The flaring torch he dashed full at a grisly muzzle that snapped and slavered at his legs. To their nostrils the singe of burned hair wafted. Yelping, the beast swerved back.
But others ran in and in at them; and now the torch was failing. Both of them shouted and struck; and the revolver stabbed the night with fire.
Pandemonium rose in the forest. Cries, howls, long wails and snuffing barks blent with the clicking of ivories, the pad-pad-pad of feet, the crackling of the underbrush.
All around, wolves. On either side, behind, in front, the sliding, bristling, sneaking, suddenly bold horrors of the wild.
And the ring was tightening; the attack was coming, now, more and more concertedly. The swinging torch could not now drive them back so fast, so far.
Strange gleams shot against the tree-trunks, wavered through the dusk, lighted the harsh, rage-contracted face of the man, fell on the laboring, skin-clad figure of the woman as they still fought on and on with their precious burden, hoping for a glimpse of water, for the river, and salvation.
"Take--a tree?" gasped Beatrice.
"And maybe stay there a week? And use up--all our ammunition? Not yet--no--no! The boat!"
On, ever on, they struggled.
A strange, unnatural exhilaration filled the girl, banishing thoughts of peril, sending the blood aglow through every vein and fiber of her wonderful young body.
Stern realized the peril more keenly. At any moment now he understood that one of the devils in gray might hurl itself at the full throat of Beatrice or at his own.
And once the taste of blood lay on those crimson tongues--good-by!
"The boat--the boat!" he shouted, striking right and left like mad with the smoky, half-extinguished flare.
"There--the river!" suddenly cried Beatrice.
Through the columns of the forest she had seen at last the welcome gleam of water, starlit, beautiful and calm. Stern saw it, too. A demon now, he charged the snarling ring. Back he drove them; he turned, seized the bag, and again plunged desperately ahead.
Together he and Beatrice crashed out among the willows and the alders on the sedgy sh.o.r.e, with the vague, shifting, bristling horror of the wolf-pack at their heels.
"Here, beat "em off while I cut the cord--while I get the bag in--and shove off!" panted Stern.
She seized the torch from his hand. Up he s.n.a.t.c.hed the rifle again, and with a pointblank volley flung three of the grays writhing and yelling all in the mud and weeds and trampled cattails on the river verge.
Down he threw the gun. He turned and swept the dark sh.o.r.e, there between the ruins of the wharves, with a keen reconnoitering glance.
What? What was this?
There stood the aged willow to which the banca had been tied. But the boat--where was it?
With a cry Stern leaped to the tree. His clutching hands fumbled at the trunk.
"My G.o.d! Here"s--here"s the cord!" he stammered. "But it"s--been cut!
The boat--_the boat"s gone!_"
CHAPTER VII
A NIGHT OF TOIL
An hour later, from the gnarled branches of the willow--up into which Stern had fairly flung her, and where he had himself clambered with the beasts ravening at his legs--the two sole survivors of the human race watched the glowering eyes that dotted the velvet gloom.
"I estimate a couple of hundred, all told," judged Allan. "Odd we never ran across any of them before to-night. Must be some kind of a migration under way--maybe some big shift of game, of deer, or buffalo, or what-not. But then, in that case, they wouldn"t be so starved, so dead-set on white meat as they seem to be."
Beta shifted her place on a horizontal limb.
"It"s awfully hard for a _soft_ wood," she remarked. "Do you think we"ll have to stay here long, dear?"
"That depends. I don"t see that the fifteen we"ve killed since roosting here have served as any terrible examples to the others. And we"re about twenty cartridges to the bad. They"re not worth it, these devils. We"ve got to save our ammunition for something edible till I can get my shop to running and begin making my own powder. No; must be there"s some other and better way."
"But what?" asked the girl. "We"re safe enough here, but we"re not getting any nearer home--and I"m _so_ hungry!"
"Same here," Stern coincided. "And the lunch was all in the boat; worse luck! Who the deuce could have cut her loose? I thought we"d pretty effectually cleared out those Hinkmatinks, or whatever the Horde consisted of. But evidently something, or somebody, is still left alive with a terrific grudge against us, or an awful longing for navigation."
"Was the cord broken or cut?"
"I"ll see."
Stern clambered to a lower branch. With the trigger-guard of his rifle he was able to catch the cord. All about the trunk, meanwhile, the wolves leaped snarling. The fetid animal smell of them was strong upon the air--that, and the scent of blood and raw meat, where they had feasted on the slain.
With the severed cord, Allan climbed back to where Beatrice sat.
"Hold the rifle, will you?" asked he. A moment, and by the quick showers of sparks that issued from his flint and steel, he was examining the leather thong.
"_Cut!_"
"Cut? But then, then--"
"No tide or wind to blame. Some intelligence, even though rudimentary, has been at work here--is at work--opposed to us."
"But what?"
"No telling. There may be more things in this world yet than either of us dream. Perhaps we committed a very grave error to leave the apparently peaceful little nook we"ve got, up there on the Hudson, and tackle this place again. But who could ever have thought of anything like this after that terrible slaughter?"
They kept silence a few minutes. The wolves now had sunk to a plane of comparative insignificance. At the very worst Stern could annihilate them, one by one, with a lavish expenditure of his ammunition.
Unnoticed now, they yelped, and scratched and howled about the tree, sat on their haunches, waiting in the gloom, or sneaked--vague shadows--among the deeper dusks of the forest.
And once again the east began to glow, even as when he and she had watched the moon rise over the hills beyond the Hudson; and their hearts beat with joy for even that relief from the dark mystery of solitude and night.
After a while the man spoke.
"It"s this way," said he. "Whoever cut that cord and either let the banca float away or else stole it, evidently doesn"t want to come to close quarters for the present, so long as these wolves are making themselves friendly.
"Perhaps, in a way, the wolves are a factor in our favor; perhaps, without them, we might have had a poisoned arrow sticking into us, or a spear or two, before now. My guess is that we"ll get a wide berth so long as the wolves stay in the neighborhood. I think the anthropoids, or whoever they were, must have been calculating on ambushing us as we came back, and expected to "get" us while we were hunting for the boat.
"They didn"t reckon on this little diversion. When they heard it they probably departed for other regions. They won"t be coming around just yet, that"s a safe wager. Mighty lucky, eh? Think what Ar targets we"d make, up here in this willow, by moonlight!"