ng her
rescue alone. But they found him under a heap of dead, so nearly dead
himself that they despaired of him. Realizing that it was he who had
saved the tribe, they began over him that great keening lamentation
hitherto reserved strictly for the funeral of the supreme Chief
himself. But Bawr, his massive features furrowed with solicitude,
stopped them, vowing that Grom should not die. And lifting the hero in
his arms he bore him into the cave.

Grom's wounds proved to be deep, but not fatal to one of these
clean-blooded sons of the open and the wind. It was some days before
it was clearly borne in upon him that A-ya had been carried off alive
by the Bow-legs. Then, with a great cry, he sprang to his feet. The
blood spouted afresh from his wounds, and he fell back in a swoon.
When he came to himself again, for days he would speak to no one, and
it looked as if he would die, not of his wounds so much as of the
insufficient will to live. But a chance word of the captive Ook-ootsk,
who was being nursed back to life beside him, reminded him that there
was vengeance to be lived for, and he roused himself a little. Then
Bawr, ever subtle in the reading of his people's hearts, suggested to
him that even such a feat as the rescue of the girl A-ya might not be
impossible to the subjugator of the fire and the slayer of a whole
people.

And from that moment Grom began climbing steadily back to life.

CHAPTER VII

THE RESCUE OF A-YA

The clay-colored, ape-like, bow-legged men squatted in council.

It was not long, as time went in the long, slow morning of the
world--perhaps a half-score thousand years or so--since their
ancestors, in the pride of their dawning intelligence, had swung down
from their tree-tops, to walk upright on the solid earth and challenge
the supremacy of the hunting beasts. Their arms were still of an
unhuman and ungainly length, their short powerful legs were still so
heavily bowed that they had no great speed in running; and they still
had their homes high among the branches, where they could sleep secure
from surprise. They were still tree dwellers; but they were men,
intent upon asserting their lordship over all the other dwellers upon
earth's surface.

They were not beautiful to look upon. Their squat, powerful forms,
varying in color from a dingy yellow-brown to blackish mud-color, were
covered unevenly with a thin growth of dark hairs. On thigh and
shoulder, down the backbone, and on