"Do not listen to the Old Ones," Masson warned. "I have captured the thunder. With it I strike you down."
The blind men hesitated, and Masson sent a bullet smoking between their legs. They backed away toward the entrance, the females with them. And a moment later Masson was piling fragments of rock and crumbling shale into a barricade before the cavern's mouth.
He could hold them off for a time he knew, until night at least, even though they brought the guards from the outer entrances to the bowl to aid the blind men.
Again and again the guards had attacked the cave where Masson lay holed up. All that day they had come crawling through the dense matted growth to launch their arrows and spears at him. Fifty or sixty of them there had been, he estimated, and at least forty blood-hungry Butrads still faced him. These were the outer guards.
With the coming of night the blinded workers of the caves would join them, and with their uncanny sense of hearing and touch they would overrun the cave. The Frogs were not a cowardly race, and his invasion into this, their most taboo and sacred place, made them all the more fanatical in their hatred.
Masson had until night. After that, unless he escaped back through the tunnel, he would die. And if he left the young Frogs behind he would never again be able to raid this cavern. Already they were hungry, their throaty shrilled cries beating at his droop-tipped ears.
Perhaps the din from within dulled his hearing. For tough naked hide scraped on rock and the heavy breathing of the wounded blind man should have been clearly audible otherwise. Masson must have heard him approaching at the last for he was half-turned when the rough fragment of grayish shale came thudding down. He twisted away from the weighty missile, but even so it grazed along his skull and he went down into the blackness of nothingness for a time.
He awakened to look into the hot dark eyes of a Frog who had crept to within a few paces of his barricade.
The rifle was yet in his grip and through blinding flashes of pain he somehow found the strength to aim and squeeze trigger. The ugly gray face vanished and he painfully fed another cartridge into the rifle's single chamber. The weight across his back did not go away, and twisting his head he saw that the blind Butrad's body had slumped across his own.
Masson slid the weight off but the blackness came again; so he rested for a time. And this time the blackness had come to stay for it was night. The sun had finally been swallowed by the cloud layers that swath Venus eternally.