father had had none to transmit to
him; but honor and conscience he did have and these were to trouble him
many times as they battled with his inherent love of freedom for
possession of his soul.

They had passed but a short distance to the rear of Numa when the boy
caught the unpleasant odor of the carnivore. His face lighted with a
smile. Something told him that he would have known that scent among a
myriad of others even if Akut had not told him that a lion lay near.
There was a strange familiarity--a weird familiarity in it that made
the short hairs rise at the nape of his neck, and brought his upper lip
into an involuntary snarl that bared his fighting fangs. There was a
sense of stretching of the skin about his ears, for all the world as
though those members were flattening back against his skull in
preparation for deadly combat. His skin tingled. He was aglow with a
pleasurable sensation that he never before had known. He was, upon the
instant, another creature--wary, alert, ready. Thus did the scent of
Numa, the lion, transform the boy into a beast.

He had never seen a lion--his mother had gone to great pains to prevent
it. But he had devoured countless pictures of them, and now he was
ravenous to feast his eyes upon the king of beasts in the flesh. As he
trailed Akut he kept an eye cocked over one shoulder, rearward, in the
hope that Numa might rise from his kill and reveal himself. Thus it
happened that he dropped some little way behind Akut, and the next he
knew he was recalled suddenly to a contemplation of other matters than
the hidden Numa by a shrill scream of warning from the Ape. Turning
his eyes quickly in the direction of his companion, the boy saw that,
standing in the path directly before him, which sent tremors of
excitement racing along every nerve of his body. With body
half-merging from a clump of bushes in which she must have lain hidden
stood a sleek and beautiful lioness. Her yellow-green eyes were round
and staring, boring straight into the eyes of the boy. Not ten paces
separated them. Twenty paces behind the lioness stood the great ape,
bellowing instructions to the boy and hurling taunts at the lioness in
an evident effort to attract her attention from the lad while he gained
the shelter of a near-by tree.

But Sabor was not to be diverted. She had her eyes upon the lad. He
stood between her and her mate, between her and the kill. It was
suspicious. Probably he had