The fall half stunned him for a moment. Then, getting on his feet, he seized the spear; all through the chase he had carried it slanted over his shoulder, carried it unconsciously or instinctively, just as he had carried it in dreamland. Balked and furious, not knowing what he did, he brandished it now as if threatening some enemy; then, reason returning, he stood resting on it and listening.
He knew she had escaped. To lose sight of a person for half a minute in that place was to lose him. Dick’s only chance was to track her by sound, but he could hear nothing. Not the breaking of a twig or the rustle of a leaf came to tell him of where she might be or what line she was taking. He did not even know whether she had dived into the trees, to right or left, or before or behind him; the fall had blotted out everything for a moment, and in that moment she had vanished.
With head uptossed, and leaning on the spear, he stood like a statue, more beautiful than any statue ever hewn from marble, the tropical trees still as the moon above him, the sound of the far-off reef a confused murmur on the windless air.
Then his chin sank ever so slightly. A sound had come to him, something that was not the reef.
It was—she. He could hear the leaves moving—a step—louder now; she was coming towards him and coming swiftly; she had lost her direction and was blundering back to the place she had started from.
He waited without a movement. The foliage dashed aside and into the glade broke, not Katafa, but Ma, the son of Laminai, with the moon full upon him.
Ma, club in hand, the shark-tooth necklace showing white as his eyeballs in the strong light. Ma, lithe and fierce as a tiger, and petrified for the moment by the sight before him.
The two faced one another without a word. Then the figure of Ma seemed to shrink slightly, relaxed itself suddenly, sprang, slipped on the treacherous moss, and fell with the cruel fish spear bedded in its back and heart.
The club shot away across the carpet of moss, and Dick was in the act of turning to seize it, when out from the trees broke Laminai—Laminai, with twenty others behind him. Ma had been the vanguard of these.
Dick turned and ran. Dashing among the leaves, he ran, weaponless, defenceless, with sure death on his heels and only one craving, to free himself from the woods, to find an open space, to escape from the branches that checked him, the flowers that hit at him, the veils and veils and veils of leaves. Instinctively he made uphill, the pursuit almost touching him, the groves ringing now to the cries of the pursuers and of Talia, Manua and Leopa, who had recognised him as the slayer of Sru and were shouting the news to Laminai.