Then she saw what it had hit. Not Jongor. Jongor’s bow! Just as one of her shots had struck a drawn bow in the fight with the natives, so Varsey’s shot had hit Jongor’s great bow, had splintered it into useless fragments.
The giant was weaponless. His bow was ruined. But at least he was unharmed.
SCREECHING, the Murians charged.
Ann Hunter saw Jongor fling the useless bow aside, and leap backward.
Her heart jumped into her throat with a terrible thought.
But Jongor wasn’t running away. Ann saw him leap backward and grab from the ledge one of the spears that he had so successfully dodged.
He hurled it with all his strength—not at the Murians, but over their heads at Varsey, at the man with the rifle.
It was exceedingly quick thinking on Jongor’s part. Another shot from the rifle might easily put an abrupt end to the fight. Therefore—get the man with the gun.
Varsey saw the spear coming. He tried to dodge but he did not have Jongor’s keenly attuned muscles. The spear did not strike him in the chest, which was where Jongor had intended it to hit. It struck him instead in the shoulder—and the keen edge of the blade almost cut his arm off. He dropped the rifle. It went over the ledge toward the rocks below. Varsey, screaming and soaked with blood, was out of the fight.
Jongor faced Alcan and five of his guards now. Only one Murian had retained his spear. The other javelins had all been cast at the bronzed young giant. The Murian with the spear did not try to hurl it. He was too close to his target for that. Instead, he jabbed with it—straight at Jongor’s heart.
Ann Hunter stifled a scream as she saw the Murian drive the spear at Jongor. She saw the giant reach out one hand, as though he intended trying to deflect the keen point of the blade with his palm. She knew he couldn’t do it. The point would go right through his hand. Trying to stop a driven spear like that was like throwing up one hand to catch a bullet—impossible.
But Jongor didn’t try to catch the blade. His hand, darting with the lightning speed of a striking snake, went under the point and grasped the shaft. Jongor swayed to one side, simultaneously yanking the shaft—and the Murian who had hold of it—toward him. His fist leaped out, caught the monkey-man right where his chin would have been if he had had a chin. The blow did not seem to have been struck hard, but the crack of the Murian’s spine as his neck snapped was fatal.
“Come on, you stupid ones with the tails, and get me!” Jongor jeered.
He didn’t wait for the Murians to accept his invitation. Instead he waded in. One mighty knee came up. The, shaft of the spear he had taken from the Murian snapped over it. At close quarters the spear was too long to use. By breaking it in two, Jongor made it into a very effective club.
Ann Hunter watched that fight with bated breath, knowing only too well how much it meant to her.
Jongor loomed above the squatty Murians like the giant that he was. Ann saw him swing the broken spear, knocking the tailed horrors right and left. She saw them go down, or turn tail and run, all but Alcan, who had remained in the rear. Alcan was not paying much attention to the fight. Instead he was looking up with quick nervous glances.
Ann did not know what the Murian was looking for until the flapping creak of leathery wings jerked her own eyes upward. Then she saw it. One of the teros had arrived! It was circling above them, as though undecided which of the possible victims it should attack.
“Jongor!” she screamed. “A tero! Watch out!”
Alcan turned to run. Jongor glanced upward, saw the careening lizard-bird. He made no effort to escape. Instead, he ran after the fleeing Alcan.
“It will get you, Jongor!” Ann Hunter called fiercely.
HE ignored her. As he leaped toward the fleeing Murian she saw another of the bird-lizards glide into view.
Two of them! They were settling lower. And Jongor persisted in chasing Alcan as though he did not realize the danger that was overhead.
Trembling, the girl crouched back against the face of the cliff. Death was in the air. Death was coming closer every passing second. She could not fight the pterodactyls. Their fierce beaks and clawed wings would slash her almost instantly to pieces. Even Jongor could not fight them without weapons. The tooth-jawed vultures would tear his mighty muscles to shreds, his whole body to a bloody caricature.
But he wasn’t trying to fight them. He was chasing Alcan. Had he lost his senses? Had he been injured in the fight? Had he become so angry that the only thought in his mind was to destroy Alcan?
Ann saw him overtake Alcan, saw the two pterodactyls swoop toward the struggling pair. And Jongor ignored them! Instead he fiercely shook the Murian into senselessness. Then the girl saw him snatch something from Alcan’s arm.
She saw death dive toward him with open beak, with clawed wings and talons open to rend and tear.
“This is the end,” she thought. “This is the end. He can’t escape! He doesn’t have a chance in the world of escaping.”
Jongor whirled. He looked up toward the diving teros. He didn’t try to fight them.
The bird-lizards swerved abruptly. They checked their flight. Suddenly they seemed to go blind. They acted as if they no longer saw the figure standing there on the ledge under them. They swerved outward, glided over the rim of the ledge and, circling, settled downward.
Jongor ran to the girl. He held up the object he had taken from Alcan. It was a glittering crystal, much like the crystal he wore on his arm, but smaller, and of a slightly different color.
“Just as my crystal controls the dinos, this crystal controls the teros,” he pantingly explained. “Alcan had it. He was using it to call the teros. That was why I had to take it away from him. If I hadn’t, he would have hidden in the jungle and called hundreds of teros to us. When I took it away from him, I used it to send the teros away. With it I can send them several miles away, which is the limit of its range.”
Jongor caught the girl as she fainted from pure relief.
CHAPTER IX
Escape
“YES,” said Jongor slowly. “I will take you away from Lost Land. We will cross the jungle and the mountains. If the Blackfellows are waiting for us, we will try to evade them. And we will cross the desert, somehow. I am anxious to see the world from which you came, the world of which my father and mother told me.”
There was a faraway look in his eyes as he finished speaking. Overhead the sunlight filtered through the leaves of the trees. They had left the mountains and entered the jungle. Jongor, for some obscure reason, had insisted they were safer among the trees than they were in the hills.
The girl was resting. The wild flight away from the city of the Murians had exhausted her strength, and she had to rest. Jongor leaned on a spear he had taken from the Murians and watched her. She was eating fruit that he had brought her.
Ann Hunter smiled. Most of the tension had gone from her face, and all of the fear had gone from her eyes. She was no longer afraid of Jongor. And when he was with her, she was not afraid of anything else.
Now he was going to take her home. Home! The word was a bell ringing in her mind. How badly she wanted to go home, she had not known until now. There was only one drawback. She had come here seeking her brother Alan. She had not found him. She had found no sign of him. The only logical conclusion was that he was dead.
“We must start as soon as you are strong enough,” Jongor said. “It is a long journey and will take months.”
“I’m ready now,” the girl answered, getting to her feet.
Side by side, they started through the jungle. It was day and the beasts, that hunt by night were not alert. But in spite of that, there was danger in this wilderness, danger from poison fang and suddenly awakened beast of prey. But this was Jongor’s land and he knew how to cross it in safety.
Fascinated, the girl watched him. When he stepped, his footfall did not give forth the slightest sound. His keen eyes canvassed every thicket for danger. Nothing moved in the green tangle that he di
d not see.
Suddenly Jongor stopped, his gaze fixed on a growth of reedy plants beside a water hole.
“What is it?” Ann whispered.
“Sh!” he answered. “Something is hiding in the reeds.”
The girl followed the line of his pointing hand. She could see nothing. The growth of reeds looked exactly like hundreds of other growths. There was no wind and the leaves hung motionless.
“Walk behind me,” Jongor whispered. “Make no sound. Something is hiding there that does not belong in the jungle. It is trying to be quiet.”
Jongor moved forward, his spear ready for throwing. If he had moved silently before, he was twice as quiet now. His eyes were fixed with alert intentness on the clump of reeds where something was hiding.
“Come out of there!” said Jongor suddenly.
Ann Hunter felt a constricting band of fear close around her heart. For a second the reeds did not move. Then they quivered. Something literally exploded out of them. At first Ann thought it was an animal. Then she saw it was a man.
Or it had been a man. It was a walking scarecrow now, with every rib showing. A dirt-clotted beard covered its face. It stared at them from haggard eyes.
“My God!” it croaked. “Ann!”
THE girl heard the words. They were spoken in a voice she had never expected to hear again, but it was a voice that sent her heart pounding feverishly. The scarecrow staggered toward them. Jongor lowered his spear point. The girl leaped around him—straight into the arms of the man. “Alan!” she sobbed. “My brother!” The scarecrow was Alan Hunter, Ann’s twin, whom she had come to Lost Land seeking. Now she had found him. He was a trembling wreck of a man, with barely enough strength left to stand, but Ann had found him. That was all that mattered. She must have seen him from the cliff that morning, she realized, without recognizing him. She had seen something moving through the jungle away from the Murian city, but she had been unable to tell whether it was a man or an animal.
It hadn’t been an animal. It had been Alan Hunter. Now Ann and Alan and Jongor could leave Lost Land forever. This mad adventure was over. The end had come; a happy ending.
It was the happiest moment of Ann Hunter’s life.
“This is what happened,” Alan Hunter said bitterly. “Varsey and I got to Lost Land all right, with nothing but our rifles left. Varsey’s guts gave out and he wouldn’t enter the valley. He stayed in. the mountain pass while I entered. By pure blind luck, I managed to cross the valley and find the Murian city. I entered the place at night and stumbled right straight into their treasure rooms.
“Talk about treasure! Why, there’s enough diamonds to load down an elephant! Gold bars stacked as high as a man’s head. This city must originally have been a colony of miners. Their descendants have been working the mines ever since the motherland sank, and having no way to dispose of their wealth now, it has just piled up.
“Naturally, I filled my pockets. Then I got out of there. The Murians never did discover me. I returned to the place where Varsey waited and showed him the jewels I had hooked. That was a mistake. It damned near cost me my life,” he recalled angrily.
“What happened?” the girl insisted.
“What do you suppose happened? Varsey waited until night and then he jumped me. He put a bullet in me, but he didn’t kill me. But I fixed him. I slung the diamonds into a ravine that nobody could get out of, if he ever got into it. Varsey howled like a kicked pup when I did it. Those diamonds were what he wanted, but he wasn’t going to have them if I could help it. When he saw they were gone, he headed back toward civilization, leaving me for dead.”
Ann Hunter shuddered. She saw how horribly she had been tricked.
“He told me you were a captive of the natives,” the girl whispered. “All he really wanted was for me to finance another expedition back to Lost Land.
He knew there were more diamonds where the first had come from.”
“He played you for a sucker, Sis,” Alan Hunter said. “And damn him, if I ever get my hands on him, he’ll pay for what he did to both of us!”
“He left me for dead,” the young explorer continued. “And I damned near was dead. When I regained consciousness the next day, Varsey was gone and a giant in a leopard skin was squatting over me. At first I thought I was delirious. Then I saw the giant was real.”
HUNTER gestured toward Jongor who stood leaning on his spear. “There’s the man who saved my life,” he said. “Jongor! He brought me water and food, and I sent him after Varsey. You tell what happened after that, Jongor.”
“I took up the trail,” Jongor said. “But Varsey saw me coming, and he must have guessed that I was after him. He fled into the desert, and I let him go, thinking that the desert would exact full payment for the debt that he owed.”
“Then you knew all the time that Varsey had tried to kill my brother,” Ann Hunter challenged. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you warn me?”
“I tried to do so,” Jongor answered. “You would not listen.”
“I’m sorry,” the girl faltered. “I was a fool. But I didn’t know.”
“Hah!” said Alan Hunter. “Sis, if you’re willing to admit that you were ever a fool, you’ve come a long way from the high-toned society girl you used to be.”
Ann colored. “Perhaps I have,” she answered evenly.
“When I returned to the place where I had left your brother, he was gone,” Jongor continued. “The signs showed that the Muros had come in their airship and taken him away. I did not look for him; for what the Muros take, they usually kill. If I had known he was locked up in the dungeons of the Muros, I would have tried to rescue him. But I did not know.”
“It wasn’t your fault you didn’t try to help me,” said the haggard youth. “The Murians locked me up and forgot about me. They wanted a girl to be the bride of the sun, but naturally they couldn’t use me. Now and then my jailers remembered enough about me to bring me food and water. I thought I was doomed. But there was a hell of a fracas in their city last night, and in the confusion, I escaped.”
Ann Hunter explained the cause of that confusion.
“Varsey again!” the youth raged. “So he traded you to Alcan. If that devil is still alive, I’m not leaving this valley until I settle accounts with him!”
“I think you need not worry,” Jongor interposed. “Alcan had a very frail neck. Somehow it broke almost as soon as I touched him. As for Varsey, he is badly wounded. The jungle will take care of him.”
Alan Hunter smiled grimly. He knew how “frail” Alcan’s neck was, and he could easily visualize how it had happened to break as soon as Jongor “touched” the Murian.
“Good for you,” the youth grinned. “You paid off a debt for me.”
“It was my debt too,” Jongor said. The youth looked curiously at him but did not ask for an explanation.
“I move,” the youth suggested, “that we get to hell out of here as fast as we can. I’ve seen enough of this country to last me the rest of my life. Jongor, Ann and I are wealthy. If you will come with us, I will see that you are well rewarded.”
“I am not interested in a reward,” the giant answered.
“But you’ll come,” Ann Hunter said quickly. “You said you would.
Jongor looked at her. She faced his gaze.
“I’ll go with you,” he said simply, but there was a glow in his eyes.
Alan Hunter saw the look that passed between them.
“So that’s the way it is,” he said happily. “Sis, old girl, you’ve picked a man who is a man! I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“Alan! Shut up!” The girl blushed furiously.
Her brother grinned in reply. “Whether you like it or not,” he said, “I’m going to be best man.”
“Best man?” Jongor queried. “What is that?”
“Oh, don’t pay any attention to him! He’s—he’s just a pest,” Ann blurted, a picture of-rosy-cheeked confusion.
OVERHEAD the sun climbed up
to noon and then slanted down the western sky. The three traveled slowly Jongor reducing his speed to that of the girl and the youth. Ann Hunter was excited and happy. She had found her brother. And each time she looked at Jongor, she knew she had found something else. They were going home. Home! Nothing could stop them now. Nothing! With, a gray-eyed jungle giant to fight for them, even the Blackfellows would not dare interfere.
And then, in the middle of the afternoon, in a glade between the swamps and the hills, the voice came whispering.
“Stop!” the voice said. “Stop.”
Jongor flung up his head like a lion scenting the presence of danger. And like the lion, his teeth were suddenly bared in a fighting snarl.
“The voice from, the air,” he said huskily. “It is talking to us.”
“It’s speaking English!” Ann Hunter gasped. “Before, it talked the language of the Blackfellows, but now it’s speaking English!”
It came from nowhere and from everywhere. It was a chilling, blood-curdling whisper, emanating from the air. And it was speaking in English!
“Halt,” it said. “Ann Hunter, halt! You, Jongor—halt. Do not move.”
Alan Hunter knew what was happening.
“That voice-from-the-air business is part of the science of the old Murians,” he said rapidly. “They developed a method of seeing at a distance that is similar to television, except that they need no transmitter to send the scenes to them. They use what looks like a large crystal ball—
“Hell, I wonder if that is the source of the belief in the crystal ball! I wonder if that legend came down through the centuries from ancient Mu. Golly, I never thought of that before! But no matter. With that crystal ball, they can see anything that is happening in and near Lost Land. They can see us and talk to us.
“I don’t know how they work it; never had a chance to find out. But cripes, it doesn’t make any difference if they can see us! Not that they can do anything to us. We’re too far away. They could use the voice to tell the natives to attack, but there aren’t any natives here to jump us.
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