So when the Bluffer bawled his question, John had his answer ready. The words were still in the air when John was on his feet himself, and shouting.
“Show me this skulking Terror!” he shouted. “Lead me to him! Who hides behind his grandfathers and his clan and won’t stand and fight like a man!”
CHAPTER 17
The words barely had time to pass John’s lips before things began happening. He felt himself snatched from the ground and the whole scene whirled wildly about him as he found himself being carried like a sack of grain away from the amphitheater and the meeting, and toward the forest beyond the valley.
The Hill Bluffer had grabbed him in two large hands and was running with him toward the forest the way a football player runs with a football. A roar of voices surged up and beat behind them. Looking back over the Bluffer’s boulder-like shoulder, John saw that the whole mass of people involved in the meeting of Clan Hollows was now at their heels.
The free air whistled past John’s face. He was being jolted about with every jarring footfall of the Bluffer; but the landscape was reeling past them both at a rate that must be close to thirty miles an hour; and the crowd behind was not gaining on them. In fact, John hesitated to believe it, considering that the Bluffer was carrying John’s extra one hundred and eighty-five pounds in such an awkward fashion, but as the forest wall drew near he was forced to, they were actually running away from their pursuers. Their lead got bigger with each stride of the Bluffer. John felt the glow of competition as he had felt it on the sports field many times before. For the first time, a spark of kinship glowed to life inside him for the Bluffer.
They might be worlds apart, biologically, thought John, but by heaven they both had what it took to outdo the next man when the chips were stacked and wagered.
Abruptly, the shadow of the forest closed about them. The Bluffer ran on a carpet of tree needles, easing back his pace to a steady lope. He lifted John, pushing him back around to the saddle. John climbed into the saddle and hung on. With John’s weight properly distributed, the Bluffer ran more easily.
The surf-sound of pursuit behind them began to be muffled by the forest. Moreover it was dropping further behind yet, and fading. The Bluffer ran down the side of one small hollow, and coming up the other, dropped for the first time back into his usual stalking stride of a walking pace. When he reached the crest of the further side, he ran again down the slope to the next hollow. And so he continued, alternately running and walking as the slope permitted.
“How far to the Terror?” asked John, during one of these spells of walking.
“Glen Hollow,” said the Bluffer, economically. “Half a—” he gave the answer in terms of Dilbian units. John worked it out in his head to come to just about three miles more.
A little more than ten minutes later, they broke through a small fringe of the birchlike trees to emerge over the lip of a small, cuplike valley containing a nearly treeless, grassy meadow split by a stream, which in the valley’s center spread out into a pool some forty feet across at its widest and showing enough dark blueness to its waters to indicate something more than ordinary depth.
By the side of those waters, waited the Streamside Terror.
John leaned forward and spoke quietly into that same ear of the Bluffer’s that he had bitten an hour or so earlier, as the Bluffer started down the slope toward the meadow.
“Put me down,” said John, “beside the deepest part of that pond.”
The Bluffer grunted agreeably and continued his descent. He came down to a point by the wider part of the pool and stopped while he was still about thirty feet from the waiting Dilbian.
“Hello, postman,” said the Terror.
“Hello, Streamside,” grunted the Bluffer. “Mail for you here.”
The Streamside Terror looked curiously past the Hill Bluffer’s shoulders and met John’s eye.
“That’s the Half-Pint Posted, is it?” he said. “I thought he’d be bigger. So the old ones let you come?”
“Nope,” said the Bluffer. “We just came on our own.”
While the Terror had been peering at John, John had been closely examining the Terror. John had gotten a fair look at the Dilbian scrapper back while he was escaping from Tark-ay, but from some little distance. And for most of that time, the Terror had been in pretty constant motion. Now John had a chance to make sure of the picture he had carried away from the Hemnoid camp before.
Once more, John was struck by the fact that the Terror did not seem particularly large, for a Dilbian. The Bluffer was nearly a good head taller. And the impressive mass of One Man would have made two of the younger battler. Streamside was good sized for a male, but nothing more than that. John noted, however, the unusually thick and bulky forearms, the short neck and—more revealing perhaps than anything else—the particularly poised stance and balance of the Dilbian.
It was as if the whole weight of the Terror’s body was so easily and lightly carried that the whole effort of moving it into action could be ignored.
John threw one quick glance at the water alongside. The bank seemed to drop directly off into deep water. He slid down from the saddle and stepped around the Dilbian postman, kicking off his boots and shrugging out of his jacket as he did so. His hands went to his belt buckle; and in the same moment, with no further pause for amenities, the Streamside Terror charged.
John turned and dived deep into the pool.
He had expected the Terror to attack immediately. He had even counted on it, reasoning that the Dilbian was too much the professional fighter to take chances with any opponent—even one as insignificant as a red-headed Shorty. John had planned that the Terror should follow him into the water.
But not that the Terror should follow so quickly.
Even as John shot for the dark depths of the pool, he heard and felt the water-shock of the big body plunging in after him, so close that it felt as if the Terror’s great nailed hands were clawing at John’s heels.
John stroked desperately for depth and distance. He had a strategy of battle; but it all depended on a certain amount of time and elbow room. He changed direction underwater, shot off at an angle up to the surface; and, flinging water from his eyes with a backward jerk of his head, looked around him.
The Terror, looking in the other direction, broke the surface fifteen feet away.
Rapidly, John dived again. Well underwater, he reached for his belt buckle, unsnapped it and pulled the belt from the loops of his trousers. In the process, he had come to the surface again. He broke water almost under the nose of the Terror; and was forced to dive again immediately with half a lungful of air and his bulky enemy close behind him.
Once more, in the space and dimness of underwater, he evaded the Dilbian; and this time he came up cleanly, a good ten feet from where the back of the Terror’s big head broke the water. Turning, John stroked for distance and breathing room, the length of his belt still trailing from one fist like a dark stem of water-weed.
Confidence was beginning to warm in John as he dove again. He had had time, now, to prove an earlier guess that, effective as the Terror might be against other Dilbians in the water, his very size made him more slow and clumsy than a human in possibly anything but straight-away swimming. John had gambled on this being true—just as he had gambled on the fact that, true to his reputation, the Terror would pick a battleground alongside some stream or other. Now, John told himself, it was time to switch to the attack, choose the proper opening and make his move.