ractory butts in the fire. As he squatted between the
cave door and the fire he made his meal of raw flesh and plantains,
and gazed out contemplatively over the vast, rankly-green landscape
below him, musing upon the savage and monstrous strife which went on
beneath that mask of wide-flung calm. And as he pondered, the fire
which he had subjugated was quietly doing his work for him.

The result was beyond his utmost expectations. After judicious
charring, the ends being turned continually in the glowing coals, he
rubbed away the charred portions between two stones, and found that he
could thus work up an evenly-rounded point. The point thus obtained
was keen and hard; and as he balanced this new shaft in his hand he
realized that its weight would add vastly to its power of penetration.
When he tried a shot with it, he found that it flew farther and
straighter. It drove through the tough, fleshy leaf of the prickly
pear as if it hardly noticed the obstruction. He fashioned himself a
half-dozen more of these highly-efficient shafts, and then set out
again--this time down the ravine--to seek a living target for his
practice.

The ravine was winding and of irregular width, terraced here and there
with broken ledges, here and there cut into by steep little narrow
gullies. Its bottom was in part bare rock; but wherever there was an
accumulation of soil, and some tiny spring oozing up through the
fissures, there the vegetation grew rank, starred with vivid blooms of
canna and hibiscus. In many places the ledges were draped with a dense
curtain of the flat-flowered, pink-and-gold mesembryanthemum. It was a
region well adapted to the ambuscading beasts; and Grom moved
stealthily as a panther, keeping for the most part along the upper
ledges, crouching low to cross the open spots, and slipping into cover
every few minutes to listen and peer and sniff.

Presently he came to a spot which seemed to offer him every advantage
as a place of ambush. It was a ledge some twenty feet above the valley
level, with a sort of natural parapet behind which he could crouch,
and, unseen, keep an eye on all the glades and runways below. Behind
him the rock-face was so nearly perpendicular that no enemy could
steal upon him from the rear. He laid his club and his spear down
beside him, selected one of his best arrows, and hoped that a fat buck
would come by, or one of those little, spotted, two-toed horses whose
flesh was so prized by the people