He did know though that the nights were very cold and that the days were not the tropical days the old and weazened hairy men told about and as he lay there prone on the warm earth struggling with this new found power of reason, he wondered after all whether the Fire Demon was the fearsome thing the hairy people believed it to be. Here was good that it gave him: the good of warm food, warm air, warm ground to put his back against—yet, and he realized it with a shudder, here were these hundreds of dead horses on which he and the wolf-dog cubs had feasted, mute testimony of the wrath of the Fire Demon. Why was it that one who possessed so much good could be so fearful? Why was it—but here the problem became too perplexing for even the hairy boy and, being full of stomach and warm of body, he fell asleep, probably the first human being to sleep prone and lying on his back.
And as he slept the wolf cubs, seeing strange shapes in the swirling steam clouds, and hearing strange guttural sounds as of huge animals eating, searched him out and crept closer to him. They were frightened at these menacing apparitions, and being motherless they looked to the hairy boy for protection, for somehow they felt that it was his presence that had kept them safe from harm up there on the hillside under the cliff.
CHAPTER III
THE CRACK IN THE EARTH
It seemed strange to the hairy boy that he should awaken with the same thoughts in his brain that he had gone to sleep with. Why did they persist? He could not understand, yet his brain still turned over the problem of why the Fire Demon, who could give so much that was good, could also destroy hundreds of horses, the fleetest and wariest of the animals he knew. He could not answer the question but as he pondered it he began to understand that if all the good of warmth could be had from the Fire Demon perhaps it would be possible to make friends with him and not fall a victim to his wrath. The hairy boy did not know just how this could be done but his interest was stirred beyond anything heretofore.
He got up, and although still bloated with food, he could not resist tearing off a strip or two more of the roasted horse, then munching on one of these he began wandering through the swirling steam, the wolf cubs following him.
Presently he found himself walking through a layer of black ash that was still warm and felt very comfortable to his feet. He knew as he recalled the valley before the eruption that this had been a huge forest. The heat from the hot lava lake somewhere down there in the bottom of the valley had fired this and burned it to cinders. Only an occasional rampike, charred and gaunt and weird looking in the blowing steam, told of the forest that grew there before. The hairy boy looked at these mute monuments to the wrath of the Fire Demon with a mingled feeling of awe and wonder. To see these tree giants charred and blackened, their twisted limbs shorn from them and scattered half burned on the ground, revived to a certain extent the fear that he had had. He stood and stared at the charred mass a long time before going on, and then not until he had broken himself a stout knotted club from one of the fire hardened rampikes, as if to provide himself with some sort of a weapon with which to face the mysterious danger of the Fire Demon.
Yet, despite his fear and trepidation, the hairy boy was enough a master of his will power to force himself into exploring the valley further. Deeper he pushed his way through the misty, swirling steam, realizing the while that the air and the earth were growing hotter. From this he understood that he was approaching what had appeared to him from the hilltop to be a red hot lake where the lava had gathered in the valley bottom.
The steam grew thicker and hotter and ahead of him and on either hand he heard peculiar hissing noises, that agitated him a great deal, for he could not know that it was the hot lava cooling off by its contact with the cold and moist earth. He went on but he went with great stealth and caution, always peering through the steam with club raised as if expecting at any moment to come face to face with the Demon that made the fire.