“Now!” roared Dick.
There were only two spears and two pistols besides his own weapons in the boats. But the men suddenly turned upon their pursuers. The ruhks could not yet believe that slaves would defy them. The slaves themselves almost failed of belief. One man in Dick’s own boat screamed and fled blindly from the bow, trampling on his fellows, and in glassy-eyed fear went on over the stern. But there was an aching blood-lust in the others. As the beasts swam snarling closer, they yelled in triumph when they found their oar-blades and sharpened saplings would reach. A man shrieked with joy when a sharp-pointed pole sank in a ruhk’s furry body and the beast uttered raging cries and snapped at the thing which impaled it. Another man howled with glee as his flailing oar broke a ruhk’s back and the thing screamed.
There were almost no shots. Dick held his own weapons in reserve. Once a ruhk got its paws over a gunwale and he raised a pistol, but a clubbed oar literally cracked its skull open. He almost relaxed, then. The other boat was close, and one ruhk did get on board it before three sharpened stakes impaled it simultaneously. No other came so near to close combat.
But the ruhks were intelligent. Devilishly, viciously intelligent. They had attacked in over confidence, urged on by blood-lust and the shouts of men on shore. Overseers, those men would be. But Dick’s own boat had killed six ruhks in a bare two minutes of tumultuous slaughter. A seventh paddled weakly toward shore. The other boat had done almost as well. The remaining beasts snarled horribly, but one among them yelped and growled meaningfully, and the rest obeyed. They did not retreat, but they did draw off, just beyond the reach of spears or oar-blades. There they swam, raging.
The light grew momently stronger. The men in the boats now snarled and jeered in their turn at the animals they had feared so terribly. The ruhks made bloodcurdling sounds, their eyes blazing, just out of reach. One of them snapped at an oar-blade. The men shouted and paddled fiercely to come to grips again. It was full dawn, now, and though the sunshine was yet a deep orange there was brightness everywhere. The dew-wet trees looked golden-green and stark, sharp shadows played as the naked men derided the ruhks and strove with burning eyes to lure them within spear-stroke or to overtake them.
But it was not right. The ruhks were brainy and they knew what they did. Dick realized it with a start. The overseers were not even shooting from the shore, and they had pistols and the range would not be much over fifty yards. There must be something else—
Dick jerked his head about and saw the answer. Around the southern tip of Welfare Island a large boat sped. It was a galley of two banks of oars, converted from a coasting-schooner with clean, sharp lines. Its masts had been cut away, its deck removed and its bulwarks cut down. It floated lightly on the water. It was open to the sun save for decking at its bow and stern and a railed walkway in between, over the heads of the slaves at the oars. Overseers ran up and down that walkway, now, their whips cracking mercilessly, and the long and clumsy oars bent as the slaves pulled the galley on. Sixty men pulled the oars— lash-scarred, chained, maniacs in despair. There were half a dozen robed men at the stern, besides one who handled a wholly modern small ship’s wheel. There were others, with ruhks, at the galley’s bow. A dozen men with firearms to four pistols and a shotgun—and one of the pistols was empty and another had only three bullets left. But the larger galley had no need to fight. It could merely ride down the smaller craft and spill their crews.
That was evidently its intention. When Dick shouted his discovery, tumult broke out, alike on the shore and from the swimming beasts. The ruhks on the larger galley howled an answer. Dick leaped to his feet and shouted, and the two cutters struck out in flight.
But there was no escape. They might beach, to be sure. But on the Manhattan shore there were ruhks and overseers. In jungle-fighting, the beasts would have it all their own way. If the boats beached on the long narrow East River island, the ruhks would even more surely have them in the end. They would be ferried there in monstrous numbers, and they had the grisly cunning of werewolves.
The sun shone brightly, now. It was day, and the two small fleeing craft and the larger, vengeful one in pursuit made a strange picture against the shores which showed only jungle. And of all insane preoccupations, Dick Blair at this moment tore leaves out of his notebook and shredded them to confetti, and tossed them in the air.
Then Dick gave orders to his own crew. The other cutter drew nearer at his hail. Without slacking their straining effort to keep ahead, the cutters raced along with their oar-tips almost touching, as if for mutual comfort. Then, when the bigger craft was barely fifty yards behind, they turned together for the farther Manhattan shore. The galley swung triumphantly. Closer. Forty yards. Thirty. Twenty. Ten. It would ride them down—
Dick flung the second of his tear-gas bombs. It was a perfect target and a perfect throw. The bomb landed on the bow-deck of the galley, in the very thick of the men who waited so zestfully to do murder. It exploded with a totally inadequate “plop!” and dense white vapor spouted out. And Dick’s tossing of paper fragments bore its fruit: for by it he had gauged the faint breeze exactly. The tear-gas cloud hung almost stationary. The galley rode through it. The mist rolled all along the length of the bigger boat, blinding overseer and slave and ruhk. When the galley came out of the quite inconsiderable cloud, its oars beat erratically and out of rhythm, its overseers’ whips no longer flailed, it lost way and veered crazily. And then the two cutters plunged to its sides and the slaves swarmed over the low gunwale.
What followed was not pretty. The former slaves, armed with sharpened poles and two spears and clubbed oars, raged the length of the galley, killing. Ruhks, unable to see, died fighting blindly. Overseers fought hopelessly with no eyesight. The men with whips, who from the walk over the rowers’ benches had lashed on the slaves to work, were so helpless in their blindness that the men of the cutters laughed at them, stripped their whips and weapons from them, and flung them down to their still-chained fellows. The eyes of the rowers streamed copiously, but with howls of joy they tore their tyrants to pieces.
It seemed a matter of no more than seconds. Certainly not more than two minutes elapsed between the time when the cutters were in full flight and the time when the revolted slaves had grown from two dozen men in small boats, freed by Dick, to more than eighty with the oared galley of the master of the villa in their possession. Sixty of them still wept uncontrollably from the tear-gas they’d taken with their masters. But they grinned and howled and clanked their chains in glee, careless of possible retribution.
The men from the cutter were not blinded. The gas mist was gone before they boarded. But the eyes of some began to smart from traces of the stuff drifting up from the rowers’ space. So Dick got the galley under way again to make a breeze to clear the last of it.
Sam Todd, white-faced, sitting on a bench in East Side Park in the New York City of Earth, put down the little metal peephole through which he had watched the battle in the dawnlight. Behind him, early morning cars whirled past on the double highway. Around him innumerable buildings poured plumes of steam and sooty smoke toward the sky. A puffing tug towed coal barges over the very spot where, in the Other World, Dick Blair and a crew of freed slaves took account of their victory.