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 Nothing could stop them, Jolie knew. This was the end.

A coldness came upon her like the coldness of death, and with it an utter indifference to fate. It was as though she were a mere looker-on at some tremendous pageant; and the pageant thrilled her, filled her with a fierce, frenzied joy in its barbaric beauty.

For an instant this mad joy possessed her; then followed fear—fear that seemed to grip her throat with physical hands and stop her breath. They were so near now that for a frightful moment she saw their faces—the faces of demons, of devils, streaked and daubed with black, red, and yellow, the eyes ringed with glaring circles of white paint.

She tried to struggle to her feet, but her hand slipped on a loose fragment of shale, and she fell sideways so that her eyes were turned toward the river. Beyond the stream she saw a man leap upon a rock—a white man in the buff and blue of a Provincial Ranger. He waved his hat, and from the dense bushes fringing the river bank on either side of him burst little puffs and jets of flame and smoke. The bushes parted and men leaped out, ran along the bank, dashed into the water and began wading across—white men all of them, most of them in buff and blue, some in buckskins, all armed with rifles.

The trees beyond the river swayed and danced before her, swirled madly, then vanished in an allengulfing blackness. When she opened her eyes,