o bar in place.

Suddenly Jotan drew back and drove his shoulder against the wood with
all his weight behind it. The door flew open and the four men came
piling into the room, knives of stone held in readiness.

That mad rush came to an abrupt halt, and what the men saw brought a
chorus of astonished exclamations from their lips.

Flat on his back in the center of the room, partially hidden behind an
overturned table, lay Meltor of Sephar. From his left breast stood the
hilt of a stone knife, its blade buried deep. He was quite dead.

The girl was gone.

CHAPTER X

The Hairy Men

For several moons now, Urb, the Neanderthal, and his tribe had found it
increasingly difficult to locate game in the neighborhood of the family
caves. The reason could be any one of several: a nearby water-hole dried
up until the rainy season came again; a family of lions holed up close
by; an absence of adequate pasturage.

Urb sat crouched near the foot of a lofty escarpment that contained the
tribal caves. His deep-sunk button eyes, beneath beetling brows,
indifferently watched the young ones of the tribe playing about the
clearing between jungle and cliff. Below a flattened, shapeless wedge of
nose, his thick pendulous lips worked in and out in worried and
laborious thought. As leader of his tribe, Urb was concerned about the
lack of game.

It had been comparatively cool here in the shadows of the scarp during
most of the morning; but with noon growing near, the sun's direct rays
began to penetrate the thick growth of black coarse hair with which
Urb's gross body was almost entirely covered.

And so he rose at last and, like the great bull ape he so closely
resembled, clambered awkwardly but quickly to one of the caves.

Just inside the entrance he squatted his two hundred and fifty pounds on
a boulder and fell to watching Gorb, his eldest son, put final touches
to a flint spear head. After heating the bit of rock in a small fire for
several minutes, Gorb would withdraw it, hastily touch a spot near the
edge with a drop of water which caused a tiny bit of the flint to scale
away, then repeat the entire process. It was a long and tedious task;
but Gorb had that untiring patience given to those for whom time has no
meaning. Eventually, his perseverance would reward him with a fine
weapon.

Urb was secretly proud of his son. Even as a boy, Gorb had shown no
interest in hunting or in war. Beneath his sharply receding fore