Stern leaped forward, revolver leveled.
But before he could pull trigger the iron door had clanged shut.
Once more darkness swallowed them.
Black though it was, it equaled not the blackness of their absolute despair.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE BATTLE IN THE DARK
For a time no word passed between them. Stern took the girl in his arms and comforted her as best he might; but his heart told him there was now no hope.
The old man had spoken only too truly. There existed no way of convincing these barbarians that their prisoners were not of some hated, hostile tribe. Evidently the tradition of the outer world had long since perished as a belief among them. The patriarch's faith in it had come to be considered a mere doting second childhood vagary, just as the tradition of the Golden Age was held to be by the later Greeks.
That Stern and Beatrice could in any way convince their captors of the truth of this outer world and establish their identity as real survivors of the other time, lay wholly outside the bounds of the probable.
And as the old man's prophecy of evil--interrupted, yet frightfully ominous--recurred to Stern's mind, he knew the end of everything was very close at hand.
“They won't get us, though, without a stiff fight, damn them!” thought he. “That's one satisfaction. If they insist on extermination--if they want war--they'll get it, all right enough! And it'll be what Sherman said war always was, too--Hell!”