At this the fellow growled, but sprang up as if he had been jabbed with a spear, and clambered into the tree as nimbly as a monkey. Grôm followed, quickly but coolly. A-ya, who had waited with her eyes watchfully on Mawg, stepped close to Grôm’s side; and all three swung upwards into the higher branches as the two lions arrived beneath.
Glaring up into the tree with shrewd, malevolent 115 eyes, the great beasts realized that, for the present at least, the tree man-creatures were quite out of reach. Lashing their tufted tails in disappointment, they turned aside to sniff, in surly scorn, at the dead, mountainous hulk of the rhinoceros, which lay with one ponderous foot stuck up in the air as if in clumsy protest at Fate. Comprehending readily the manner of its death, they came back and lay down under the tree, and fell to gnawing lazily at the body of one of the pig-tapirs which the megatherium had torn in two. They had the air of intending to stay some time, so Grôm presently turned his attention to his rescued rival.
Mawg was sitting on the next branch, a good spear’s length distant, and glowering at A-ya’s lithe shapeliness with eyes of savage greed. Grôm knit his brows, and significantly passed an arm about the girl’s shoulders. Mawg shifted his attention to him.
“What do you want of me?” he demanded, in a thick, guttural voice.
“I thought you ran as if you did not want the lions to eat you,” answered Grôm.
Mawg stared with a stupid brutality and incomprehension; and the eyes of the two men, meeting fairly, seemed to lock in a duel of personalities.
They presented a significant contrast. Both, physically, superb specimens of their race––the highest then evolved upon the youthful earth––the elder man, in his ample forehead and calm, reasoning eyes, displayed all the promise of the future; while the youth, 116 low skulled and with his dull but pugnacious eyes set under enormous bony brows, suggested the mere brute from which the race had mounted. His hair was shorter and coarser than Grôm’s, and foully matted; and his neck was set very far forward between his powerful but lumpy shoulders. The color of his coarse and furrowed skin was so dark as to make the weathered tan of Grôm and A-ya look white by contrast.
In no way lacking courage, but failing in will and steadiness, in a dozen seconds Mawg involuntarily shifted his gaze, and looked down at the lions.
“What do you want of me?” he demanded again, as if he had had no answer before.
“The tribe has too few warriors left. I will take you back to the tribe!” replied Grôm with authority.