Too far away to use their own weapons and facing only one small four-limbed creature, they considered their game already in the bag, but they had no comprehension of earthly muscles, nor any understanding of the power and range of a hundred-pound bow driving a steel-headed war arrow. Thus, while they were arguing, Stevens took the offensive, and a cruelly barbed steel war-head tore completely through the body of their leader and mortally wounded the creature next beyond him. Though surprised, they were not to be frightened off, but with wild, shrill screams rushed to the attack. Stevens had no ammunition to waste, and every time that mighty bow twanged a yard-long arrow transfixed at least one of the red horde--and a body through which had torn one of those ghastly, hand-forged arrow-heads was of very little use thereafter. Accurately-sped arrows splintered harmlessly against the re-enforced windows of his helmet and against the steel guards protecting his hands. He was almost deafened by the din as the stone missiles of the slingers rebounded from his reverberating shell of steel, but he fired carefully, steadily, and powerfully until his last arrow had been loosed. Then, the wicked dirk in his left hand and the long and heavy saber weaving a circular path of brilliance in the sun, he stepped forward a couple of paces to meet the attackers. For a few moments nothing could stand before that fiercely driven blade--severed heads, limbs, and fragments of torsos literally filled the air, but sheer weight of numbers bore him down. As he fell, he saw the white shaft of one of Nadia's hunting-arrows flash past his helmet and bury itself to the flock in the body of one of the horde above him. Nadia knew that her arrows could not harm her lover, and through a chink between two boulders she was shooting into the thickest of the mob speeding her light arrows with the full power of her bow. Though down, the savages soon discovered that Stevens was not out. In such close quarters he could not use his sword, but the fourteen-inch blade of the dirk, needle-pointed as it was and with two razor-sharp, serrated cutting edges, was itself no mean weapon, and time after time he drove it deep, taking life at every thrust. Four more red monsters threw themselves upon the prostrate man, but not sufficiently versed in armor to seek out its joints, their fierce short spear thrusts did no damage. Presently four more corpses lay still and Stevens, with his, to them incredible, earthly strength, was once more upon his feet in spite of their utmost efforts to pinion his mighty limbs, and was again swinging his devastating weapon. Half their force lying upon the field, wiped out by a small, but invincible and apparently invulnerable being, the remainder broke and ran, pursued by Stevens to the point where the red monsters had first halted. He recovered his arrows and returned to the cave, opening his face-plate as he came.