The Greatest Works of Robert E. Howard: 300+ Titles in One Edition. Robert E. Howard

he trotted through the trees. Alone they would have sweated and blundered among the thickets for hours before they found the beach-trail—if they had ever found it. The Cimmerian led them as unerringly as if he had been following a blazed path, and the rovers shouted with hysterical relief as they burst suddenly upon the trail that ran westward.

      'Fool!' Conan clapped a hand on the shoulder of a pirate who started to break into a run, and hurled him back among his companions. 'You'll burst your heart and fall within a thousand yards. We're miles from the beach. Take an easy gait. We may have to sprint the last mile. Save some of your wind for it. Come on, now.'

      He set off down the trail at a steady jog-trot; the seamen followed him, suiting their pace to his.

      The sun was touching the waves of the western ocean. Tina stood at the window from which Belesa had watched the storm. 'The setting sun turns the ocean to blood,' she said. 'The carack's sail is a white fleck on the crimson waters. The woods are already darkened with clustering shadows.'

      'What of the seamen on the beach?' asked Belesa languidly. She reclined on a couch, her eyes closed, her hands clasped behind her head.

      'Both camps are preparing their supper,' said Tina. 'They gather driftwood and build fires. I can hear them shouting to one another—what is that?'

      The sudden tenseness in the girl's tone brought Belesa upright on the couch. Tina grasped the window-sill, her face white. 'Listen! A howling, far off, like many wolves!'

      'Wolves?' Belesa sprang up, fear clutching her heart. 'Wolves do not hunt in packs at this time of the year—'

      'Oh, look!' shrilled the girl, pointing. 'Men are running out of the forest!'

      In an instant Belesa was beside her, staring wide-eyed at the figures, small in the distance, streaming out of the woods. 'The sailors!' she gasped. 'Empty-handed! I see Zarono—Strom—'

      'Where is Conan?' whispered the girl.

      Belesa shook her head.

      'Listen! Oh, listen!' whimpered the child, clinging to her. 'The Picts!'

      All in the fort could hear it now—a vast ululation of mad exultation and blood-lust, from the depths of the dark forest. That sound spurred on the panting men reeling toward the palisade.

      'Hasten!' gasped Strom, his face a drawn mask of exhausted effort. 'They are almost at our heels. My ship—'

      'She is too far out for us to reach,' panted Zarono. 'Make for the stockade. See, the men camped on the beach have seen us!'

      He waved his arms in breathless pantomime, but the men on the strand understood, and they recognized the significance of that wild howling, rising to a triumphant crescendo. The sailors abandoned their fires and cooking-pots and fled for the stockade gate. They were pouring through it as the fugitives from the forest rounded the south angle and reeled into the gate, a heaving, frantic mob, half-dead from exhaustion. The gate was slammed with frenzied haste, and sailors began to climb the firing-ledge, to join the men-at-arms already there.

      Belesa confronted Zarono.

      'Where is Conan?'

      The buccaneer jerked a thumb toward the blackening woods; his chest heaved; sweat poured down his face. 'Their scouts were at our heels before we gained the beach. He paused to slay a few and give us time to get away.'

      He staggered away to take his place on the firing-ledge, whither Strom had already mounted. Valenso stood there, a somber, cloak-wrapped figure, strangely silent and aloof. He was like a man bewitched.

      'Look!' yelped a pirate, above the deafening howling of the yet unseen horde.

      A man emerged from the forest and raced fleetly across the open belt.

      'Conan!' Zarono grinned wolfishly.

      'We're safe in the stockade; we know where the treasure is. No reason why we shouldn't feather him with arrows now.'

      'Nay!' Strom caught his arm. 'We'll need his sword! Look!'

      Behind the fleet-footed Cimmerian a wild horde burst from the forest, howling as they ran—naked Picts, hundreds and hundreds of them. Their arrows rained about the Cimmerian. A few strides more and Conan reached the eastern wall of the stockade, bounded high, seized the points of the logs and heaved himself up and over, his cutlass in his teeth. Arrows thudded venomously into the logs where his body had just been. His resplendent coat was gone, his white silk shirt torn and bloodstained.

      'Stop them!' he roared as his feet hit the ground inside. 'If they get on the wall, we're done for!'

      Pirates, buccaneers and men-at-arms responded instantly, and a storm of arrows and quarrels tore into the oncoming horde. Conan saw Belesa, with Tina clinging to her hand, and his language was picturesque.

      'Get into the manor,' he commanded in conclusion. 'Their shafts will arch over the wall—what did I tell you?' As a black shaft cut into the earth at Belesa's feet and quivered like a serpent-head, Conan caught up a longbow and leaped to the firing-ledge. 'Some of you fellows prepare torches!' he roared, above the rising clamor of the battle. 'We can't fight them in the dark!'

      The sun had sunk in a welter of blood; out in the bay the men aboard the carack had cut the anchor chain and the Red Hand was rapidly receding on the crimson horizon.

      VIII. — MEN OF THE WOODS

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      NIGHT had fallen, but torches streamed across the strand, casting the mad scene into lurid revealment. Naked men in paint swarmed the beach; like waves they came against the palisade, bared teeth and blazing eyes gleaming in the glare of the torches thrust over the wall. Toucan feathers waved in black manes, and the feathers of the cormorant and the sea-falcon. A few warriors, the wildest and most barbaric of them all, wore shark's teeth woven in their tangled locks. The sea-land tribes had gathered from up and down the coast in all directions to rid their country of the white-skinned invaders. They surged against the palisade, driving a storm of arrows before them, fighting into the teeth of the shafts and bolts that tore into their masses from the stockade. Sometimes they came so close to the wall they were hewing at the gate with their war-axes and thrusting their spears through the loop-holes. But each time the tide ebbed back without flowing over the palisade, leaving its drift of dead. At this kind of fighting the freebooters of the sea were at their stoutest; their arrows and bolts tore holes in the charging horde, their cutlasses hewed the wild men from the palisades they strove to scale. Yet again and again the men of the woods returned to the onslaught with all the stubborn ferocity that had been roused in their fierce hearts.

      'They are like mad dogs!' gasped Zarono, hacking downward at the dark hands that grasped at the palisade points, the dark faces that snarled up at him.

      'If we can hold the fort until dawn they'll lose heart,' grunted Conan, splitting a feathered skull with professional precision. 'They won't maintain a long siege. Look, they're falling back.'

      The charge rolled back and the men on the wall shook the sweat out of their eyes, counted their dead and took a fresh grasp on the blood-slippery hilts of their swords. Like blood-hungry wolves, grudgingly driven from a cornered prey, the Picts skulked back beyond the ring of torches. Only the bodies of the slain lay before the palisade.

      'Have they gone?' Strom shook back his wet, tawny locks. The cutlass in his fist was notched and red, his brawny bare arm was splashed with blood.

      'They're still out there,' Conan nodded toward the outer darkness which ringed the circle of torches, made more intense by their light. He glimpsed movements in the shadows; glitter of eyes and the dull sheen of steel.

      'They've drawn off for a bit, though,' he said. 'Put sentries on the wall, and let the rest drink and eat. It's past midnight. We've been fighting for hours without much interval.'

      The chiefs clambered down from the ledges, calling their men from the walls. A sentry was posted in the