ce. "Fred was getting ready to bring in the rest of the
woods goat. He shouldn't have been more than ten minutes behind me--and
it's been over an hour."

They rounded the grove of trees. At first it seemed there was nothing
before them but the empty, grassy glade. Then they saw it lying on the
ground no more than twenty feet in front of them.

It was--it had been--a man. He was broken and stamped into hideous
shapelessness and something had torn off his arms.

For a moment there was dead silence, then the hunter whispered, _"What
did that?"_

The answer came in a savage, squealing scream and the pound of cloven
hooves. A formless shadow beside the trees materialized into a monstrous
charging bulk; a thing like a gigantic gray bull, eight feet tall at the
shoulders, with the tusked, snarling head of a boar and the starlight
glinting along the curving, vicious length of its single horn.

_"Unicorn!"_ Prentiss said, and jerked up his rifle.

The rifles cracked in a ragged volley. The unicorn squealed in fury and
struck the hunter, catching him on its horn and hurling him thirty feet.
One of the riflemen went down under the unicorn's hooves, his cry ending
almost as soon as it began.

The unicorn ripped the sod in deep furrows as it whirled back to
Prentiss and the remaining rifleman; not turning in the manner of
four-footed beasts of Earth but rearing and spinning on its hind feet.
It towered above them as it whirled, the tip of its horn fifteen feet
above the ground and its hooves swinging around like great clubs.

Prentiss shot again, his sights on what he hoped would be a vital area,
and the rifleman shot an instant later.

The shots went true. The unicorn's swing brought it on around but it
collapsed, falling to the ground with jarring heaviness.

"We got it!" the rifleman said. "We----"

It half scrambled to its feet and made a noise; a call that went out
through the night like the blast of a mighty trumpet. Then it dropped
back to the ground, to die while its call was still echoing from the
nearer hills.

From the east came an answering trumpet blast; a trumpeting that was
sounded again from the south and from the north. Then there came a low
and muffled drumming, like the pounding of thousands of hooves.

The rifleman's face was blue-white in the starlight. "The others are
coming--we'll have to run for it!"

He turned, and began to run toward the distant bulk of the stockade.

"No!" Prentiss comman