hing but to push a lot of senseless buttons. Down there you were
the bosses, the ones to look upon me as dirt. Here, on the ice, where
it takes guts to get along, _I_ am the boss. I let you live on my
scraps and leavings, simply because it tickled me to see you cringe
and beg. But I am growing weary of that sport. Henceforth you keep
away from my camp. Don't let me catch you prowling around, d'you hear?
Let's see how long you'll last on the ice!"

"This animal is mine." He prodded the carcass. "I killed it. I'll make
the prolats skin and, cut it up for me. Ho-ho, how they cringe and
obey me--Abud, the dull one! Ho-ho!"

On this he strode away, still laughing thunderously.

I looked to Keston in blank dismay. What was to be our fate now, but
death by cold and slow starvation!

Three-months had passed since we had escaped to the ice from the
dreadful machines--a score of us. For a while it seemed that we had
fled in vain. We were not fit to cope with the raw essentials of life:
it was uncounted centuries since man fought nature bare handed. So we
huddled together for warmth, and starved. Even Keston's keen brain was
helpless in this waste of ice, without tools, without machines.

* * * * *

Then it was that Abud arose to take command. He, dull brute that he
was amid the complexities of our civilization, fairly reveled in this
primitive combat with hunger and cold. He was an anachronism in our
midst, a throwback to our early forebears.

It did not take him long to fashion cunning nooses and traps to catch
the few beasts that roamed the ice. Once he pounced upon a wolf-like
creature, and strangled it with bare hands. He fashioned with apt
fingers spears and barbs of bone, curved knives from shin bones, and
skinned the heavy fur pelts and made them into garments.

No wonder the prolats in their helplessness looked to him as their
leader. Keston and I were thrust aside. But Abud did not forget. His
slow witted mind harbored deadly rancor for former days, when we were
in command. He remembered our contempt for his slow dull processes;
for the many errors he was guilty of. By a queer quirk, the very fact
that Keston had saved him from the Death Bath on several occasions but
fed the flames of his hatred. Perhaps that was an ancient human trait,
too.

So he set himself to twit and humiliate us. His jibes were heavy
handed and gross. He refused to let us eat at the communal mess, but
force