ir
with his arrows.

The difficulty which now confronted him was that of giving his shafts
a penetrating point. Being of a very hard-fibered cane, akin to
bamboo, they would take a kind of splintering-point of almost needle
sharpness. But it was fragile; and the cane being hollow, the point
was necessarily on one side, which affected the accuracy of the
flight. There were no flints in the neighborhood, or slaty rocks,
which he could split into edged and pointed fragments. He tried
hardening his points in the fire; but the results were not altogether
satisfactory. He thought of tipping some of the shafts with thorns, or
with the steely points of the old aloe leaves; but he could not, at
the moment, devise such a method of fixing these formidable weapons in
place as would not quite destroy their efficiency. Finally he made up
his mind that the thing to use would be bone, ground into a suitable
shape between two stones. But this was a matter that would have to
await his return to the Caves, and would then call for much careful
devising. For the present he would perforce content himself with such
points as he had fined down and hardened in the fire.

This matter settled in his mind, Grom burned to put his wonderful new
weapon to practical test. He descended cautiously the steep slope from
the eastern edge of his plateau--a broken region of ledges,
subtropical thickets, and narrow, grassy glades, with here and there
some tree of larger growth rising solitary like a watch-tower. Knowing
this was a favorite feeding-hour for many of the grass-eaters, he hid
himself in the well-screened crotch of a deodar, overlooking a green
glade, and waited.

He had not long to wait, for the region swarmed with game. Out from a
runway some thirty or forty yards up the glade stepped a huge,
dun-colored bull, with horns like scimitars each as long as Grom's
arm. His flanks were scarred with long wounds but lately healed, and
Grom realized that he was a solitary, beaten and driven out from his
herd by some mightier rival. The bull glanced warily about him, and
then fell to cropping the grass.

The beast offered an admirable target. Grom's arrow sped noiselessly
between the curtaining branches, and found its mark high on the bull's
fore-shoulder. It penetrated--but not to a depth of more than two or
three inches. And Grom, though elated by his good shot, realized that
such a wound would be nothing more than an irritant.

Startled and infur