"Oh, master, we shall see the patriarch soon?" asked Bremilu, in a strange voice--a voice to him astonishingly loud, in the clear air of night upon the surface of the world. "Soon shall we speak with him and--"
"Hark! What's that?" interrupted Stern, pausing, the while he gripped his pistol tighter.
From afar, though in which direction he could not say, a vague, dull roar made itself heard through the forest.
Sonorous, vibrant, menacing, it echoed and died; and then again, as once before, Stern heard that strange, hollow booming, as of some mighty drum struck by a muffled fist.
A cry? Was that a cry, so distant and so faint? Beast-cry, or call of night-bird, shrill and far?
Stern shuddered, and with redoubled haste once more pushed through the vague path he and Beatrice had made from the barrens to Settlement Miffs.
Presently, followed by the two colonists who dared not let him for a moment out of their sight, he reached the brow of the canyon. His hand flash-lamp showed him the rough path to the terrace.
With fast-beating heart he ran down it, unmindful of the unprotected edge or the sheer drop to the rocks of New Hope River, far below.
Bremilu and Zangamon, seeing perfectly in the gloom, hurried close behind, with words of awe, wonder and admiration in their own tongue.
"Beta! Oh, Beatrice! Home again!" Stern shouted triumphantly. "Where are you, Beta? Come! I'm home again!"
Quickly he scrambled along the broken terrace, stumbling in his haste over loose rocks and debris. Now he had reached the turn. The fire was in sight.
"Beta!" again he hailed. "O-he! Beatrice!"
Still no answer, nor any sign from her. As he came to the fire he noted, despite his strong emotions, that it had for the most part burned down to glowing embers.
Only one or two resinous knots still flamed. It could not have been replenished for some time, perhaps two hours or more.
Again, his quick eye caught the fact that cinders, ashes and half-burned sticks lay scattered about in strange disorder.
"Why, Beatrice never makes a fire like that!" the thought pierced through his mind.
And--though as yet on no very definite grounds--a quick prescience of catastrophe battered at his heart.
"What's this?"
Something lying on the rock-ledge, near the fire, caught his eye. He snatched it up.
"What--what can this mean?"
The colonists stood, frightened and confused, peering at him in the dark. His face, in the ruddy fire-glow, as he studied the thing he now held in his hand, must have been very terrible.
"Cloth! Torn! But--but then--"
He flung from him the bit of the girl's cloak which, ripped and shredded as though by a powerful hand, cried disaster.