith an attack as furious and desperate as the charge of a wounded tiger The Pict, staggering under the iainst hi axe; the instinct to slay sub even the instinct to live, he drove his spear ferociously at his enee of a greater intelligence, and a weapon in each hand The hatchet, checking its doard sweep, struck the spear aside, and the knife in the Cimmerian's left hand ripped upward into the painted belly

An awful howl burst from the Pict's lips as he crumpled, disembowelled a cry not of fear or of pain, but of baffled, bestial fury, the death-screech of a panther It was answered by a wild chorus of yells solade The Ci like a wild thing at bay, lips asnarl, shaking the sweat from his face Blood trickled 97

down his forear, incoherent imprecation he turned and fled ard He did not pick his way now, but ran with all the speed of his long legs, calling on the deep and all but inexhaustible reservoirs of endurance which are Nature's compensation for a barbaric existence Behind him for a space the woods were silent, then a de burst out at the spot he had recently left, and he knew his pursuers had found the bodies of his victi the blood drops that kept spilling to the ground fro a trail a child could follow He had thought that perhaps these three Picts were all that still pursued him of the war-party which had followed hiht have known these human wolves never quit a blood-trail

The woods were silent again, and thathis path by the betraying blood-drops he could not check A wind out of the west blew against his face, laden with a salty danized Dully he was a chase had been even longer than he had realized But it was nearly over Even his wolfish vitality was ebbing under the terrible strain He gasped for breath and there was a sharp pain in his side His legs trembled eariness and the lame one ached like the cut of a knife in the tendons each time he set the foot to earth He had followed the instincts of the wilderness which bred hi every subtlety and artifice to survive Now in his extre for a place to turn at bay and sell his life at a bloody price

He did not leave the trail for the tangled depths on either hand He knew that it was futile to hope to evade his pursuers now He ran on down the trail while the blood pounded louder and louder in his ears and each breath he dreas a racking, dry-lipped gulp Behind hi broke out, token that they were close on his heels and expected to overhaul their prey swiftly They would co at every leap

Abruptly he burst froround pitching upward, and the ancient trail winding up rocky ledges between jagged boulders All swam before higed crag rising abruptly from the forest about its foot And the die near the suood a place to die as any He li on hands and knees in the steeper places, his knife between his teeth He had not yet reached the jutting ledge when so like wolves At the sight of their prey their screams rose to a devil's crescendo, and they raced toward the foot of the crag, loosing arrows as they caedly cli Without pausing in his climb he tore it out and threw it aside, heedless of the less accurate missiles which splintered on the rocks about hie and turned about, drawing his hatchet 98

and shi+fting knife to hand He lay glaring down at his pursuers over the ri eyes visible His chest heaved as he drank in the air in great shuddering gasps, and he clenched his teeth against a tendency toward nausea

Only a few arrohistled up at him The horde knew its prey was cornered The warriors cailely over the rocks at the foot of the hill, war-axes in their hand

The first to reach the crag was a brawny brave whose eagle feather was stained scarlet as a token of chieftainshi+p He halted briefly, one foot on the sloping trail, arrow notched and drawn half-way back, head thrown back and lips parted for an exultant yell But the shaft was never loosed He froze into ave way to a look of startled recognition With a whoop he gave back, throwing his ar braves The e above theue, but he was too far away to catch the significance of the staccato phrases snapped at the warriors by the cri, and stood e, it seemed to him, but at the hill itself Then without further hesitation, they unstrung their bows and thrust theirdles; turned their backs and trotted across the open space, to melt into the forest without a backward look

The Cilared in anize the finality expressed in the departure He knew they would not coes, a hundred miles to the east

But he could not understand it What was there about his refuge that would cause a Pictish war- party to abandon a chase it had followed so long with all the passion of hungry wolves? He knew there were sacred places, spots set aside as sanctuaries by the various clans, and that a fugitive, taking refuge in one of these sanctuaries, was safe from the clan which raised it But the different tribes seldom respected sanctuaries of other tribes; and the men who had pursued hiion They were the es lay far to the east, adjoining the country of the Wolf-Picts

It was the Wolves who had captured hi Thunder River, and they had given hile-iant Cimmerian, and noas redder still, for his escape had cost the life of a noted war-chief That hy they had followed hih long leagues of gloorounds of hostile tribes And now the survivors of that long chase turned back when their enemy was run to earth and trapped He shook his head, unable to understand it

He rose gingerly, dizzy frorind, and scarcely able to realize that it was over His limbs were stiff, his wounds ached He spat dryly and cursed, rubbing his burning, bloodshot 99

eyes with the back of his thick wrist He blinked and took stock of his surroundings Below hireen wilderness waved and billoay and away in a solid mass, and above its western ri over the ocean The wind stirred his blackof the atmosphere revived him He expanded his enormous chest and drank it in

Then he turned stiffly and painfully about, growling at the twinge in his bleeding calf, and investigated the ledge whereon he stood Behind it rose a sheer rocky cliff to the crest of the crag, some thirty feet above him A narrow ladder-like stair of hand-holds had been niched into the rock And a few feet froh and tall enough for a runted The sun, hanging high above the western forest, slanted into the cleft, revealing a tunnel-like cavern beyond, and rested a revealing beam on the arch at which this tunnel ended In that arch was set a heavy iron-bound oaken door!

This was a wilderness The Cimmerian knew that for a thousand miles this western coast ran bare and uninhabited except by the villages of the ferocious sea-land tribes, ere even less civilized than their forest-dwelling brothers

The nearest outposts of civilization were the frontier settle Thunder River, hundreds of miles to the east The Cimmerian kneas the only white man ever to cross the wilderness that lay between that river and the coast Yet that door was no work of Picts

Being unexplainable, it was an object of suspicion, and suspiciously he approached it, axe and knife ready Then as his blood-shot eyes becalooht, he noticed so the walls A blaze of comprehension came into his eyes He bent over one, but the lid resisted his efforts He lifted his hatchet to shatter the ancient lock, then changed hiswasat his sides He pushed against the ornately carven door and it swung inithout resistance

Then his -like abruptness; he recoiled with a startled curse, knife and hatchet flashi+ng as they leaped to positions of defense An instant he poised there, like a statue of fierce h the door It was darker in the large natural chalow ereat jehich stood on a tiny ivory pedestal in the center of the great ebony table about which sat those silent shapes whose appearance had so startled the intruder

They did not move, they did not turn their heads toward him

100

”Well,” he said harshly; ”are you all drunk?”