My comrade followed my thought, and surveyed them with her usual coolness. “They are more intelligent than the Killers, of whom they are not afraid. The Killers serve them. They must have built that roof for their dwelling. They fear us, and therefore hate us. It might be well if you sent an arrow to frighten them.” But as the thought came, the yellow heads shot back, and the openings were quiet and vacant. “I thought so,” she smiled, “they can read our thoughts, while they watch us. They are dangerous and might do us mischief, but I think the Killers are too stupid to use them.” Meanwhile, I had again secured the bow, which I had used the night before with such unmerited success. When I had drawn it once or twice, and felt that I could control it to some purpose, though it was almost beyond my strength to handle, I stepped to one of the windows on a sudden impulse, and saw the ground before me was pink with advancing Killers. Swiftly and silently they came, having appeared again from the side which had hidden them from the sight of our Leader. There was no whistling from the suckers, but they were waving them from right to left, and tossing them in the air in their excitement, as does an elephant when he trumpets. Many of them had the red-stemmed javelins. All had their strangling-cords in readiness. The archers moved beside them, one on each flank, bow in hand, but I saw that there were no arrows on the strings. There was no need to aim. I bent the bow to my strength’s limit, and sent the long shaft into the hideous crowd that confronted me. I think that it might only have dented the slimy bladder-like skin of the first it struck, without puncturing it, had it been able to throw him back without striking any solid substance behind him, but--perhaps because they were advancing so closely--it went through him and two others before it spent its force, and left them heaped and squealing. In a moment the whistling cries arose to a point which I cannot hope to tell, for I lack words for any possible comparison. Right and left ran the Killers, the archers first in flight, and in a few seconds were beyond my range and seeing, beneath the side walls of the arsenal that was at once our jail and our safety. My comrade, looking from the other window, gazed at the stricken, struggling heap with eyes that danced in triumph. Her age-long wandering in the ocean ways had familiarised her to death and cruelty in a hundred forms. Her repugnance had been to doing things herself which she regarded as natural only to a lower order of creation. I suppose in all her life she had never knowingly done harm to any sentient thing. But she loved adventure as a child loves it. Then her eyes clouded to an instant’s blankness, and turned to me again, and this was the thought she gave.