They came charging down upon the two white men and the now madly raging King Cole in a series of long bounds, springing from the ground and landing upon it with both feet together, each leap being accompanied by a deep, bellowing roar, the volume of which testified to immense power of lung, while their small, deeply set eyes blazed with fury.
“Shoot from the wings, inward,” ordered Earle, “then we shall not waste two bullets upon the same beast. You begin with the one on your extreme left.”
As Earle spoke he threw up his rifle, and pressing the trigger, neatly dropped the beast on the extreme right of the advancing line, while Dick brought down his mark with a broken leg. But these casualties had not the slightest effect upon the others, who continued their charge without the smallest sign of a check.
“Keep cool and shoot straight,” admonished Earle, as his rifle spoke a second time and another foe crashed to earth with a .35 soft-nosed bullet through his brain. Dick, on the other hand, very much less hardened than Earle for such a nerve-trying experience as this, grew a little flurried, and caught his next mark in the shoulder, shattering the bone and goading the beast to a condition of absolutely maniacal fury, but failing to stop him until he had sent a bullet through the brute’s lungs, when he halted, coughing up a torrent of blood. And so matters proceeded until the two men had emptied their Remingtons, the ten shots accounting for seven dead and two put hors de combat.
There was no time to reload, for the monsters still continued the charge, apparently quite unconscious of, or supremely indifferent to, what had happened to their companions; the two men therefore dropped their empty rifles, and each whipped a seven-shot Colt automatic from his belt, and continued his fusillade. Those Colt pistols were formidable weapons, of .45 calibre, at close quarters quite as effective as the rifles; and before the beasts succeeded in closing, all but four were down.
Of those four, King Cole tackled one, launching himself like an arrow at the creature’s throat, with a low snarl of concentrated rage, and sinking his fangs deeply in the muscular, hairy neck, the claws of his two fore feet firmly gripping the huge shoulders of the beast while the strong claws of his powerful hind feet tore open the abdomen and practically disembowelled his adversary. And as the pair went down, roaring, snarling, and fighting desperately, Earle thrust the muzzle of his Colt into the yawning jaws of another and sent the heavy bullet crashing upward through the brute’s skull at the precise instant that the powerful jaws snapped like a trap upon the barrel of the weapon.
Meanwhile, the remaining two hurled themselves upon Dick. One of them he shot clean through the heart as the brute sprang upon him, and although there can be no doubt that the creature instantly died, the momentum of his spring was sufficient to dash the lad to the ground and send his pistol flying. And before he could regain his feet or draw his remaining pistol, the last survivor was upon him, with a ponderous club upraised to dash out the youngster’s brains. Like lightning the blow fell; but instinctively and without premeditation Dick just managed to dodge it; and such was the force of the blow that the club snapped short off in the brute’s great hairy hand. And now the knowledge of boxing that the young sailor had aforetime somewhat painfully acquired, came to his aid, for as his ferocious antagonist crouched over him, his great tusks bared and dripping foam, while the little eyes burnt red with deadly hate, Dick threw his whole strength into a right-hander, which caught the beast fair and square on the point of the chin with a crash that sent the head violently back and caused the vertebrae of the neck to crack, following up the blow with a punch in the wind that fairly knocked the beast out of time for the moment. That moment proved sufficient to save Cavendish’s life, for it afforded him time to whip the remaining pistol from his belt and discharge it full in the brute’s face as it gathered itself together for what would in all probability have proved a fatal leap, so far as Dick was concerned.