"Why do you laugh, Gordon King?" asked Fou-tan, looking up suddenly.
"You would not understand, Fou-tan," he said. He had been thinking of what Susan Anne would say could she have knowledge of the situation in which he then was—a situation which he realised was not only improbable but impossible. Here was he, Gordon King, a graduate physician, a perfectly normal product of the twentieth century, sitting almost naked under a big rock with a little slave girl of a race that had disappeared hundreds of years before. That in itself was preposterous. But there was another matter that was even less credible; he realised that he enjoyed the situation, and most of all he enjoyed the company of the little slave girl.
"You are laughing at me, Gordon King," said Fou-tan, "and I do not like to be laughed at."
"I was not laughing at you, Fou-tan," he replied. "I could not laugh at you. I—"
"You what?" she demanded.
"I could not laugh at you," he replied lamely.
"You said that once before, Gordon King," she reminded him. "You started to say something else. What was it?"
For a moment he was silent. "I have forgotten, Fou-tan," he said then.
His eyes were turned away from her as she looked at him keenly in silence for some time. Then a slow smile lighted her face and she broke into a little humming song.
The man upon the opposite cliff withdrew stealthily until he was out of sight of the two in the gorge below him. Then he arose to an erect position and crept softly away into the forest. Ready in his hands were his bow and an arrow. For all his great size and weight he moved without noise, his little eyes shifting constantly from side to side. Suddenly, and so quickly that one could scarcely follow the movements of his hands, an arrow sped from his bow, and an instant later he stepped forward and picked up a large rat that had been transfixed by his missile. The creature moved slowly onward, and presently a little monkey swung through the trees above him. Again the bow-string twanged, and the little monkey hurtled to the ground at the feet of the primitive hunter. Squatting on his haunches the man-thing ate the rat raw; then he carried the monkey back to the edge of the gorge, and after satisfying himself that the two were still there he fell to upon the principal item of his dinner; and he was still eating when darkness came.