Chapter 19: "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 passed in and out. But even here the wall had been doubled and carried past itself: no place was left for an easy assault, 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--”

“And we haven’t--” It was Chet, now, who seemed thinking aloud. “But, I wonder--can we bluff him a bit?”

He dropped behind the barricade and crawled into one of the huts to come out with three extra pistols clutched in his hand. Empty, of course, but they had brought them with them with some faint hope that some day the ship might be reached and ammunition secured. Chet handed one to Diane and another to Kreiss; the third weapon he stuck in his own belt where it would show plainly. Harkness was already armed.

“Now let’s get up where they can see us,” was Chet’s answer to their wondering looks; “let’s show off our armament. How can he know how much ammunition we have left? For that matter, he may be getting a little short of shells himself, and he won’t know that his solitary pistol is the thing we are most afraid of.”

“Good,” Harkness agreed; “we will play a little good old-fashioned poker with the gentleman, but don’t overdo it, just casually let him see the guns.”

Schwartzmann, far across the open ground, must have seen them as plainly as they saw him as they climbed the little hummock of rocks. He could not fail to note the pistols in the men’s belts, nor overlook the significance of the weapon that gleamed brightly in the pilot’s hand. Chet saw him return his pistol to his belt as he backed slowly into the shadows, and he knew that Schwartzmann had no wish for an exchange of shots, even at long range, with so many guns against him. But from their slight elevation he saw something else.

The grass was trampled flat all about their enclosure, but, beyond, it stood half the height of a man; it was a sea of rippling green where the light wind brushed across it. And throughout that sea that intervened between them and the jungle Chet saw other ripples forming, little quiverings of shaken stalks that came here and there until the whole expanse seemed trembling.

“Down--and get ready for trouble!” he ordered crisply, then added as he sprang for his own long bow: “Their commanding officer doesn’t want to mix it with us--not just yet--but the rest are coming, and there’s a million of them, it looks like.”

The apes broke cover with all the suddenness of a covey of quail, but they charged like wild, hungry beasts that have sighted prey. Only the long spears in their bunchy fists and the shorter throwing spears that came through the air marked them as primitive men.

The standing grass at the end of the clearing beyond their barricade was abruptly black with naked bodies. To Chet, that charging horde was a formless dark wave that came rolling up toward them; then, as suddenly as the black wave had appeared, it ceased to be a mere mass and Chet saw individual units. A black-haired one was springing in advance. The man behind the barricade heard the twang of his bow as if it were a sound from afar off; but he saw the arrow projecting from a barrel-shaped chest, and the ape-man tottering over.

He loosed his arrows as rapidly as he could draw the bow; he knew that others were shooting too. Where naked feet were stumbling over prostrate bodies the black wave broke in confusion and came on unsteadily into the hail of winged barbs.

But the wave rushed on and up to the barricade in a scattering of shrieking, leaping ape-man, and Chet spared a second for unspoken thanks for the height of the barrier. A full six feet it stood from the ground, and the ends that had been burned, then pointed with a crude ax, were aimed outward. Inside the enclosure Chet had wanted to throw up a bench or mound of earth on which they could stand to fire above the high barrier, but lack of tools had prevented them. Instead they had laid cribbing of short poles at intervals and on each of these had built a platform of branches.

Close to the barricade of poles and vines, these platforms enabled the defenders to shield themselves from thrown spears and rise as they wished to fire out and down into the mob. But with the rush of a score or more of the man-beasts to the barricade itself, Chet suddenly knew that they were vulnerable to an attack with long lances.

A leaping body was hanging on the barrier; huge hands tore and clawed at the inner side for a grip. From the platform where Diane stood came an arrow at the same instant Chet shot. One matched the other for accuracy, and the clawing figure fell limply from sight. But there were others--and a lance tipped with the jagged fin, needle-sharp, of a poison fish was thrusting wickedly toward Diane.

This time Harkness’ arrow did the work, but Chet ordered a retreat. Above the pandemonium of snarling growls, he shouted.

“Back to the rocks, Walt,” he ordered; “you and Diane! Quick! The rest of us will hold ‘em till you are ready. Then you keep ‘em off until we come!” And the two obeyed the cool, crisp voice that was interrupted only when its owner, with the others, had to duck quickly to avoid a barrage of spears.

Kreiss was wounded. Chet found him dropped beside his firing platform working methodically to extract the broad blade of a spear from his shoulder where it was embedded.

Chet’s first thought was of poison, and he shouted for Towahg. But the savage only looked once at the spear, seized it and with one quick jerk drew the weapon from the wound; then, when the blood flowed freely, he motioned to Chet that the man was all right.

The savage wadded a handful of leaves into a ball and pressed it against the wound, and Chet improvised a first-aid bandage from Kreiss’ ragged blouse before they put him from sight in one of the shelters and ran to rejoin Harkness and Diane on the rocks.

But the first wave was spent. There were no more snarling, white-toothed faces above the barricade, and in the open space beyond were shambling forms that hid themselves in the long grass while others dragged themselves to the same concealment or lay limply inert on the open, sunlit ground.

And within the enclosure one solitary ape-man forgot his bruised body while he stamped up and down or whirled absurdly in a dance that expressed his joy in victory.

“Better come down,” said Chet. “Schwartzmann might take a shot at you, although I think we are out of pistol range. We’re lucky that isn’t a service gun he’s got, but come down anyway, and we’ll see what’s next. This time we’ve had the breaks, but there’s more coming. Schwartzmann isn’t through.”

But Schwartzmann was through for the day; Chet was mistaken in expecting a second assault so soon. He posted Towahg as sentry, and, with Diane and Harkness, threw himself before the door-flap of the shelter where Kreiss had been hidden, and was now sitting up, his arm in a sling.

“Either you’re a ‘mighty hard man to kill, ‘“ he told Kreiss, “or else Towahg is a powerful medicine man.”

“I am still in the fight,” the scientist assured him. “I can’t do any more work with bow and arrow, but I can keep the rest of you supplied.”

“We’ll need you,” Chet assured him grimly.

They ate in silence as the afternoon drew on toward evening.

Back by their little fire, with Towahg on guard, Chet shot an appreciative glance at a white disk in the southern sky. “Still getting the breaks,” he exulted. “The moon is up; it will give us some light after sunset, and later the Earth will rise and light things up around here in good shape.”

That white disk turned golden as the sun vanished where mountainous clouds loomed blackly far across the jungle-clad hills. Then the quick night blanketed everything, and the golden moon made black the fringe of forest trees while it sent long lines of light through their waving, sinuous branches, to cast moving shadows that seemed strangely alive on the open ground. Muffled by the jungle-sea that absorbed the sound waves, faint grumblings came to them, and at a quiver of light in the blackness where the clouds had been, Harkness turned to Chet.

“We had all better get on the job,” Chet was saying, as he took his bow and a supply of arrows, “we’ve got our work cut out for us to-night.”

And Harkness nodded grimly as the flickering lightning played fitfully over far-distant trees. “We crowed a bit too soon,” he told Chet; “there’s a big storm coming, and that’s a break for Schwartzmann. No light from either moon or Earth to-night.”

The moon-disk, as he spoke, lost its first clear brilliance in the haze of the expanding clouds.