ar-club in his hand. I knew
him as without fear with nerves untouched by our effete civilization,
fighting, as the beasts fight, to the death, killing without pity and
suffering without a moan.

It was a picture that I could not but admire.

I liked, too--I am free to confess it--his peculiar way with women. His
system was, as I understood it, to take them by the neck and bring them
along with him. That was his fierce, primordial way of "wooing" them.
And they liked it. So at least we are informed by a thousand credible
authorities. They liked it. And the modern woman, so we are told, would
still like it if only one dared to try it on. There's the trouble; if
one only _dared_!

I see lots of them--I'll be frank about it--that I should like to grab,
to sling over my shoulder and carry away with me; or, what is the same
thing, allowing for modern conditions, have an express man carry them.
I notice them at Atlantic City, I see them in Fifth Avenue--yes,
everywhere. But would they come? That's the _deuce_ of it. Would they
come right along, like the cave-woman, merely biting off my ear as
they came, or are they degenerate enough to bring an action against me,
indicting the express company as a party of the second part?

Doubts such as these prevent me from taking active measures. But they
leave me, as they leave many another man, preoccupied and fascinated
with the cave-man.

One may imagine, then, my extraordinary interest in him when I actually
met him in the flesh. Yet the thing came about quite simply, indeed more
by accident than by design, an adventure open to all.

It so happened that I spent my vacation in Kentucky--the region, as
everybody knows, of the great caves. They extend--it is a matter of
common knowledge--for hundreds of miles; in some places dark and sunless
tunnels, the black silence broken only by the dripping of the water from
the roof; in other places great vaults like subterranean temples, with
vast stone arches sweeping to the dome, and with deep, still water of
unfathomed depth as the floor; and here and there again they are lighted
from above through rifts in the surface of the earth, and are dry and
sand strewn--fit for human habitation.

In such caves as these--so has the obstinate legend run for
centuries--there still dwell cave-men, the dwindling remnant of their
race. And here it was that I came across him.

I had penetrated into the caves far beyond my guides. I carried a
revolver