Price shouted. "Hello! Hello! Is anybody there? I'm lost. I need help. Hello!"
His voice was shocking in the stillness, loud and impolite.
There was no answer.
He went on down the flattened track toward the trees. He was afraid, and desperately tired.
"Hello?" he said, and now his voice was pleading. "Please. Where are you? Help me—"
Help me, you men of an unknown future, you hunters in impossibility, you lurkers in nightmare. Help me, or I die.
The shadows were heavy under the trees. The prairie grass did not grow here, but there were briars and other things to show a crushed trail. It was not a long one. He saw the carcass lying in a little glade. It was a black-and-white cow, already partially butchered. He moved toward it, and then from the branches overhead and the underbrush on either side short ropes of braided leather came flying, weighted at their ends with stones. Price fell down helpless and floundering, painfully bruised, his arms and legs wrapped in the tough bolo-like ropes, and one around his neck cutting off his breath so he could not even cry out.
In a swift and furious rush six men sprang from among the trees and stood about him. One snatched his rifle, another his revolver. They wore sketchy garments of tanned leather, and they were as dark and wild as the Shawnees and Wyandots who had hunted these woodland prairies long ago, except that some of them had light hair and all of them were bearded.
One of them, a tall lean wide-shouldered man with a shock of sun-bleached brown hair and eyes more blue, more blazing and filled with hate than any Price could remember seeing in his life, crouched beside him and tore the strangling rope ungently from his neck. Price tried to speak, but before he could do more than gasp for breath the brown-haired man whipped out a knife and drove the point of it straight for Price's throat.
"Now," he said, "you star-spawn—we'll see if your blood is any redder than the kind we breed on Earth!"