ted Chief.

"There are none of the young women or the old men, who can fight,
among them," said Grom. "A-ya must have sent them, because the time
has come. Let us wait for the young girl, who seems to bring a
message."

Breathless, and clutching at her bosom with one hand, the girl fell at
Bawr's feet.

"A-ya says, 'Come quick!'" she gasped. "They are too many. They run
over the fires and trample us."

Grom sprang forward with a cry, then stopped and looked at his Chief.

"Go, you," said Bawr, "and bring them to us. I will stay here and look
to the rafts."

Taking a half-score of the strongest warriors with him, Grom raced up
the steep, torn with anxiety for the fate of A-ya and the children.

It was now about three-quarters tide, and the flood rising strongly.
By way of precaution some of the rafts had been kept afloat, let down
with ropes of vine to follow the last ebb, and guided carefully back
on the returning flood. But most of them were lying where they had
been built, or left by the preceding tide, along high-water mark, as
hopelessly stranded, for the next two hours, as a birch log after a
freshet. As the old women with children arrived, Bawr rushed them down
the wet beach to the rafts which were afloat, appointing to each
clumsy raft four men, with long, rough flattened poles, to manage it.
For the moment, all these men had to do was hold their charges in
place that they might not be swept away by the incoming tide.

When Grom and his eager handful, passing a stream of trembling
fugitives on the way, reached the level ground before the Caves, the
sight that greeted them was tremendous and appalling. It looked as if
some great country to the southward had gathered together all its
beasts and then vomited them forth in one vast torrent, confused and
irresistible, to the north. It was a wholesale migration, on such a
scale as the modern world has never even dreamed of, but suggested in
a feeble way by the torrential drift of the bison across the North
American plains half a century ago, or the sudden, inexplicable
marches of the lemming myriads out of the Scandinavian barrens that
give them birth.

The shrill cries of the women, fighting like she-wolves in defense of
the children and the home-caves, the hoarse shouts of the old men,
weak but indomitable, were mingled with an indescribable medley of
noises--gruntings, bellowings, howlings, roarings, bleatings and
brayings--from the dreadful mob of beast