It was no time for knife-work now.  As the avalanche of brute strength descended upon him Aldous gathered himself for the shock.  He had already measured his own weakness.  Those ten minutes among the rocks of the chasm had broken and beaten him until his strength was gone.  He was panting from his first onset with Quade, but his brain was working.  And he knew that Quade was no longer a reasoning thing.  He had ceased to think.  He was blind with the passion of the brute, and his one thought was to crush his enemy down under the weight of the club in his huge hands.  Aldous waited.  He heard Joanne’s terrified scream when Quade was almost upon him—­when less than five feet separated them.  The club was descending when he flung himself forward, straight for the other’s feet.  The club crashed over him, and with what strength he had he gripped Quade at the knees.  With a tremendous thud Quade came to earth.  The club broke from the grip of his hands.  For a moment he was stunned, and in that moment Aldous was at his throat.

He would have sold the best of his life for the skinning-knife.  But he had lost it in gripping Quade.  And now he choked—­with every ounce of strength in him he choked at the thick red neck of his enemy.  Quade’s hands reached for his own throat.  They found it.  And both choked, lying there gasping and covered with blood! while Joanne struggled vainly to free herself, and scream after scream rang from her lips.  And John Aldous knew that at last the end had come.  For there was no longer strength in his arms, and there was something that was like a strange cramp in his fingers, while the clutch at his own throat was turning the world black.  His grip relaxed.  His hands fell limp.  The last that he realized was that Quade was over him, and that he must be dying.

Then it was, as he lay within a final second or two of death, no longer conscious of physical attack or of Joanne’s terrible cries, that a strange and unforeseen thing occurred.  Beyond the tepee a man had risen from the earth.  He staggered toward them, and it was from Marie that the wildest and strangest cry of all came now.  For the man was Joe DeBar!  In his hand he held a knife.  Swaying and stumbling he came to the fighters—­from behind.  Quade did not see him, and over Quade’s huge back he poised himself.  The knife rose; for the fraction of a second it trembled in midair.  Then it descended, and eight inches of steel went to the heart of Quade.

And as DeBar turned and staggered toward Joanne and Marie, John Aldous was sinking deeper and deeper into a black and abysmal night.

CHAPTER XXX

In that chaotic night in which he was drifting, light as a feather floating on the wind, John Aldous experienced neither pain nor very much of the sense of life.  And yet, without seeing or feeling, he seemed to be living, All was dead in him but that last consciousness, which is almost the spirit; he might have been dreaming, and minutes, hours, or even years might have passed in that dream.  For a long time he seemed to be sinking through the blackness; and then something stopped him, without jar or shock, and he was rising.  He could hear nothing.  There was a vast silence about him, a silence as deep and as unbroken as the abysmal pit in which he seemed to be softly floating.