Part 25 (1/2)

”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 s.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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.