In all the world of living men there was not another then so strong as I; in all the wastes and desert places of the vast forests there was not a wild beast more ferocious; in all the earth or in the heavens above there was no being with more swift and certain mission! I bounded across the space between us, leaping to Phalos even as he took the child and was about to face the grinning idol, and then, as he turned at my hoarse shout and our eyes met glaringly, I drove that Assyrian axe down through that head, down through that crafty brain, down sheer between the hating eyes, and, as I caught the child, he fell crumplingly as any poled bull of one of his own sacrifices! I saw but as an instant’s vision Elissa sink to earth in a white swoon, and bounded with my child toward the entrance where the fray was raging, while about and behind me rose first the groan and then the yell of vengeance of the frenzied worshippers. Naught for the moment checked me with my circling axe seeking more blood. I reached nearly to my followers, so near to Aradnus that I tossed the child to him over the intervening heads and had the joy of seeing him, upon my shout, bound away with it toward our vessel and so preserve its safety. Nearer and nearer to my own men I struggled, but I could not reach them. The fierce guards of the priest were all about me now and a thousand of the mob were crowding savagely behind them. I felt a spear thrust in my side, and then another, and so went down most happily. My man-child would become a man in Egypt! CHAPTER XIII THE HERCYNIAN FOREST What it was which had changed the nature of my dream so suddenly I could not understand at first. Most curious fancies had come to me, visions of what I had certainly never seen in all my hunting and battling, but which were familiar enough to me and comprehensible, until I awoke. There were boats with broad sails, though little of the sea had we of the great forest ever looked upon, and there were cities beside which our villages were but as the swamp villages of the ever-toiling beaver. There was conflict, as well, yet that, I thought, did not surpass in quality the manner of our own fierce battling, for we were fighters of some zest.