In the Morning of Time Part 13

He was sorry to have hurt the old woman. He had a ridiculous dislike of hurting any one unnecessarily; and when he looked back and saw A-ya rocking herself to and fro in heartless mirth, he felt like asking her how she would have liked it herself, if she had been in the place of the fat old woman. On the other hand, he knew that he had made a great discovery, second only to the conquest of the fire. He had found a new weapon, of unheard-of, unimagined powers, able to kill swiftly and silently and at a great distance. All he had to do was to perfect the weapon and learn to control it.

He strode haughtily up to the cave mouth to recover his shaft. The people, even the mightiest of the warriors, looked anxious and deprecating at his approach; but he gave them never a glance. It would not have done to let them think he had wounded the old woman by accident. He picked up the shaft and examined its bloodstained point, frowning fiercely. Then he glared into the cave where the unlucky victim of his experiments had taken refuge. He refitted the shaft to the bow-string, and made as if to follow up his stroke with further chastis.e.m.e.nt. Instantly there came from the dark interior a chorus of shrill feminine entreaties. He hesitated, seemed to relent, put the shaft into the bundle under his arm, and strode back to rejoin A-ya.

He had done enough for the moment. His next step required deep thought and preparation.

An hour or two later, Grom set out from the Caves alone in spite of A-ya's pleadings. He wanted complete solitude with his new weapon.

Besides a generous bundle of canes, of varying lengths and sizes, he carried some strips of raw meat, a bunch of plantains, his spear and club, and a sort of rude basket, without handle, formed by tying together the ends of a roll of green bark.

This basket was a device of A-ya's, which had added greatly to her prestige in the tribe, and caused the women to regard her with redoubled jealousy. By lining it thickly with wet clay, she was able to carry fire in it so securely and simply that Grom had adopted it at once, throwing away his uncertain and always troublesome fire-tubes of hollow bamboo.

Mounting the steep hillside behind the Caves, Grom turned into a high, winding ravine, and was soon lost to the sight of the tribe.

The ravine, the bed of a long-dry torrent, climbed rapidly, bearing around to the eastward, and brought him at length to a high plateau on a shoulder of the mountain. At the back of the plateau the mountain rose again, abruptly, to one of those saw-tooth pinnacles which characterized this range. At the base of the steep was a narrow fissure in the rock-face, leading into a small grotto which Grom had discovered on one of his hunting expeditions. He had used it several times already as a retreat when tired of the hubbub of the tribe and anxious to ponder in quiet some of the problems which for ever tormented his fruitful brain.

Absorbed in meditations upon his new weapons, Grom set himself to build a small fire before the entrance of the grotto. The red coals from his fire-basket he surrounded and covered with dry gra.s.s, dead twigs, and small sticks. Then, getting down upon all fours, he blew long and steadily into the ma.s.s till the smoke which curled up from it was streaked with thin flames. As the flames curled higher, his ears caught the sound of something stirring within the cave. He looked up, peering between the little coils of smoke, and saw a pair of eyes, very close to the ground, glaring forth at him from the darkness.

With one hand, he coolly but swiftly fed the fire to fuller volume, while with the other he reached for and clutched his club. The eyes drew back slowly to the depths of the cave. Appearing not to have observed them, Grom piled the fire with heavier and heavier fuel, till it was blazing strongly and full of well-lighted brands. Then he stood up, seized a brand, and hurled it into the cave. There was a harsh snarl, and the eyes disappeared, the owner of them having apparently shrunk off to one side.

A moment or two later the interior was suddenly lighted up with a smoky glare. The brand had fallen on a heap of withered gra.s.s which had formerly been Grom's couch. Grom set his teeth and swung up his club; and in the same instant there shot forth two immense cave-hyenas, mad with rage and terror.

The great beasts were more afraid of the sudden flare within than of the substantial and dangerous fire without. The first swerved just in time to escape the fire, and went by so swiftly that the stroke of Grom's club caught him only a light, glancing blow on the rump. But the second of the pair, the female, was too close behind to swerve in time. She dashed straight through the fire, struck Grom with all her frantic weight, knocked him flat, and tore off howling down the valley, leaving a pungent trail of singed fur on the air.

Uninjured save for an ugly scratch, which bled profusely, down one side of his face, Grom picked himself up in a rage and started after the fleeing beasts. But his common sense speedily rea.s.serted itself.

He grunted in disgust, turned back to the fire, and was soon absorbed in new experiments with the bow. As for the blaze within the cave, he troubled himself no more about it. He knew it would soon burn out. And it would leave the cave well cleansed of pestilential insects.

All that afternoon he experimented with his bundle of shafts, to find what length and what weight would give the best results. One of the arrows he shattered completely, by driving it, at short range, straight against the rock-face of the mountain. Two others he lost, by shooting them, far beyond his expectations, over the edge of the plateau and down into the dense thickets below him, where he did not care to search too closely by reason of the peril of snakes. The bow, as his good luck would have it, though short and clumsy was very strong, being made of a stick of dry upland hickory. And the cord of raw hide was well-seasoned, stout and tough; though it had a troublesome trick of stretching, which forced Grom to restring it many times before all the stretch was out of it.

Having satisfied himself as to the power of his bow and the range of his arrows, Grom set himself next to the problem of marksmanship.

Selecting a plant of p.r.i.c.kly pear, of about the dimensions of a man, he shot at it, at different ranges, till most of its great fleshy leaves were shredded and shattered. With his straight eye and his natural apt.i.tude, he soon grasped the idea of elevation for range, and made some respectable shooting. He also found that he could guide the arrow without crooking his finger around it. His elation was so extreme that he quite forgot to eat, till the closing in of darkness put an end to his practice. Then, piling high his fire as a warning to prowlers, he squatted in the mouth of the cave and made his meal. For water he had to go some little way below the lip of the plateau; but carrying a blazing balsam-knot he had nothing to fear from the beasts that lay in ambush about the spring. They slunk away sullenly at the approach of the waving flame.

That night Grom slept securely, with three fires before his door.

Every hour or two, vigilant woodsman that he was, he would wake up to replenish the fires, and be asleep again even in the act of lying down. And when the dawn came red and amber around the shoulder of the saw-toothed peak, he was up again and out into the chill, sweet air with his arrows.

The difficulty which now confronted him was that of giving his shafts a penetrating point. Being of a very hard-fibered cane, akin to bamboo, they would take a kind of splintering-point of almost needle sharpness. But it was fragile; and the cane being hollow, the point was necessarily on one side, which affected the accuracy of the flight. There were no flints in the neighborhood, or slaty rocks, which he could split into edged and pointed fragments. He tried hardening his points in the fire; but the results were not altogether satisfactory. He thought of tipping some of the shafts with thorns, or with the steely points of the old aloe leaves; but he could not, at the moment, devise such a method of fixing these formidable weapons in place as would not quite destroy their efficiency. Finally he made up his mind that the thing to use would be bone, ground into a suitable shape between two stones. But this was a matter that would have to await his return to the Caves, and would then call for much careful devising. For the present he would perforce content himself with such points as he had fined down and hardened in the fire.

This matter settled in his mind, Grom burned to put his wonderful new weapon to practical test. He descended cautiously the steep slope from the eastern edge of his plateau--a broken region of ledges, subtropical thickets, and narrow, gra.s.sy glades, with here and there some tree of larger growth rising solitary like a watch-tower. Knowing this was a favorite feeding-hour for many of the gra.s.s-eaters, he hid himself in the well-screened crotch of a deodar, overlooking a green glade, and waited.

He had not long to wait, for the region swarmed with game. Out from a runway some thirty or forty yards up the glade stepped a huge, dun-colored bull, with horns like scimitars each as long as Grom's arm. His flanks were scarred with long wounds but lately healed, and Grom realized that he was a solitary, beaten and driven out from his herd by some mightier rival. The bull glanced warily about him, and then fell to cropping the gra.s.s.

The beast offered an admirable target. Grom's arrow sped noiselessly between the curtaining branches, and found its mark high on the bull's fore-shoulder. It penetrated--but not to a depth of more than two or three inches. And Grom, though elated by his good shot, realized that such a wound would be nothing more than an irritant.

Startled and infuriated, the bull roared and pawed the sod, and glared about him to locate his unseen a.s.sailant. He had not the remotest idea of the direction from which the strange attack had come. The galling smart in his shoulder grew momentarily more severe. He lashed back at it savagely with the side of his horn, but the arrow was just out of his reach. Then, bewildered and alarmed, he tried to escape from this new kind of fly with the intolerable sting by galloping furiously up and down the glade. As he pa.s.sed the deodar, Grom let drive another arrow, at close range. This, too, struck, and stuck. But it did not go deep enough to produce any serious effect. The animal roared again, stared about him as if he thought the place was bewitched, and plunged headlong into the nearest thicket, tearing out both arrows as he went through the close-set stems. Grom heard him crashing onward down the slope, and smiled to think of the surprise in store for any antagonist that might cross the mad brute's path.

This experiment upon the wild bull had shown Grom one thing clearly.

He must arm his arrows with a more penetrating point. Until he could carry out his idea of giving them tips of bones, he must find some shoots of solid, pithless growth to take the place of his light hollow canes. For the next hour or two he searched the jungle carefully and warily, looking for a young growth that might immediately serve his purpose.

But there in the jungle everything that was hard enough was crooked or gnarled, everything that was straight enough was soft and sappy. It was not till the sun was almost over his head, and the heat was urging him back to the coolness of his grotto, that he came across something worth making a trial of. On a bleak wind-swept knoll, far out on the mountain-side, lay the trunk of an old hickory-tree, which had evidently been shattered by lightning. From the roots, tenacious of life, had sprung up a throng of saplings, ranging from a foot or two in height to the level of Grom's head. They were as straight and slim as the canes. And their hardness was proved to Grom's satisfaction when he tried to break them off. They were tough, too, so that he almost lost his patience over them, before he learned that the best way to deal with them was to strip them down, in the direction of the fiber, where they sprang from the parent trunk or root. Having at length gathered an armful, he returned to his grotto and proceeded to shape the refractory b.u.t.ts in the fire. As he squatted between the cave door and the fire he made his meal of raw flesh and plantains, and gazed out contemplatively over the vast, rankly-green landscape below him, musing upon the savage and monstrous strife which went on beneath that mask of wide-flung calm. And as he pondered, the fire which he had subjugated was quietly doing his work for him.

The result was beyond his utmost expectations. After judicious charring, the ends being turned continually in the glowing coals, he rubbed away the charred portions between two stones, and found that he could thus work up an evenly-rounded point. The point thus obtained was keen and hard; and as he balanced this new shaft in his hand he realized that its weight would add vastly to its power of penetration.

When he tried a shot with it, he found that it flew farther and straighter. It drove through the tough, fleshy leaf of the p.r.i.c.kly pear as if it hardly noticed the obstruction. He fashioned himself a half-dozen more of these highly-efficient shafts, and then set out again--this time down the ravine--to seek a living target for his practice.

The ravine was winding and of irregular width, terraced here and there with broken ledges, here and there cut into by steep little narrow gullies. Its bottom was in part bare rock; but wherever there was an acc.u.mulation of soil, and some tiny spring oozing up through the fissures, there the vegetation grew rank, starred with vivid blooms of canna and hibiscus. In many places the ledges were draped with a dense curtain of the flat-flowered, pink-and-gold mesembryanthemum. It was a region well adapted to the ambuscading beasts; and Grom moved stealthily as a panther, keeping for the most part along the upper ledges, crouching low to cross the open spots, and slipping into cover every few minutes to listen and peer and sniff.

Presently he came to a spot which seemed to offer him every advantage as a place of ambush. It was a ledge some twenty feet above the valley level, with a sort of natural parapet behind which he could crouch, and, unseen, keep an eye on all the glades and runways below. Behind him the rock-face was so nearly perpendicular that no enemy could steal upon him from the rear. He laid his club and his spear down beside him, selected one of his best arrows, and hoped that a fat buck would come by, or one of those little, spotted, two-toed horses whose flesh was so prized by the people of the Caves. Such a prize would be a proof to all the tribe of the potency of his new weapon.

For nearly an hour he waited, moveless, save for his ranging eyes, as the rock on which he leaned. To a hunter like Grom, schooled to infinite patience, this was nothing. He knew that, in the woods, if one waits long enough and keeps still enough, he is bound to see something interesting. At last it came. It was neither the fat buck nor the little two-toed horse with dapple hide, but a young cow-buffalo. Grom noticed at once that she was nervous and puzzled.

She seemed to suspect that she was being followed and was undecided what to do. Once she faced about angrily, staring into the coverts behind her, and made as if to charge. Had she been an old cow, or a bull, she would have charged; but her inexperience made her irresolute. She snorted, faced about again, and moved on, ears, eyes and wide nostrils one note of wrathful interrogation. She was well within range, and Grom would have tried a shot at her except for his seasoned wariness. He would rather see, before revealing himself, what foe it was that dared to trail so dangerous a quarry. The buffalo moved on slowly out of range, and vanished down a runway; and immediately afterwards the stealthy pursuer came in view.

To Grom's amazement, it was neither a lion nor a bear. It was a man, of his own tribe. And then he saw it was none other than the great chief, Bawr himself, hunting alone after his haughty and daring fashion. Between Grom and Bawr there was the fullest understanding, and Grom would have whistled that plover-cry, his private signal, but for the risk of interfering with Bawr's chase. Once more, therefore, he held himself in check; while Bawr, his eyes easily reading the trail, crept on with the soundless step of a wild cat.

But Grom was not the only hunter lying in ambush in the sun-drenched ravine. Out from a bed of giant, red-blooming canna arose the diabolical, grinning head and monstrous shoulders of a saber-tooth, and stared after Bawr. Then the whole body emerged with a noiseless bound. For a second the gigantic beast stood there, with one paw uplifted, its golden-tawny bulk seeming to quiver in the downpour of intense sunlight. It was a third as tall again at the shoulders as the biggest Himalayan tiger, its head was flat-skulled like a tiger's, and its upper jaw was armed with two long, yellow, saber-like tusks, projecting downwards below the lower jaw. This appalling monster started after Bawr with a swift, crouching rush, as silent, for all its weight, as if its feet were shod with thistledown.

Grom leapt to his feet with a wild yell of warning, at the same time letting fly an arrow. In his haste the shaft went wide. Bawr, looking over his shoulder, saw the giant beast almost upon him. With a tremendous bound he gained the foot of a tree. Dropping his club and spear, he sprang desperately, caught a branch, and swung himself upward.

But the saber-tooth was already at his heels, before he had time to swing quite out of reach. The gigantic brute gathered itself for a spring which would have enabled it to pluck Bawr from his refuge like a ripe fig. But that spring was never delivered. With a roar of rage the monster turned instead, and bit furiously at the shaft of an arrow sticking in its flank. Grom's second shaft had flown true; and Bawr, greatly marveling, drew up his legs to a place of safety.

With the fire of that deep wound in its entrails the saber-tooth forgot all about its quarry in the tree. It had caught sight of Grom when he uttered his yell of warning, and it knew instantly whence the strange attack had come. It bit off the protruding shaft; and then, fixing its dreadful eyes on Grom, it ceased its snarling and came charging for the ledge with a rush which seemed likely to carry it clear up the twenty-foot perpendicular of smooth rock.

Grom, enamored of the new weapon, forgot the spear which was likely to be far more efficient at these close quarters. Leaning far out over the parapet, he drew his arrow to the head and let drive just as the monster reared itself, open-jawed, at the wall. The pointed hickory went down into the gaping gullet, and stood out some inches at the side of the neck. With a horrible coughing screech the monster recoiled, put its head between its paws, and tried to claw the anguish from its throat. But after a moment, seeming to realize that this was impossible, it backed away, gathered itself together, and sprang for the ledge. It received another of Grom's shafts deep in the chest, without seeming to notice the wound; and its impetus was so tremendous that it succeeded in getting its fore-paws fixed upon the ledge.

Clinging there, its enormous pale-green eyes staring straight into Grom's, it struggled to draw itself up all the way--an effort in which it would doubtless have succeeded at once but for that first arrow in its entrails. The iron claws of its hinder feet rasped noisily on the rock-face.

Grom dropped his bow beside him and reached for the spear. His hand grasped the club instead; but there was no time to change. Swinging the stone-head weapon in air, he brought it down, with a grunt of huge effort, full upon one of those giant paws which clutched the edge of the parapet. Crushed and numbed, the grip of that paw fell away; but at the same moment one of the hinder paws got over the edge, and clung. And there the monster hung, its body bent in a contorted bow.

Bawr, meanwhile, seeing Grom's peril, had dropped from his tree, s.n.a.t.c.hed up his spear and club, and rushed in to the rescue. It was courage, this, of the finest, counting no odds; for down there on the level he would have stood no ghost of a chance had the beast turned back upon him. Grom yelled to him to keep away, and swung up his club for another shattering blow. But in that same moment the great glaring eyes filmed and rolled upwards; blood spouted from between the gaping jaws; and with a spluttering cough the monster lost its hold. It fell, with a soft but jarring thud, upon its back, and slowly rolled over upon its side, pawing the air aimlessly. The arrow in the throat had done its work.

With fine self-restraint Bawr refrained from striking, that he might seem to usurp no share in Grom's amazing achievement. He stood leaning upon his spear, calmly watching the last feeble paroxysm, till Grom came scrambling down from the ledge and stood beside him. He took the bow and arrows, and examined them in silence. Then he turned upon Grom with burning eyes.

"You found the Fire for our people. You saved our people from the hordes of the Bow-legs. You have saved my life now, slaying the monster from very far off with these little sticks which you have made. It is you who should be Chief, not I."

Grom laughed and shook his head. "Bawr is the better man of us two,"

said he positively, "and he is a better chief. He governs the people, while I go away and think new things. And he is my friend. Look, I will teach him now this new thing. And we will make another just like it, that when we return to the Caves Bawr also shall know how to strike from very far off."

With their rough-edged spear-heads of flint they set themselves to the skinning of the saber-tooth. Then they went back to the high plateau, where Bawr was taught to shoot a straight shaft. And on the following day they returned to the fires of the tribe, carrying between them, shoulder high, slung upon their two spears, this first trophy of the bow, the monstrous head and hide of the saber-tooth.

CHAPTER IX

THE DESTROYING SPLENDOR

I

To Grom, hunting farther to the south of the Tribal Fires than he had ever ranged before, came suddenly a woman running, mad with fright, a baby clutched to her bosom. She fell at Grom's feet, gibbering breathlessly, and plainly imploring his protection. Both she and the child were streaming with blood, and covered with strange cup-like wounds, as if the flesh had been gouged out of them with some irresistible circular instrument.

Grom swiftly fitted an arrow to his bow, and peered through the trees to see what manner of adversary the fugitive was like to bring upon him. At the same time, he gave a piercing cry, which was answered at once from some distance behind him.

Having satisfied himself (the country being fairly open) that the woman's pursuer, whatever it might be, was not close upon her heels, and that no immediate danger was in view, he turned his attention upon the woman herself. She was not of his race, and he looked down upon her with cold aversion. At first glance he thought she was one of the Bow-legs. But the color of her skin, where it could be seen for the blood, was different, being rather of a copper-red; and she was neither so hairy on the body nor of so ape-like proportions. She was sufficiently hideous, however, and of some race plainly inferior to the People of the Caves. The natural instinct of a Cave Man would have been to knock her and her offspring on the head without ceremony--an effective method of guarding his more highly developed breed from the mixture of an inferior blood. But Grom, the Chief and the wise man, had many vague impulses moving him at times which were novel to the human play-fellows of Earth's childhood. He disliked hurting a woman or a child. He might, quite conceivably, have refused to concern himself with the suppliant before him, and merely left her and her baby to the chances of the jungle. But the peculiar character of her wounds interested him. She aroused his curiosity. Here was a new mystery for him to investigate. The woman was saved.

Knowing a few words of the Bow-legs' tongue, which he had learned from his lame slave Ook-ootsk, he addressed the crouching woman, telling her not to fear. The tongue was unintelligible to her, but the tones of his voice seemed to rea.s.sure her. She sat up, revealing again the form of the little one, which she had been shielding with her hair and her bosom as if she feared the tall white hunter might dash its brains out; and Grom noted with keen interest that the child also had one of those terrible, cup-shaped wounds, almost obliterating its fat, copper-colored shoulder. He saw, also, that the woman's face, though uncomely, was more intelligent and human than the b.e.s.t.i.a.l faces of the Bow-legs' women. It was a broad face, with very small, deep-set eyes, high cheek bones, a tiny nose, and a very wide mouth, and it looked as if some one had sat on it hard and pushed it in. The idea made him smile, and the smile completed the woman's rea.s.surance. She poured a stream of chatter quite unlike the clicks and barkings of the Bow-legs. Then she crept closer to Grom's feet, and proceeded to give her little one the breast. It was twisting uneasily with the pain of its dreadful wound, but it nursed hungrily, and with the prudent stoicism of a wild creature it made no outcry.