Here, there, everywhere through the dense masses of foliage, the watchers could already see a dim and moving mass, fitfully illuminated by torches that now burned steady, now flared into red and smoky tourbillons of flame in the night-wind.
"Like monster glow-worms, crawling among the trees!" the girl exclaimed. "We could mow them down, from here, already! God grant we sha'n't have to fight!"
"S-h-h-h! Wait and see what's up!"
Now, from the other horde, coming from the north, sounds of warlike preparation were growing ever louder.
With quicker beats the insistent tom-toms throbbed their rhythmic melancholy rune, hollow and dissonant. Then all at once the drums ceased; and through the night air drifted a minor chant; a wail, that rose, fell, died, and came again, lagging as many strange voices joined it.
And from the square, below, a shrill, high-pitched, half-animal cry responded. Creeping shudders chilled the flesh along the engineer's backbone.
"What I need, now," thought he, "is about a hundred pounds of high-grade dynamite, or a gallon of nitroglycerin. Better still, a dozen capsules of my own invention, my 'Pulverite!'
"I guess that would settle things mighty quick. It would be the joker in this game, all right! Well, why not make some? With what chemicals I've got left, couldn't I work up a half-pint? Bottled in glass flasks, I guess it would turn the trick on 'em!"
"Why, they look black!" suddenly interrupted the girl. "See there--and there?"
She pointed toward the spring. Stern saw moving shadows in the dark. Then, through an opening, he got a blurred impression of a hand, holding a torch. He saw a body, half-human.
The glimpse vanished, but he had seen enough.
"Black--yes, blue-black! They seem so, anyhow. And--why, did you see the size of them? No bigger than apes! Good Heaven!"
Involuntarily he shuddered. For now, like a dream-horde of hideous creatures seen in a nightmare, the torch-bearers had spread all through the forest at the base of the Metropolitan.
Away from the building out across by the spring and even to Fifth Avenue the mob extended, here thick, there thin, without order or coherence--a shifting, murmuring, formless, seemingly planless congeries of dull brutality.
Here or there, where the swaying of the trees parted the branches a little, the wavering lights brought some fragment of the mass to view.
No white thing showed anywhere. All was dark and vague. Indistinctly, waveringly as in a vision, dusky heads could be made out. There showed a naked arm, greasily shining for a second in the ruddy glow which now diffused itself through the whole wood. Here the watchers saw a glistening back; again, an out-thrust leg, small and crooked, apelike and repulsive.