Only three or four were shaken off, to catapult over and over down into the foaming lash of the river.
And still, now creeping with hideous agility along the racked and swinging bridge that hung by but a single rope, they continued to make way, howling and screaming like damned souls.
One gained the shore! At Allan it bounded, crouching, ferocious, deadly. He saw the tiny, venomous lance raised for the throw.
“Flick!”
He felt a twitch on his arm. Was he wounded? He knew not. Only he knew that with blind rage he had flung himself on the second rope, and now with demon-rage was hacking at it desperately.
The snapping whirl of the cable as it parted flung him backward.
He had an instant's vision of the whole bridge-structure crumpling. Then it vanished. From the depths rose the most awful scream, quickly smothered, that he had ever heard.
And as the bestial bodies went tumbling, rolling, fighting, down the rapids, he suddenly beheld the bridge footway hanging limp and swaying against the further cliff.
“Thank God! In time, in time!” he panted, staggering like a drunken man.
But all at once he beheld two of the Horde still there in front of him--the one that had flung the dart and another. They were advancing at a lope.