Cover was there for a hundred Mut-muts; and for Dick Bellamy one was more than enough, while he could not see him.
With his heart in his mouth and Ockley's gun in his hand, he sat waiting.
But Amaryllis, in the false belief that both enemies were behind her, and well taught in the handling of a car, was not going to begin an unknown descent at full speed. About half-way across the level, she slackened the pace, turning her face a little to the left, as if to speak to the man behind her.
And in that moment, with the words in his mouth to bid her quicken, not relax the speed, Dick saw the bestial one-eared Malay, erect upon a boulder, not more than three feet on the off-side distant from the car.
The brute was on the point of leaping down upon them.
The girl saw Dick's revolver go up, turned, and saw its target.
The horrors of the morning, coming to a climax in this shock like a nightmare's crisis, seemed to stop her heart. With instinctive memory of her instructor's, "If you're taken bad, miss, throw out your clutch, jam on your breaks and faint comfortable," she stopped the car and lost consciousness.
In the same moment Dick fired.
The bullet was too late to stop that gorilla-like spring, and Mut-mut, with a glitter of steel flashing in one of his outspread palms, launched himself upon them, landing, like some huge and horrible cat of dreams, on all fours in the body of the car.
His left ribs were pressed against Dick's knees, his right hand tearing at and ripping the cloth and leather of the car's side-linings as he struggled to rise.