tempt to reach
the cave in which I was imprisoned and rescue me. She explained that
with my rifle and pistol--both of which she assured me she could use,
having watched me so many times--she planned upon frightening the
Band-lu and forcing them to give me up. Brave little girl! She would
have risked her life willingly to save me. But some time after she
reached our cave she heard voices from the far recesses within, and
immediately concluded that we had but found another entrance to the
caves which the Band-lu occupied upon the other face of the cliff.
Then she had set out through those winding passages and in total
darkness had groped her way, guided solely by a marvelous sense of
direction, to where I lay. She had had to proceed with utmost caution
lest she fall into some abyss in the darkness and in truth she had
thrice come upon sheer drops and had been forced to take the most
frightful risks to pass them. I shudder even now as I contemplate what
this girl passed through for my sake and how she enhanced her peril in
loading herself down with the weight of my arms and ammunition and the
awkwardness of the long rifle which she was unaccustomed to bearing.

I could have knelt and kissed her hand in reverence and gratitude; nor
am I ashamed to say that that is precisely what I did after I had been
freed from my bonds and heard the story of her trials. Brave little
Ajor! Wonder-girl out of the dim, unthinkable past! Never before had
she been kissed; but she seemed to sense something of the meaning of
the new caress, for she leaned forward in the dark and pressed her own
lips to my forehead. A sudden urge surged through me to seize her and
strain her to my bosom and cover her hot young lips with the kisses of
a real love, but I did not do so, for I knew that I did not love her;
and to have kissed her thus, with passion, would have been to inflict a
great wrong upon her who had offered her life for mine.

No, Ajor should be as safe with me as with her own mother, if she had
one, which I was inclined to doubt, even though she told me that she
had once been a babe and hidden by her mother. I had come to doubt if
there was such a thing as a mother in Caspak, a mother such as we know.
From the Bo-lu to the Kro-lu there is no word which corresponds with
our word mother. They speak of ata and cor sva jo, meaning
reproduction and from the beginning, and point toward the south; but no
one has a mother.

After consid