Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/111

Rh Red Legion terribly here. This attack will not be the last. There will be more and more such attacks, and the next will not be so easily wiped out by one pair of hands as was this one. You need our young Indian braves, trained and ready and watching from every far flung ray post. You need steadily to grow and grow and have more and more strength until there is no ray group anywhere to face your strength. Will you explain this to Eemeeshee?"

"I do not need to. Even now I saw in his angry mind just such plans. I will go ahead and have my women train your folk in the uses of the rays, and we will put your plans swiftly into operation. You call in from their far homes the rest of your Red Legion and we will make this place something different from what it has been. It will be good to have new faces, new eager spirits about. I like your plans."

ANE did not wait for more. Stevens by his side, they hastened back to the camp of the refugees and explained the situation. The attack had gone unnoticed by the camp. The Indians slept peacefully in their blankets.

The next morning the great hidden door in the rock lifted, and two of the cars that had come in went out again. In the cars were two of the young braves intent upon delivering their message to the other centers of the Red Legion. Stevens had told them to go in person to each of the headquarters of the Legion and tell them in their own words just what had happened, what Eemeeshee was, and that they were all needed to defend their ancient God and the gateway to the vast wisdom of the past.

Eemeeshee lay in his great crystal nest and glowered and growled and nursed his hurts. Saba and Lane and Stevens worked hard daily, teaching, getting a force of ready hands upon the ancient ray controls, getting prepared as swiftly as they might for a repetition of the attack from the north. Every day they spread their force a little, posting men to the four quarters with the old rays reaching out for forty miles to watch steadily, sweeping across the innumerable passages through the rock where attack might come. They were now vastly safer than before the attack, but Lane knew that anyone really conversant with the uses of the ancient mechanisms must be able to overcome them. For they knew so little of it. If it broke

Only Saba and one or two of the women knew the least thing about repairing the machines. They were too green, as Saba explained, really to fight with the weapons as the old accounts told her they were meant to be fought with.

But the attack did not come, and now into the great door every night came three or four or a dozen of the men of the Red Legion; men from Oregon; men from Canada; men from the pueblos; Mexican Indians sent their number. Swiftly the word spread and steadily their numbers grew.

Now papooses shouted and ran in the gloomy so-long-empty caverns, and cooking fires gleamed by the hundreds. Indian women swayed in their tribal mating dances, the braves sprang and whooped in the war-dance. Life had come to this place of Eemeeshee's. And over the new activity glowered ever the transformed Eemeeshee, and one could read ever in his heard thought: "Vengeance. Eemeeshee has a way to vengeance."

Said Saba:

"No more does Eemeeshee flood the chambers with the dream images and wallow in the stim-dreams of beauty and wonder. No more does he take pleasure day after day and year after year. These wounds have changed him—he has waked up! I have never seen him so intent upon anything as he is now upon growing strong and fighting with these enemies who attacked without warning. His anger burns steadily, higher and higher. He has taught me many things he formerly denied me. Come, I will show you what he taught me yesterday."

Saba took Lane to a great round machine. A mouth about three feet across