the bronzed faces of Max
and another standing back of the assaulting force, but where was
Schwartzmann?

It was Kreiss who answered the insistent question. From above on the
rocks, where he had kept the fire blazing, Kreiss was calling in a
high-pitched voice.

"The water!" he shouted, "they're attacking from the water!" And Chet
rushed around the broken rock-heap to see a lake like an inky pool,
where the firelight showed faint reflections from black, shining faces;
where rippling lines of phosphorescence marked each swimming savage; and
where larger waves of ghostly light came from a log raft on which was a
familiar figure whose face, through its black beard, showed white in
contrast with the faces of his companions.

* * * * *

Still a hundred feet from the shore, they were approaching steadily,
inexorably; and the storm, at that instant, broke with a ripping flash
of light that tore the heavens apart, and that seared the picture of the
attackers upon the eyeballs of the man who stared down.

From behind him came sounds of a renewed attack. He heard Harkness:
"Shoot, Diane! Nail 'em, Towahg! There's a hundred of them!" And the
wind that came with the lightning flash, though it brought no rain,
whipped the black water of the lake to waves that drove the raft and the
swimming savages closer--closer--

Chet glanced above him. "Come down, Kreiss!" he ordered. "Get down here,
quick! This is the finish. We could have licked them on land, but these
others will get us." He stood, dumb with amazement, as he saw the thin
figure of Kreiss leap excitedly from his rocky perch and vanish like a
terrified rabbit into the cave in the rocks.

"I didn't think--" he was telling himself in wondering disbelief at this
cowardice, when Kreiss reappeared. His one hand was white with a rubbery
coating that Chet vaguely knew for latex. He was holding a gray, earthy
mass, and he threw himself forward to the catapult where it stood idly
erect in the wind that beat and whipped at it.

"Help me!" It was Kreiss who ordered, and once more he spoke as if he
were conducting only an interesting experiment. "Pull here! Bend
it--bend it! Now hold steady; this is metallic sodium, a deposit I found
deep in the earth."

The gray mass was in the crude bucket of the machine. Kreiss' knife was
ready. He slashed at the vine that he'd the bent sapling, and a gray
mass whirled out into the dark; out and down--and the in