The Headhunters by L. Ron Hubbard

Author:L. Ron Hubbard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781592125708
Publisher: Galaxy Press
Published: 2011-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Waiting for Attack

TOM CHRISTIAN still had a great number of coast men and they were still in great fear—especially when stray arrows clipped close to their gigantic thatches of hair. The coast men did not have to be told that the arrow points were so smeared that a man would die in horrible agony within the hour at a mere scratch.

It was thus with some difficulty that Christian made them go to work on the barricade, raising it until it was quite arrowproof unless some headhunter figured out trajectory by calculus and managed to drop a barrage of feathered death down in the parabolic manner of the Stokes mortar.

When noon came the place was fairly defensible. The headhunters had finally discovered that the sub-tommy was quite lethal and had a most unhappy habit of knocking men into battered hamburger without half trying. In spite of the fact that Punjo repeatedly removed and polished his glass eye and made all manner of weird sounds as though communing with all manner of devils, no concerted attack was forthcoming and Christian began to breathe more easily.

No one knew better than Christian that they were quite effectually trapped. The frowning ridges of the hills—with trees like hair standing uncouth and uncombed—were visible on every side. One pass was available but Christian was not enough of an optimist to think that he would find that open. It appeared, on the face of it, that the professor would get his wish about long houses and would have several centuries in which to study the heads of dead men while his own dangled happily in their midst by a string.

The stream, pouring over shallow gravel, had a laughing sound which, considering that Christian had given the headhunters a watery grave and had let them float to their brothers, was a most gruesome thing to hear.

The stockade built and its defenses arranged and a plan of battle carefully outlined to all who could be entrusted with arms, Christian went to work on the pool.

He and Larsen had already cut away one great bank, leaving a protected pit in which the men could work. It was fairly simple to divert the bulk of the water through a canal and thus leave the bed and the sunken copper plates reasonably dry.

The sticky soil had been loath to part with its gold and Christian and Larsen had imported pumps with which to drive a heavy stream of water upon the bank, washing it down into the creek where the heavier gold would sink and catch in the mercury-smeared plates.

It was night before everything was done. In the morning the cleanup would begin.

A very soiled Christian came back to camp. He was splattered from head to foot with muck, soaked through with water, and generally plastered with vegetable matter of various kinds. But he seemed to be in a very good frame of mind and he actually smiled when he addressed Diana.

“Worried?”

“Not so very,” said Diana, glumly.

“Keep your chin up,” said Christian.

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