"Listen, Aura. Hear them shouting; I mustn't stay here." He tried, weakly, to get upon his feet, but the girl's arm about his waist held him down.
"Wait," she said. Surprised by the tenseness of her tone, he relaxed.
The cry grew louder, rolling up from a thousand voices and echoing back and forth across the amphitheater. The Very Young Man wondered vaguely what it could mean. He looked into Aura's face. Her lips were smiling now.
The girl impulsively put her arms about him and held him close.
"But we are coming through, my friend Jack. We are coming through." The Very Young Man looked wonderingly into her eyes. "Don't you hear? That cry--the cry of fear and despair. It means--life to us; and no more death--to them."
The Chemist's voice came out of the distance shouting: "They're running away. It's over; thank God it's over!"
Then the Very Young Man knew, and life opened up before him again. "Life," he whispered to himself. "Life and love and happiness."
In a few minutes the amphitheater was entirely clear, save for the dead and maimed little figures lying scattered about; but it was nearly an hour more before the fugitives were ready to resume their journey.
The attack had come so suddenly, and had demanded such immediate and continuous action that none of the men, with the exception of the Very Young Man, had had time to realize how desperate was the situation in which they had fallen. With the almost equally abrupt cessation of the struggle there came the inevitable reaction; the men bleeding from a score of wounds, weak from loss of blood, and sick from the memory of the things they had been compelled to do, threw themselves upon the ground utterly exhausted.
"We must get out of here," said the Doctor, after they had been lying quiet for a time, with the strident shrieks of hundreds of the dying little creatures sounding in their ears. "That was pretty near the end."
"It isn't far," the Chemist answered, "when we get started."
"We must get water," the Doctor went on. "These cuts----" They had used nearly all their drinking-water washing out their wounds, which Aura and Lylda had bound up with strips of cloth torn from their garments.
The Chemist got upon his feet. "There's no water nearer than the Forest River," he said. "That tunnel over there comes out very near it."