t was within some thirty or forty yards of the line of fire,
Grom yelled an order and a swarm of arrows darted from the bows to
meet it. But they fell futile from its armored hide, which gleamed
like dull bronze in the fire-light. Grom shouted again, and this time
the warriors hurled their spears--and they, too, fell harmless from
the monster's armor. Its next crashing bound brought the monster to
the edge of the encampment, where one of its ponderous feet
obliterated a fire. With a lightning swoop of its gigantic head it
seized the nearest warrior in its jaws and swung him, screaming, high
into the air, as a heron might snatch up a sprawling frog. At the same
instant A-ya, who was the one unerring archer in the tribe, let fly an
arrow which pierced full half its length into the center of one of
those horrifying enamelled eyes; while Grom, who alone, of all the
warriors, had not recoiled in terror, succeeded in driving a spear
deep into the unarmored inner side of the monster's thigh. But both
these wounds, dreadful though they were, failed to make the colossus
drop its prey. With mighty, braying noises through its nostrils it
brushed the spear shaft from its hold like a straw, flopped about, and
with the arrow still sticking in its eye, went leaping off again into
the darkness to devour its victim.

For several hours, with the fires trebled in number and stirred to
fiercer heat, the tribe waited for the monster to return and claim
another victim. But it did not return. At length Grom concluded that
his spear-head in its groin and A-ya's arrow in its eye had given it
something else to think of. Once more he set the guards, and gradually
the tribe, inured to horrors, settled itself down to sleep. It slept
out the rest of the night without disturbance--but the following
night, and the next two nights thereafter, were spent in the
tree-tops. Then, on the fourth day, the harassed travelers emerged
from the swamp into a pleasant region of grassy, mimosa-dotted,
gently-rolling plain. The hills, now showing green and richly wooded,
were not more than a day's march ahead.

And just here, as the Fates which had of late been pursuing them would
have it, the worn travelers found themselves once more in the line of
the hordes of migrating beasts.

Grom's heart sank. To reach the refuge of the hills across the march
of those maddened hordes was obviously impossible. Were his people to
be forced back into the swamp, to resume the