r
the fleeing beasts. But his common sense speedily reasserted itself.
He grunted in disgust, turned back to the fire, and was soon absorbed
in new experiments with the bow. As for the blaze within the cave, he
troubled himself no more about it. He knew it would soon burn out. And
it would leave the cave well cleansed of pestilential insects.

All that afternoon he experimented with his bundle of shafts, to find
what length and what weight would give the best results. One of the
arrows he shattered completely, by driving it, at short range,
straight against the rock-face of the mountain. Two others he lost, by
shooting them, far beyond his expectations, over the edge of the
plateau and down into the dense thickets below him, where he did not
care to search too closely by reason of the peril of snakes. The bow,
as his good luck would have it, though short and clumsy was very
strong, being made of a stick of dry upland hickory. And the cord of
raw hide was well-seasoned, stout and tough; though it had a
troublesome trick of stretching, which forced Grom to restring it many
times before all the stretch was out of it.

Having satisfied himself as to the power of his bow and the range of
his arrows, Grom set himself next to the problem of marksmanship.
Selecting a plant of prickly pear, of about the dimensions of a man,
he shot at it, at different ranges, till most of its great fleshy
leaves were shredded and shattered. With his straight eye and his
natural aptitude, he soon grasped the idea of elevation for range, and
made some respectable shooting. He also found that he could guide the
arrow without crooking his finger around it. His elation was so
extreme that he quite forgot to eat, till the closing in of darkness
put an end to his practice. Then, piling high his fire as a warning to
prowlers, he squatted in the mouth of the cave and made his meal. For
water he had to go some little way below the lip of the plateau; but
carrying a blazing balsam-knot he had nothing to fear from the beasts
that lay in ambush about the spring. They slunk away sullenly at the
approach of the waving flame.

That night Grom slept securely, with three fires before his door.
Every hour or two, vigilant woodsman that he was, he would wake up to
replenish the fires, and be asleep again even in the act of lying
down. And when the dawn came red and amber around the shoulder of the
saw-toothed peak, he was up again and out into the chill, sweet a