The yellow men reeled under their flailing. The ground was cumbered with bodies and the air with curses. The momentary panic drove them in upon themselves and bunched them together.
But the weak point about the thrown spear as a weapon of offence is the fact that, once hurled, it is gone. The yellow men were an undisciplined mob, Ishmaelites all, accustomed every man to fight for himself and ready to fight at any moment, but their death dealers remained in their hands, and they outnumbered the Torch men by seven to one. The Torches poured in volley after volley. The yellow men tightened their defence and replied in kind; while the brown men danced wildly among the rocks, and hurled stones and clubs, and were shot down like rabbits.
Blair's men were falling all round him. The sight was too much for him. He snatched a club from the ground and sprang down the hillside. In a moment the sides of the pass vomited brown men frenzied for the fight.
"Kown 'im!—kown 'im!—kown 'im!" they yelled, and hurled themselves on the enemy.
The Torch men, reduced in number, fired one more round and came racing in with their cutlasses. The yellow men replied, and then clubbed their guns and thrashed wildly at the advancing tide.
Under such conditions, and with the might of right as well as numbers against them, the yellow men gave way and drifted back towards the mouth of the pass, fighting stubbornly all the way.
And Kenneth Blair forgot that he was a man of peace. He saw his brown men falling all round him, ripped and bashed and broken, and he dashed into that fight as he had dashed into many a more peaceful one on the football field at home. He saw nothing at the moment but the vicious yellow faces and shaggy heads of the despoilers. He knew nothing but the necessity of demolishing them, and with his unaccustomed club he smote with all his might at every head he could reach, as his forbears long ago struck down the Northmen when they came wading ashore from their beaked ships on the coast of Caledonia.
The brown men eyed him with amazement, and yelled with unholy joy at sight of his Berserk fury. The teacher was a man like themselves, and could let himself loose like the rest of them. And Blair thought neither of them nor himself, or of anything whatsoever, save the necessity of ridding the island of the vermin that would pollute it.
For once in his life he tasted the wild, mad joy of battle.
His red club whirled and fell, and wherever it fell there fell a gap, and in him raged a red fury which nothing could appease or oppose.