used
the tribe, however, and her captors, appreciating in her a shapeliness
and fairness beyond anything they had ever seen in their own females,
hastened to make sure of their prize by dragging her off into the
woods. Three of the Hillmen, raging in pursuit, were intercepted by a
horde of the squat strangers suddenly leaping from the thickets,
surrounded, pulled down after a heaving convulsion of struggle, torn
to pieces and trodden into the earth.

The Chief of the tribe, from his vantage at the top of the slope which
led up to the little amphitheater of caves wherein he had gathered his
people, saw and understood. The perils of the past two years had made
him cool and provident. One look at those foul and shaggy hordes,
leaping like beasts, had told him that this was to be a battle to the
death. Angrily beating back the hotheads who would have rushed down to
avenge their kin and inevitably to share their fate, his shouts,
bellowed sonorously from his deep and hairy chest, called up the whole
tribe to the defense of the bottle-neck pass which led into the
amphitheater. At a word, passed on breathlessly from mouth to mouth,
the old men and the old women, with some of the bigger children,
swarmed up among the rocks and ledges which formed the two walls of
the pass, while others raced about collecting stones to hand up to
them. The younger women and grown girls, armed, like the men, with
stone-headed clubs and flint-tipped spears, took their places in the
hinder ranks at the mouth of the pass.

The Bow-legs, their yellow skin showing through the clotted tufts of
coarse, clay-colored hair which unevenly clothed their bodies, came
plunging irregularly through the brook and gathered in confused masses
along the foot of the slope, jabbering shrilly to each other and
making insolent gestures toward the silent company at the top. The
hair of their heads was stringy, coarse and scant, and of an inky
blackness, in contrast to the abundant locks of the Hillmen, which
were for the most part of a dark brown or ruddy hue.

In other respects the contrast was still more striking, the Hillmen,
erect and straight, were taller than their bestial-looking opponents
by a foot or fifteen inches. With less breadth of shoulder and
heaviness of trunk, they had great depth of chest, great muscular
development in arm and leg, and a leanness of flank that gave them a
look of breed. Their skins, very hairy in the case of the mature men,
were of