No chance to loose the arrow then, though the brute's back was half turned. He had Harkness and Diane by their throats, and Chet knew by the unresisting limpness of Harkness' body that the fearful fire in those blazing eyes had them in a grip even more deadly than the hands of the beast.
Thoughts were flashing wildly through Chet's brain. "Knocked 'em cold! He'll do the same to me if I meet his eyes. But I can't shoot now; Diane's in line. I must take him face about; get him before he gets me—get him first time!"
And, confusedly, there were other thoughts mingled with his own—thoughts he was picking up by means of a nervous system that was like an aerial antenna:
"Good—good! No—do not kill them. Not now; bring them to us alive. The pleasure will come later. And where are the other two? Find them!" It was here that Chet let out a wordless, blood-curdling shriek from lungs and throat that were tight with breathless waiting.
He must face the big brute about, and his wild yell did the work. Startled by that cry that must have reached even those calloused, savage nerves, the ape-man leaped straight up in the air. He whirled as he sprang, to face whatever was behind him, and he threw the bodies of Harkness and Diane to the ground.
Chet saw the black ugliness of the face; he saw the eyes swing toward him.... But he was following with his own narrowed eyes a spot on a hairy throat; he even seemed to see within it where a great carotid artery carried pumping blood to an undeveloped brain.
The glare of those eyes struck him like a blow: his own were drawn irresistibly into that meeting of glances that would freeze him to a rigid statue—but the twang and snap of his own bowstring was in his ears, and a hairy body, its throat pierced in mid-air, was falling heavily to the ground.
But Chet Bullard, even as he leaped to the side of his companions, was thinking not of his victory, nor even of the two whose lives he had saved. He was thinking of some horror that his mind could not clearly picture: it had found them; it had seen them through this ape-man's eyes before the arrow had closed them in death ... and from now on there could not be two consecutive minutes of peace and happiness in this Happy Valley of Diane's.