"A kick-off," shouted the hurler of the head, "for the second team." [1]
This effort to trace Cohen and the fugitives had failed, but the knowledge soon came in, in four or five different ways. One of the wireless messages had brought a clue. Some traders brought in a fuller clue, and rapidly other news came to hand.
It soon became perfectly clear that there existed some kind of evident understanding between the various fleeing crowds, and that their first place of united meeting was to be one of the agricultural colonies near to the old Kadesh-Barnea.
By this time the fugitives had had four good days start. Apleon ordered an enormous body of troops to go in pursuit, and to slay or capture the fugitives—capture, by preference, that they might be publicly tortured and beheaded.
Mad with the lust for blood, and that fouler lust of Religious revenge, the pursuing host sped southwards. The wondrous new motor-trains, that would career over hillocks easier than a thoroughbred hunter gallops over a turfy down, carried the expedition. There were a hundred trains of thirty cars each, besides a thousand or more single Motor-Cars, carrying from twelve to twenty persons. Worked on the then latest principle,—ether-driven—the cars and trains swept onward at the rate of a hundred miles an hour. Over head, travelling at the same rate, was a fleet of aerial war-ships, armed with infernal torpedoes, that if dropped into any town or community, would wipe out every living soul, and destroy the stoutest city, in a few minutes.
It looked as though the devoted band of Jews and Gentiles who had fled south were doomed.
Wild, exultant shouts of ironical laughter and unholy glee burst from the land and aerial pursuers, as they came within a moment or two (at their rate of travelling) of the fugitives.
The latter had seen them, heard them, and, as a body, were bowed in prayer for——. They scarcely knew what to ask, for deliverance or for fortitude, so that the essence of their prayer was "undertake for us, Lord!"
The sky lowered over their heads. They thought it was the aerial fleet hiding the sun—but the winged warriors were not quite come up over their place of gathering.