Amazing Stories — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

the hall was the rusting spade. 18 AMAZING STORIES changed as he shouted. He tried again; the bark- ing seemed to mock him, and one dog danced a pace forward, bristling. Suddenly he turned, and utter- ing certain words in the dialect of the underways, _ words incomprehensible to Elizabeth, he made for the dogs. There was a sudden cessation of the bark- ing, a growl and a snapping. Elizabeth saw the snarling head of the foremost dog, its white teeth and retracted ears, and the flash of the thrust blade, The brute leapt into the air and was flung back. - Then Denton, with a shout, was driving the dogs before him. The sword flashed above his head with a sudden new freedom of gesture, and then he van- ished down the staircase. She made six steps to follow him, and on the landing there was blood. She stopped, and hearing the tumult of dogs and Denton’s shouts pass out of the house, ran to the window. Nine wolfish sheep-dogs were scattering, one writhed before the porch; and Denton, tasting that strange delight of combat that slumbers still in the blood of even the most civilized man, was shouting and running across the garden space. And then she saw something that for a moment he did not see. The dogs circled round this way and that, and came again, They had him in the open. In an instant she divined the situation. She would have called to him. For a moment she felt sick and helpless, and then, obeying a strange impulse, she gathered up her white skirt and ran downstairs. In That was it! She seized it and ran out. She came none too soon. One dog rolled before him, well-nigh slashed in half; but a second had him by the thigh, a third gripped his collar behind, and a fourth had the blade of the sword between its teeth, tasting its own blood. He parried the leap of a fifth with his left arm. It might have been the first century instead of the twenty-second, so far as she was concerned. All the gentleness of her eighteen years of city life van- ished before the primordial need. The spade smote hard and sure, and cleft a dog’s skull. Another, crouching for a spring, yelped with dismay at this unexpected antagonist, and rushed aside. Two wasted precious moments on the binding of a femi- nine skirt. The collar of Denton’s cloak tore and parted as he staggered back; and that dog too felt the spade, and ceased to trouble him. He sheathed his sword in the brute at his thigh. “To the wall!” cried Elizabeth; and in three sec- onds the fight was at an end, and our young people stood side by side, while a remnant of five dogs, with ears and tails of disaster, fled shamefully from the stricken field. For a moment they stood panting and victorious, and then Elizabeth, dropping her spade, covered her face, and sank to the ground in a paroxysm of weep- ing. Denton looked about him, thrust the point of his sword into the ground so that it was at hand, and stooped to comfort her. _ A\T last their more tumultuous emotions subsided, _and they could talk again. She leant upon the all, and he sat upon it so that he could keep an eye king. dogs. Two, at any rate, were she was brave and had saved his life. But a new fear was growing in her mind. “They are the dogs of the Food Company,” said. “There will be trouble.” “T am afraid so, Very likely they will prosecute us for trespass.” A pause. “In the old times,” he said, “this sort of thing happened day after day.” “Last night!” she said. “I could not live through another such night.” He looked at her. Her face was pale for want of sleep, and drawn and haggard. He came toa sudden resolution. “We must go back,” he said. She looked at the dead dogs, and shivered. “We cannot stay here,” she said. “We must go back,” he repeated, glancing over his shoulder to see if the enemy kept their distance. “We have been happy for a time... . Rut the world is too civilized. Ours is the age of cities. More of this will kill us.” “But what are we to do? How can we live there?” Denton hesitated. His heel kicked against the wall on which he sat. “It’s a thing I haven’t mentioned before,” he said, and coughed; “but...” Ves ron “You could raise money on your expectations,” he said. “Could I?” she said eagerly. “Of course you could. What a child you are!” She stood up, and her face was bright. “Why did you not tell me before?” she asked. ‘And all this time we have been here!” He looked at her for a moment, and smiled. Then the smile vanished. “I thought it ought to come from you,” he said. “I didn’t like to ask for your money. And besides—at first I thought this would be rather fine.” There was a pause. “It has been fine,” he said; and glanced once more over his shoulder. “Until all this began.” “Yes,” she said, “those first days. The first three days.” They looked for a space into one another’s faces, and then Denton slid down from the wall and took her hand. “To each generation,” he said, “the life of its time. I see it all plainly now. In the city—that is the life to which we were born. To live in any other fashion. . . . Coming here was a dream, and this—is the awakening.” “Tt was a pleasant dream,” she said,—‘in the beginning.” For a long space neither spoke. “If we would reach the city before the shepherds come here, we must start,” said Denton, “We must get our food out of the house and eat as we go.” Denton glanced about him again, and, giving the dead dogs a wide berth, they walked across the gar- den space and into the house together. They found the wallet with their food, and descended the blood- stained stairs again. In the hall Elizabeth stoppéd. “One minute,” she said. ‘There is something here,” She led the way into the room in which that one— little blue flower was blooming. She stooped to it, she touched it with her hand. I she