Avon Fantasy Reader No. 11 — page 65: what you’re looking at

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

him, fell forwacd; and at the same moment the banana leaves were suddenly swept aside and a gang of gorillas leaped out on the sparsely armed Baloon- as. The sight almost paralyzed Mogglesby; such a multiplication of fiends. The unarmed men dashed behind comrades who still held speacs. The guard Jolo was caught as the black men retreated. The Negro screamed as if from the grates of hell. Mogglesby turned, made a mad rush at the brute breaking Jolo’s body. He struck the great ape on its small, close set ear and it went over. The next moment Jolo and the white maa dashed for the cover of the collecting assegais and the anthropoids were afraid to follow. Their at- tack was over. In an instant they had vanished among the banana leaves. The battlefield became silent save for the rustle of some frond as the gorillas made for the dense jungle beyond. The gorilla which had attacked the girl and which had received the spears was dead. As the warriors turned back to the village they met Luomo, who came tunning toward them. “Did you kilt a wood-man ?” Some black man called out yes and pointed in the direction of the body. en called the woman. “Did he have a gray patch on the side of his head ?”’ “May a snake crush me, Luomo!”’ cried the warrior. ‘“‘Do you think we were looking at the wood-man’s hair when we killed him?’ Luomo dashed on past the spearmen to the dead gorilla making the strangest threatiest sounds Mogglesby had ever heard from a humaa larynx. The woman merely glanced at the dead simian, than ran on, lifting her strange animal-like cry in the jungle. When the warriors had reentered the stockade they gathered around the place where the simian had attacked the girl and stared at it with that human feeling that something strange and precious inhered in the mere locale of the drama. They picked up the stone Mogglesby had flung at the gorilla and were amazed at its weight. And they talked about the Englishman's blow that had saved Jolo; or rather the remnants of Jolo, for the guard was badly torn. The ‘Englishman evidently had leaped up in the estimation of the tribes- men. He had reached that great height of admiration accorded by primitive people to extremely strong men. The man had dashed at a gorilla and knocked him over. And they hefted again the stone the governor's agent had flung. It weighed perhaps fifty pounds. Mogglesby himself was lost in a maze of thought at the conduct of this sortie. Was the porilla which he had struck with a stone actually wounded, or had it pretended to be crippled to draw the warriors into an ambuscade? And at the crux had that wood-man voluntarily received the assegais in his body to disarm the blacks for the assault of the hidden gorillas? The more the white man thought of it the more impossible it appeared that it all came about by chance. The wood-men had conducted a strategic 63 “ comicbooks.com