"No, no; you must rest a while. Just so you're better, that's enough for me."
Beatrice was really gaining fast. The fever had at least left her with an insatiable appetite.
Allan decided she was now well enough again to nurse the baby. So he and the famous goat were mutually spared many a mauvais quart d'heure.
Tallying up matters and things on the evening of the twelfth day, as they sat once more on the terrace in front of Cliff Villa, he inventoried the situation thus: 1--Twenty-six of the Folk are dead. 2--H'yemba is disposed of--praise be! 3--Forty still survive--twenty-eight men, nine women, three children. Of these forty, thirty-three are sound. 4--The Pauillac is lost. 5--The bridge is destroyed, and eight of the caves are gone. 6--The entire forest area to the northward, as far as the eye can reach, is totally devastated. 7--The Horde is wiped out.
"Some good items and some bad, you see, in this trial balance," he commented as he checked up the items. "It means a fresh start in some ways, and no end of work. But, after all, the damage isn't fatal, as it might easily have been. We're about a thousand times better off than there was any hope for."
"You haven't counted in your own wounds just healing, or the terrific time you had with the Horde," suggested Beatrice. "How in this world you ever got through I don't see."
"I don't either. It was a miracle, that's all. From the place where I descended for a little repair work, and where they suddenly attacked us, to the colony, can't be less than one hundred and fifty miles. And such hills, valleys, jungles! Perfectly unimaginable difficulties, Beta! Now that I look back on it myself, I don't see how I ever got here."
"They killed both the men you had with you?"
"Yes; but one of them not till the second day. You see, the carburetor got clogged and wouldn't spray properly. I realized I could never reach Settlement Cliffs without overhauling it. So I scouted for a likely place to land, far from any sign of the cursed signal-fires.
"Well, we hadn't been on the ground fifteen minutes before I'm blest if one of my men didn't hear the brushwood crackling to eastward.
"'O Kromno, master!' said he, clutching my arm, 'there come creatures--many creatures--through the forest! Let us go!'
"I listened and heard it, too; and somehow--subconsciously, I guess--I knew an advance-guard of the Horde was on us!
"It was night, of course. My search-light was still burning, throwing a powerful white glare into the thicket about a quarter-mile away, beyond the sand-barren where I had taken earth. I turned it off, for I remembered how much better the Folk could see without artificial light in our night atmosphere.