Nadara wept, silently. An elderly lady with a single tooth, espying her, moaned in sympathy. Presently other females, attracted by the moaning, joined them, and, becoming affected by the strange hysteria to which womankind is heir, mingled their moans with those of the toothless one.
Excited by their own noise they soon were shrieking and screaming in hideous chorus. Then came Big Fist and others of the men. The din annoyed them. They set upon the mourners with their fists and teeth scattering them in all directions. Thus ended the festivities.
Or would have had not Big Fist made the fatal mistake of launching a blow at Nadara. Thandar had been standing nearby looking with wonder upon the strange scene.
He had noted the quiet grief of the young girl—real grief; and he had witnessed the hysterical variety of the "mourners"—not sham grief. Precisely, because they made no pretense to grief—it was noise to which they aspired. And as the fiendish din had set his own nerves on edge he wondered not at all that Big Fist and the other men should take steps to quell the tumult.
The female half-brutes were theirs and Waldo Emerson had reverted sufficiently to the primitive to feel no incentive to interfere. But Nadara was not theirs—she was not of them, and even had she not belonged to him the American would have felt bound to stand between her and the savage creatures among whom fate had cast her.
That she did belong to him, however, sent him hot with the blood lust of the killer as he sprang to intercept the rush of Big Fist toward her.
Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones had learned nothing of the manly art of self-defense in that other life that had been so zealously guarded from the rude and vulgar. This was unfortunate since it would have given him a great advantage over the man-brute. A single well-timed swing to that unguarded chin would have ended hostilities at once; but of hooks and jabs and jolts, scientific, Thandar knew nothing.
Except for his crude weapons he was as primeval in battle as his original anthropoid progenitor, and quite as often as not he forgot all about his sword, his knife, his bow and arrows and his spear when, half stooped, he crouched to meet the charge of a foeman.
Now he sprang for Big Fist's hairy throat. There was a sullen thud as the two bodies met, and then, rolling, biting and tearing, they struggled hither and thither upon the rocky ground at the base of the cliff.
The other men desisted from their attack upon the women. The women ceased their vocal mourning. In a little circle they formed about the contestants—a circle which moved this way and that as the fighters moved, keeping them always in the center.