climbed into
the tree. What happened up there I could not tell, but I heard him yell
and saw the excitement of those that remained beneath. After several
minutes his body crashed down to the ground. He did not move. They
looked at him and raised his head, but it fell back limply when they let
go. Red-Eye had accounted for himself.

They were very angry. There was an opening into the trunk close to the
ground. They gathered wood and grass and built a fire. The Swift One
and I, our arms around each other, waited and watched in the thicket.
Sometimes they threw upon the fire green branches with many leaves,
whereupon the smoke became very thick.

We saw them suddenly swerve back from the tree. They were not quick
enough. Red-Eye's flying body landed in the midst of them.

He was in a frightful rage, smashing about with his long arms right and
left. He pulled the face off one of them, literally pulled it off with
those gnarly fingers of his and those tremendous muscles. He bit another
through the neck. The Fire-Men fell back with wild fierce yells, then
rushed upon him. He managed to get hold of a club and began crushing
heads like eggshells. He was too much for them, and they were compelled
to fall back again. This was his chance, and he turned his back upon
them and ran for it, still howling wrathfully. A few arrows sped after
him, but he plunged into a thicket and was gone.

The Swift One and I crept quietly away, only to run foul of another
party of Fire-Men. They chased us into the blueberry swamp, but we knew
the tree-paths across the farther morasses where they could not follow
on the ground, and so we escaped. We came out on the other side into a
narrow strip of forest that separated the blueberry swamp from the great
swamp that extended westward. Here we met Lop-Ear. How he had escaped
I cannot imagine, unless he had not slept the preceding night at the
caves.

Here, in the strip of forest, we might have built tree-shelters
and settled down; but the Fire People were performing their work of
extermination thoroughly. In the afternoon, Hair-Face and his wife fled
out from among the trees to the east, passed us, and were gone. They
fled silently and swiftly, with alarm in their faces. In the direction
from which they had come we heard the cries and yells of the hunters,
and the screeching of some one of the Folk. The Fire People had found
their way across the swamp.

The Swift One, Lop-Ear, and I followed on t