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 shore, 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 snatched 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 shore, 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 God! 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!"