too, seem restless. I think
they are themselves driven. But what dreadful beings must be they who
can drive them!"

"If they are driven over us," muttered Bawr, "they will grind us and
our fires into the dust."

"It must be men," mused Grom aloud, "men far mightier than ourselves
and so countless that the hordes of the Tree Men would seem a handful
in comparison. Only men, or gods, and in swarms like locusts, could so
drive all these mighty beasts before them as a child drives rabbits."

"Before they come," said Bawr, dropping his great craggy chin upon his
breast, "the People of the Caves will be trodden out. Whither can we
escape from such foes? We will build great fires before the caves, and
we will go down fighting, as befits men."

He lifted his maned and massive head, and shook his great spear
defiantly at the unknown doom that was coming up from the south. But
Grom's eyes were sunken deep under his brows in brooding thought.

"There is one way, perhaps," he said at length. "We have learned to
journey on the water. We must build us rafts, many rafts, to carry all
the tribe. And when we can no longer hold our fires and our caves we
will push out upon the water, and perhaps make our way to that blue
shore yonder, where they cannot follow us."

"The waves, and the monsters of the waves, will swallow us up,"
suggested Bawr.

"Some of us, perhaps many of us," agreed Grom. "But many of us will
escape, to keep the tribe-fires burning, if the gods be kind upon that
day and bind down the winds till we get over. If we stay here we shall
all die."

"It is well," grunted Bawr, turning to hurry down the steep. "We will
build rafts. Let us hasten."

* * * * *

On the beach below the Caves the Men of the Tribe worked furiously,
dragging the trunks of trees together at the water's edge, lashing
them with ropes of vine and cords of hide, and laboriously lopping
some of the more obstructive branches by the combined use of fire and
split stones. The women, and the lame slave Ook-ootsk--with the old
men, who, though their hearts were still high, were too frail of their
hands for such a heavy task as raft-building--remained before the
Caves under the command of A-ya, Grom's mate. They had enough to do in
feeding the chain of fires, keeping the children out of danger, and
fighting back with spear and arrow the ever-encroaching mob of
wild-eyed beasts. The beasts feared the fires, a