From that hour the Master-Girl's influence was paramount.
That shot converted the braves of the Sun Totem from spear-throwers to bowmen. In time, and as it seemed, but just in time, an archer-force, equipped and trained by their chieftainess, encountered the long anticipated raid of the Lynx-Men. The rout of the invaders was signal and complete. Timely warning of their presence was given by the young Good Wolves which the Master-Girl had taught her people to domesticate: these warders of the dimness before the dawn held up the advance guard of the foe with bristling backs and shining teeth until Dêh-Yān had set her battle in array. A born general, one of the first, she had silently thought out her strategy—piously attributing its inspiration and success to her Totem—the horned moon, whose very form she imitated in the marshalling of her little force.
This naked woman-savage had evolved from her own clear brain the most consistently successful tactic of all subsequent warfare, that deceptive movement which consists in refusing battle by the attacked centre whilst delivering counterstrokes from the converging flanks.
"The Lynx-Men are very stout-hearted," she said. "They have carried matters their own way for many years, you tell me. It is well, O Pŭl-Yūn, for I would have them charge us as an old boar charges, without thought of turning or looking to left or right," she laughed low in her throat, but her eye was hard and bright, her braves watched her as growing boys watch a man. "Now we have them," she cried, as battle was joined, "remember, if one of them falls by a spear of ours I shall want to know whose spear it was that transgressed!"
A minute later and the Sun-Men's centre, a special force of spearmen, trained to practice the ruse, after wasting their assegais at idle range, were in full retreat upon the stockade—and their bows!—whilst ambuscaded archery was closing in upon both flanks. The enemy, stubborn, haughty and with an unbeaten record, saw nothing, knew nothing, until, clambering one upon another at the stockade like bees that swarm, their backs felt the dreadfully-piercing small javelins of their despised foes, whilst the bowmen behind the stockade struck them down faster than they could climb.
They died there to a man; not one escaped. It was a war-party of Sun-Men disguised in Lynx trappings which took the news of the defeat to the Quarry-camp. This was the Master-Girl's counterstroke; she led it—as the song that was sung for many generations told—led it in the weed of a captive woman, one of a crowd of women, and of braves decked out as women, who marched with dishevelled hair and down-cast heads and with hoppled hands!—but with their bows borne for them by their (supposed) captors, ready at need. The surprise was absolute and final. The Lynx Totem was blotted out, only the young unproved girls and the smallest of the toddling boys were reserved to be incorporated in the Sun-and-Moon Clan, the first of many similar acts of adoption.