ry, he
bristled his hair and snarled up with menacing teeth at whatever the
thing was which was so enormously present and yet invisible to his eyes.

Nalasu crouched closer when the shell burst beyond, and Jerry snarled and
rippled his hair afresh. Each repeated his actions with each fresh
shell, for, while they screamed no more loudly, they burst in the jungle
more closely. And Nalasu, who had lived a long life most bravely in the
midst of perils he had known, was destined to die a coward out of his
fear of the thing unknown, the chemically propelled missile of the white
masters. As the dropping shells burst nearer and nearer, what final self-
control he possessed left him. Such was his utter panic that he might
well have bitten his veins and howled. With a lunatic scream, he sprang
to his feet and rushed inside the house as if forsooth its grass thatch
could protect his head from such huge projectiles. He collided with the
door-jamb, and, ere Jerry could follow him, whirled around in a part
circle into the centre of the floor just in time to receive the next
shell squarely upon his head.

Jerry had just gained the doorway when the shell exploded. The house
went into flying fragments, and Nalasu flew into fragments with it.
Jerry, in the doorway, caught in the out-draught of the explosion, was
flung a score of feet away. All in the same fraction of an instant,
earthquake, tidal wave, volcanic eruption, the thunder of the heavens and
the fire-flashing of an electric bolt from the sky smote him and smote
consciousness out of him.

He had no conception of how long he lay. Five minutes passed before his
legs made their first spasmodic movements, and, as he stumbled to his
feet and rocked giddily, he had no thought of the passage of time. He
had no thought about time at all. As a matter of course, his own idea,
on which he proceeded to act without being aware of it, was that, a part
of a second before, he had been struck a terrific blow magnified
incalculable times beyond the blow of a stick at a nigger's hands.

His throat and lungs filled with the pungent stifling smoke of powder,
his nostrils with earth and dust, he frantically wheezed and sneezed,
leaping about, falling drunkenly, leaping into the air again, staggering
on his hind-legs, dabbing with his forepaws at his nose head-downward
between his forelegs, and even rubbing his nose into the ground. He had
no thought for anything save to remove the biti