They
closed upon her from every side and then, drawing her knife she
turned at bay, metamorphosed by the fires of fear and hate from a
startled deer to a raging tiger-cat. They did not try to kill her,
but only to subdue and capture her; and so it was that more than a
single Ho-don warrior felt the keen edge of her blade in his flesh
before they had succeeded in overpowering her by numbers. And still
she fought and scratched and bit after they had taken the knife from
her until it was necessary to tie her hands and fasten a piece of
wood between her teeth by means of thongs passed behind her head.
At first she refused to walk when they started off in the direction
of the valley but after two of them had seized her by the hair and
dragged her for a number of yards she thought better of her original
decision and came along with them, though still as defiant as her
bound wrists and gagged mouth would permit.
Near the entrance to Kor-ul-lul they came upon another body of
their warriors with which were several Waz-don prisoners from the
tribe of Kor-ul-lul. It was a raiding party come up from a Ho-don
city of the valley after slaves. This Pan-at-lee knew for the
occurrence was by no means unusual. During her lifetime the tribe
to which she belonged had been sufficiently fortunate, or powerful,
to withstand successfully the majority of such raids made upon
them, but yet Pan-at-lee had known of friends and relatives who had
been carried into slavery by the Ho-don and she knew, too, another
thing which gave her hope, as doubtless it did to each of the other
captives--that occasionally the prisoners escaped from the cities
of the hairless whites.
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