foremost warrior which warned me.

On such a little thing my life hung that I often marvel that I
escaped so easily. Had not the rifle of the leader of the party
swung from its fastenings beside his saddle in such a way as to
strike against the butt of his great metal-shod spear I should have
snuffed out without ever knowing that death was near me. But the
little sound caused me to turn, and there upon me, not ten feet
from my breast, was the point of that huge spear, a spear forty
feet long, tipped with gleaming metal, and held low at the side
of a mounted replica of the little devils I had been watching.

But how puny and harmless they now looked beside this huge and
terrific incarnation of hate, of vengeance and of death. The man
himself, for such I may call him, was fully fifteen feet in height
and, on Earth, would have weighed some four hundred pounds. He sat
his mount as we sit a horse, grasping the animal's barrel with his
lower limbs, while the hands of his two right arms held his immense
spear low at the side of his mount; his two left arms were
outstretched laterally to help preserve his balance, the thing he
rode having neither bridle or reins of any description for guidance.

And his mount! How can earthly words describe it! It towered ten
feet at the shoulder; had four legs on either side; a broad flat
tail, larger at the tip than at the root, and which it held straight
out behind while running; a gaping mouth which split its head from
its snout to its long, massive neck.

Like its master, it was entirely devoid of hair, but was of a dark
slate color and exceeding smooth and glossy. Its belly was white,