fe and easy, and the good fire we will have
always with us."

CHAPTER XIII

THE FEAR

The People of the Caves were beginning to dread their good fortune.
Plenty was being showered upon them with so lavish and sudden a hand
that they looked at it askance, distrustful of the unsought-for
largess. For a week or more their hunting-grounds had been swarming
with game, in amazing and daily increasing numbers, till there was
little more of chance or of excitement in the hunt than in plucking a
ripe mango from its branch. It was game of the choicest kinds,
too--deer of many varieties, and antelope, and the little wild horse
whose flesh they accounted such a delicacy. They slew, and slew, and
their cooking-fires were busy night and day, and the flesh they could
not devour was dried in the sun in long strips or smoked in the reek
of green-wood fires. They feasted greedily, but there was something
sinister in the whole matter, something ominous; and they would stop
at times to wonder anxiously what stroke of fate could be hanging over
the Caves.

During the past day or two, moreover, there had been a disquieting
influx of those great and fierce beasts which the Cave Men were by no
means anxious to hunt. The giant white and the woolly rhinoceros had
arrived by the score in the dense thickets of the steaming savannah
which unrolled its green-and-yellow breadths along the southward base
of the downs. These half-blind brutes appeared to be waging a dreadful
and doubtful war with the red herds of those monstrous, cone-horned
survivals from an earlier age, the Arsinotheria, who had ruled the
reeking savannah for countless cycles. The roar and trampling of the
struggle came up from time to time to the dwellers in the Caves, when
the hot breeze came up from the southward.

What concerned the Cave Folk far more than any near-sighted and
blundering rhinoceros, however malignant, was the sudden arrival of
the great red bears, the black lions, the grinning and implacable
saber-tooth tigers, and giant black-gray wolves which hunted in small,
handy packs of six or seven in number. All these, the dread foes of
Man for as long as tradition could remember, had been mercifully few
and scattered. Now, in a night, they had become as common as conies;
and not a child could be allowed to play beyond shelter of the
cave-mouth fires, not a woman durst venture to the spring without a
brightly blazing fire-brand in her hand. Yet--and this se