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Even so would you or I cling to the Martian who should land us on that ruddy planet and pilot us through some huge, inchoate and grotesque growth of things to us perfectly unimaginable. "Oh, master, we shall see the patriarch soon?" asked Bremilu, in a strange voice a voice to him astonishingly loud, in the clear air of night upon the surface of the world. "Soon shall we speak with him and "
"Never have we heard such in our place!" added Bremilu, gripping his ax the tighter. "Is that a man-cry, or the cry of a beast one of the beasts you told us of, that we have never seen?" "Both! A man-beast! Kill! Kill!" Now, Allan, sure of his direction, took the lead. No longer he flashed the light, and only once more he called: "Beatrice! O Beatrice! We're coming!"
The bright beam of the flash-lamp in his face roused Allan to a consciousness that he was bruised and suffering, and that his left arm ached with dull insistence. Dazed, he brought it up and saw his sleeve of dull brown stuff was dripping red. Beside him, in the trampled grass, he vaguely made out a hairy bulk, motionless and huge. Bremilu was kneeling beside his master, with words of cheer.
Bremilu, starting at the sudden discharge close to his ear, had pressed the ivory button. Stern snatched for the flash-lamp, fumbled it, and dropped it there among the lush growths underfoot. Before he could more than stoop to feel for it a heavy crash through the wood told that the thing was charging.
Zangamon whispered some unintelligible phrase. Allan projected the light forward again, and at sight of a moving mass, vague and intangible, among the gigantic fronds, leveled his automatic. But on the instant Bremilu seized his arm. "O master! Do not throw the fire of death!" he warned. "You cannot see, but we can! Do not throw the fire!" "Why not? What is that thing?"
Bremilu had been one of his two most competent and trusted followers, and Allan, too, felt a strong personal affection for the man who had saved his life that first night at the cliffs. Beside the body he stood, in the morgue-cave whither it had been borne.
It was on the second day of July, according to the rude calendar they were keeping, that he once more bade farewell to Beatrice and, borne by the Pauillac, headed for the village of the Lost Folk. He left behind him all matters in a state of much improvement. Zangamon and Bremilu were now well installed in the new environment and seemingly content.
Not more than twenty minutes later, followed by Bremilu and Zangamon, Stern was making way through the thick-laced wood and jungle. Awed, terrified by their first sight of trees and by the upper world which to them was naught but marvel and danger, the two Merucaans followed close behind their guide.
Bremilu stood staring for a moment, unable to grasp this catastrophe on the very moment of arrival. But Zangamon, of swifter wit, had already fallen on his knees, there by the mouth of the cave, and now seeing clearly by the dim light which more than sufficed for him was studying the traces of the struggle.
There, roughly yet unmistakably imprinted on the white limestone surface, he saw the print, in crimson, of a huge, a horrible, a brutally distorted hand. Stern's cry of horror as he scrambled from the ravaged, desecrated cave, and the ghastly horror of his face, seen by the firelight, brought Zangamon and Bremilu to him, in terror. "Master! Master! What " "My God!
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