Then a flood of stinking bodies submerged me. I went down, and struggled to my feet again. Gap-toothed mouths yapped at my throat. Squat fiends struck at me with stone-mauls and flint knives. But I smashed right and left with my musket-butt, and kept my footing until Corlaer came to my rescue, swinging his clubbed musket in one hand, his knife in the other, ready for the few who passed its orbit.
"Tawannears!" he grunted, his little pig-eyes gleaming joyously.
Side by side we chopped our way through the smelly mob to where the Seneca stood with his back to a bowlder, the herd-girl crouched beside him. Her turkeys had taken flight at last, and she was wielding a rock-maul one of the savages had dropped, laughing with glee as she pecked at men who tried to attack Tawannears from the rear.
She even shook her weapon at us, as though to ask us why we intruded. But the fight was over, for her own people were surging into the defile, arrows slatting on the rocks, and the squat savages fled incontinently.
The turkey-girl tossed away the stone-maul she had used so valiantly.
"Whoever you are," she remarked, "you are good fighters—better than Kokyan,* I think."
* The Spider.
"Who is Kokyan?" I asked.
But she ignored me, as she had once before.
"What is his name!" she demanded, pointing at Tawannears.