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A cold and leaden day was breaking over the world and as they listened their hearts throbbing against each other, the same sound came to them both. It was the sakootwow the savage, shrieking blood-cry of the Kogmollocks, a scream that demanded an answer of the three hooded creatures who, a few minutes before, had attacked Philip in the edge of the open. The cry came from perhaps a mile away.
For only the fraction of a second it held, that tense waiting. Then from nine hundred throats there shot up to the sky, turquoise and pink and calm, such a sound as all the northland knew, the wild blood-cry of the savage.
So infinitesimal was the space of time between the throwing of the javelin and Philip's movement that the Eskimo believed he had transfixed his victim. A scream of triumph rose in his throat. It was the Kogmollock sakootwow the blood-cry, a single shriek that split the air for a mile. It died in another sort of cry. From where he had dropped Philip was up like a shot.
Joe had at last become the whirlwind. Genevieve remembered his "just watch, you'll know when I go after him." The house knew it, too. It was on its feet, every voice raised in a fierce yell. It was the blood-cry of the crowd, and it sounded to her like what she imagined must be the howling of wolves. And what with confidence in her lover's victory she found room in her heart to pity Ponta.
Klok-No-Ton seemed to half swoon away, now that his work was done; but he waited, with closed eyes, listening for the great blood-cry to go up the great blood-cry, familiar to his ear from a thousand conjurations, when the tribespeople flung themselves like wolves upon the trembling victim.
At the sight and scent of the warm blood, the companions of the stricken brute the gaunt, tireless leaders, who had traveled beside him in the van, and the rag-tag and bobtail alike fell upon him tooth and nail, and the silence of the forest was shattered by the blood-cry of the meat-getters.
A second stone gashed his brow, a third whistled past his head, the great blood-cry went up, and everywhere were people groping on the ground for missiles. He staggered and half sank down. "It was a joke! Only a joke!" he shrieked. "I but took them for a joke!" "Where hast thou hidden them?" Scundoo's shrill, sharp voice cut through the tumult like a knife.
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