Down he came directly on top of a flaming pile of brush, and with him came the old man. The warriors leaped forward with whirling axes. What mattered it if the old man was pierced by a dozen of the spears that had been intended for the marauder? They leaped and shouted in savage glee, for the lion was dead even before a single ax had smitten him. The old man was dead, too. Him they hurled out to the beasts beyond the flames; the lion they first skinned.
It was an awful spectacle, that evening scene in the far antiquity of man, when the Boat Builders, come north in search of new fisheries, camped upon the shore of the Restless Sea in the edge of the jungle primeval; but to Nat-ul it presented nothing remarkable. To such scenes she had been accustomed since earliest childhood. Of course, with her people the danger of attack by wild beasts at night was minimized by the fact that her tribe dwelt in caves, the mouths of which could be easily blocked against fourfooted enemies; but she was familiar with the evening fires which burned at the cliff's base while the tribe was gathered to feast or council, and she was used, too, to the sudden charge of some bolder individual amongst the many that always foregathered about the haunts of man at night.
At last the people withdrew to their shelters. Only two girls were left, whose business it was to keep the fires burning brightly. Nat-ul was familiar with this custom and she knew the utilitarian origin of it. Women were the least valuable assets of a tribe. They could best be spared in case of a sudden onslaught by some fierce beast at night—it was the young men, who soon were to become warriors, that must be preserved. The death of a single girl would count for little—her purpose would have been served if the screams of herself and her companion aroused the warriors.
But why not old and useless women instead of young girls? Merely because the instinct of self-preservation is stronger in the young than in the very old. An old woman would have been much less careless of her life than would a young woman, and so might sleep and permit the fires to die out—she would have but a few years or months to live anyway and little or nothing to live for in those primitive days.
The young woman, on the contrary, would watch the fires zealously for her own protection, and so insure the greater safety of the tribe. Thus, perhaps, was born the custom from which sprung the order of holy virgins who tended the eternal fires in the temples that were yet unbuilt in the still undreamed-of Rome.
Presently the entrance to the shelter in which Nat-ul was secured was darkened by the figure of a man—it was Tur. Nat-ul recognized him at once. He came to her side and knelt.
"I have kept the women from you," he said. "Gron would have torn you to pieces, and the others would have helped her. But you need not fear them. Promise me that you will not resist, or attempt to escape, and you shall be freed from your bonds permanently. Otherwise I shall have to tie you up whenever I am away, and then there is no telling what Gron may do, since you will be defenseless and I not here to keep her from you. What do you say?"
"I say that the moment my hands are freed I shall fight until I kill or am killed," replied the girl; "and when my feet are loosed I shall run away as fast as I can."
Tur shrugged his shoulders.
"Very well," he said. "It will profit you nothing, unless you enjoy being always tied in this uncomfortable position."