Page:Hugh Pendexter--Tiberius Smith.djvu/105

 then we curved in towards the massed force and when within thirty feet of their left wing we pivoted, standing fast, hanging to each other's necks like twin oaks. I never saw oaks do that; but our stratagem worked to perfection. For when the heavy axe could no longer continue in a straight course along the edge of the lake, it swiftly began to answer the centripetal requirements and describe a blazing circle. The enemy got wise and tried to abscond from the danger, but as the gliding axe was now overlapping their firing-line the moment was too late for the most of them. And when the whizzing cord and steel struck their scampering legs, the air grew dusky with their going up and coming down.

"‘Quite like our childhood's game of snapping the whip,' observed Tib, cheerily, forgetting his iron complexion and trying to mop the sweat from his brow.

"‘My hands are cold—very,' I gasped, for steel mittens aren't the warmest things sold in glove stores.

"‘Beat them together—' began Tib, when zip! and a baby bowlder shot over the ice and knocked his feet from under him. You could have heard the earth bulge on the opposite side of the globe from where he sat down and made the ice look like fractured stars.