What the travelers had heard regarding the fierceness and courage of
the red pygmies had not been one bit exaggerated. Never had such
desperate fighting ever taken place. The red dwarfs, scarcely one of
whom was more than three feet high, were strongly built, and there
were so many of them, and they battled together with such singleness
of purpose, that they were more formidable than a tribe of ordinary-
sized savages would have been.

And their purpose was to utterly annihilate the enemy that had so
unexpectedly come upon them. It did not matter to them that Tom and
the others had arrived in an airship. The strange craft had no
superstitious terror for them, as it had for the simpler blacks.

"Bless my multiplication tables!" cried Mr. Damon. "What a mob of
them!"

"Almost too many!" murmured Tom Swift, who was rapidly firing his
electric rifle at them. "We can never hope to drive them back, I'm
afraid."

Indeed from every side of the plain, and even from the depths of the
jungle the red dwarfs were now pouring. They yelled most horribly,
screaming in rage, brandishing their spears and clubs, and keeping
up an incessant fire of big arrows from their bows, and smaller ones
from the blowguns.

As yet none of our friends had been hit, for they were sheltered in
the airship, and as the windows were covered with a mesh of wire, to