Unnoticed in the excitement, a fur-clad figure had darted in through the cave entrance. Apparently he had not observed the agitation of his kinsmen; certainly, he gave it not a second thought. Coming forward by great strides and leaps, he shouted at the top of his voice: "My people! My people! Make ready! Defend yourselves! The beast-men come!"
Only a few turned to heed him. But while the echoes of his appeal still reverberated about him, he cried out a second time, in tones of unmistakable terror: "Hear me, my people! The beast-men come! The beast-men come! Defend yourselves! They will kill you all, will kill you all!"
This time a score or more wheeled about to observe the newcomer. "Mumlo the Trail-Finder!" they muttered, while frantically he repeated, "The beast-men come! The beast-men come! The beast-men come!"
Struck by the note of genuine alarm in his voice, the people forgot all about Grumgra and Ru, and shrilled with Mumlo, "The beast-men come! The beast-men come!"
Soon all the cavern rang with the echoes of that dreadful cry. Even Grumgra, hearing it, stopped short in terror, and abandoned the pursuit of the Sparrow-Hearted. A moment later, he was one of the shrieking, howling, fear-stricken mob racing furiously toward the cave entrance.
CHAPTER XXI
The Arrival of the Beast-Men
When the multitude stormed and crowded out of the narrow rocky doorway, there was at first nothing to be seen. Just beneath them the cliff walls shot almost perpendicularly for perhaps two hundred feet. Above them the rocky ledges slanted for other hundreds of feet, with projecting crags interspersed with a few dwarfed trees and stunted shrubs. At their feet the river curved tortuously through a wilderness of reeds, bushes and dense woods, while not very far away the opposite cañon walls arose in bare and beetling magnificence. But not a living thing was to be seen in all those desolate expanses; and the beast-men that Mumlo had reported might have been the figments of a nightmare.
But so excited were the people that at first they did not observe how still and unperturbed was the scene before them. Surging through the cave entrance like stampeding cattle, they literally fell over one another in their eagerness for a glimpse of the beast-men; on and on they pressed, on and on in an insistent stream, those in the rear pushing so frantically to be first that those in front could not remain on the narrow ledge, but were crowded off, and, with horrible screams, pitched into the abyss.
Not until five or six had plunged to their death did the madness of the mob begin to subside. Then by degrees the furious pressure subsided; the cries of the throng grew somewhat less tempestuous, the crowding slowly relaxed; several who had been clinging to an overhanging spur of the rock were rescued; and the people began to glance into the cañon a little in the manner of reasonable beings.