riously
until they were felled. Once our allies broke under the pressure, and
had it not been for the execution done by our rifles they would
certainly have taken to their heels. But they were gallantly rallied
by their old chief and came on with such a rush that the ape-men began
in turn to give way. Summerlee was weaponless, but I was emptying my
magazine as quick as I could fire, and on the further flank we heard
the continuous cracking of our companion's rifles.

Then in a moment came the panic and the collapse. Screaming and
howling, the great creatures rushed away in all directions through the
brushwood, while our allies yelled in their savage delight, following
swiftly after their flying enemies. All the feuds of countless
generations, all the hatreds and cruelties of their narrow history, all
the memories of ill-usage and persecution were to be purged that day.
At last man was to be supreme and the man-beast to find forever his
allotted place. Fly as they would the fugitives were too slow to
escape from the active savages, and from every side in the tangled
woods we heard the exultant yells, the twanging of bows, and the crash
and thud as ape-men were brought down from their hiding-places in the
trees.

I was following the others, when I found that Lord John and Challenger
had come across to join us.

"It's over," said Lord John. "I think we can leave the tidying up to
them. Perhaps the less we see of it the better we shall sleep."

Challenger's eyes were shining with the lust of slaughter.

"We have been privileged," he cried, strutting about like a gamecock,
"to be present at one of the typical decisive battles of history--the
battles which have determined the fate of the world. What, my friends,
is the conquest of one nation by another? It is meaningless. Each
produces the same result. But those fierce fights, when in the dawn of
the ages the cave-dwellers held their own against the tiger folk, or
the elephants first found that they had a master, those were the real
conquests--the victories that count. By this strange turn of fate we
have seen and helped to decide even such a contest. Now upon this
plateau the future must ever be for man."

It needed a robust faith in the end to justify such tragic means. As
we advanced together through the woods we found the ape-men lying
thick, transfixed with spears or arrows. Here and there a little group
of shattered Indians marked where one of the