"London, Jack - Tales of the klondyke" - читать интересную книгу автора (London Jack)

The sun hurried round to the north, sinking closer to the horizon.
The heavens in that quarter grew red and bloody. The shadows
lengthened, the light dimmed, and in the sombre recesses of the
forest life slowly died away. Even the wild fowl in the river
softened their raucous chatter and feigned the nightly farce of
going to bed. Only the tribesmen increased their clamor, war-
drums booming and voices raised in savage folk songs. But as the
sun dipped they ceased their tumult. The rounded hush of midnight
was complete. Stockard rose to his knees and peered over the
logs. Once the child wailed in pain and disconcerted him. The
mother bent over it, but it slept again. The silence was
interminable, profound. Then, of a sudden, the robins burst into
full-throated song. The night had passed.

A flood of dark figures boiled across the open. Arrows whistled
and bow-thongs sang. The shrill-tongued rifles answered back. A
spear, and a mighty cast, transfixed the Teslin woman as she
hovered above the child. A spent arrow, diving between the logs,
lodged in the missionary's arm.

There was no stopping the rush. The middle distance was cumbered
with bodies, but the rest surged on, breaking against and over the
barricade like an ocean wave. Sturges Owen fled to the tent,
while the men were swept from their feet, buried beneath the human
tide. Hay Stockard alone regained the surface, flinging the
tribesmen aside like yelping curs. He had managed to seize an
axe. A dark hand grasped the child by a naked foot, and drew it
from beneath its mother. At arm's length its puny body circled
through the air, dashing to death against the logs. Stockard
clove the man to the chin and fell to clearing space. The ring of
savage faces closed in, raining upon him spear-thrusts and bone-
barbed arrows. The sun shot up, and they swayed back and forth in
the crimson shadows. Twice, with his axe blocked by too deep a
blow, they rushed him; but each time he flung them clear. They
fell underfoot and he trampled dead and dying, the way slippery
with blood. And still the day brightened and the robins sang.
Then they drew back from him in awe, and he leaned breathless upon
his axe.

"Blood of my soul!" cried Baptiste the Red. "But thou art a man.
Deny thy god, and thou shalt yet live."

Stockard swore his refusal, feebly but with grace.

"Behold! A woman!" Sturges Owen had been brought before the
half-breed.

Beyond a scratch on the arm, he was uninjured, but his eyes roved
about him in an ecstasy of fear. The heroic figure of the
blasphemer, bristling with wounds and arrows, leaning defiantly