wer
of lung, while their small, deeply set eyes blazed with fury.

"Shoot from the wings, inward," ordered Earle, "then we shall not waste
two bullets upon the same beast. You begin with the one on your extreme
left."

As Earle spoke he threw up his rifle, and pressing the trigger, neatly
dropped the beast on the extreme right of the advancing line, while Dick
brought down his mark with a broken leg. But these casualties had not
the slightest effect upon the others, who continued their charge without
the smallest sign of a check.

"Keep cool and shoot straight," admonished Earle, as his rifle spoke a
second time and another foe crashed to earth with a .35 soft-nosed
bullet through his brain. Dick, on the other hand, very much less
hardened than Earle for such a nerve-trying experience as this, grew a
little flurried, and caught his next mark in the shoulder, shattering
the bone and goading the beast to a condition of absolutely maniacal
fury, but failing to stop him until he had sent a bullet through the
brute's lungs, when he halted, coughing up a torrent of blood. And so
matters proceeded until the two men had emptied their Remingtons, the
ten shots accounting for seven dead and two put _hors de combat_.

There was no time to reload, for the monsters still continued the
charge, apparently quite unconscious of, or supremely indifferent to,
what had happened to their companions; the two men therefore dropped
their empty rifles, and each whipped a seven-shot Colt automatic from
his belt, and continued his fusillade. Those Colt pistols were
formidable weapons, of .45 calibre, at close quarters quite as effective
as the rifles; and before the beasts succeeded in closing, all but four
were down.

Of those four, King Cole tackled one, launching himself like an arrow at
the creature's throat, with a low snarl of concentrated rage, and
sinking his fangs deeply in the muscular, hairy neck, the claws of his
two fore feet firmly gripping the huge shoulders of the beast while the
strong claws of his powerful hind feet tore open the abdomen and
practically disembowelled his adversary. And as the pair went down,
roaring, snarling, and fighting desperately, Earle thrust the muzzle of
his Colt into the yawning jaws of another and sent the heavy bullet
crashing upward through the brute's skull at the precise instant that
the powerful jaws snapped like a trap upon the barrel of the weapon.

Meanwhile, the remaining two hurl