But not without reason was the Black Chief dictator of the Bow-legs. Brutal and filthy though he was, and hideous beyond description, and horrible with his gashed face and the blood pouring down over his huge and shaggy chest, he was all a man, and the mastery in him checked her. She felt the hopelessness of fighting her fate. The flame flickered out, leaving her eyes dull and leaden. She rose listlessly, and followed her new lord to the tree in which he had his dwelling of woven branches.
At the foot of the tree the Black Chief stopped, stood back, and signed the girl to ascend. A climber as expert as himself, she clutched the rough trunk with accustomed hands. Then she hesitated, and shut her eyes. Should she obey, yielding to her fate? Mawg, her late captor, she had hated with a murderous hate; yet she had submitted to him, in a dim way biding 155 her time for vengeance. He was of her own race; and it was in her mind, her spirit––though she herself could not so analyze the emotion––that she hated him. But this new master was an alien, and of a lower, beastlier type. Toward him she felt a sick bodily repulsion. Behind her tight-shut lids the dark went red. She stood rigid and quivering, stormed through by a raging impulse to tear out either his throat or her own. She was herself a more advanced product of her own advanced race, and urged by impulses still new and imperfectly applied to life. But the countless centuries of submission were in her blood also; and they whispered to her insidiously that she was lawful prey. A huge hand fell significantly upon the back of her neck. She jumped, gave a sobbing cry, and sprang up into the tree. Who was she to challenge doom for an idea, a hundred thousand years before her time.
Some days’ journey to the westward of the swampy refuge of the Bow-legs, a tall hunter was making his way warily through the forest. His color, his build, and his swift grace of movement proclaimed him of the same race as Mawg and the girl A-ya, acquitting him easily of any kinship with the People of the Trees. In height and weight he was much like Mawg, but lighter in complexion, somewhat less hairy, and of a frank, sagacious countenance. His eyes were of a blue-gray, calm and piercing, yet with a look in them as of one who broods on mysteries. He was obviously 156 much older than Mawg, his long, thick hair and short, close-curling beard being liberally touched with gray. He carried in one hand a peculiar long-handled club, which he had fashioned by lashing, with strips of green hide, a split and jagged flint-stone into the cleft head of a stick. In the other hand he bore two long, slender spears, their tips hardened and pointed in fire.
On the day, now many weeks back, when Grôm set out from the Caves behind the Fire to seek for A-ya in the far-off country of the Bow-legs, he had carried also two hollow tubes of green bark, with the seeds of fire, kept smouldering in a bed of punk, hidden in the hearts of them. But the need of stopping frequently to build a fire and renew the vitality of the secret spark had soon exasperated his impatient spirit. Intolerant of the hindrance, and confident in his own strength and craft, he had thrown the fire-tubes away and fallen back upon the weapons which had sufficed him before his discovery and conquest of the Shining One.
Engrossed in his purpose, thinking only of regaining possession of the girl, the mother of his man-child, he shunned all contest with the great beasts which crossed his path, and fled without shame from those which undertook to hunt him.
He would risk no doubtful battle. He satisfied his hunger on wild honey, and the ripe fruits and tubers with which the forest abounded at this season. At night he made his nest, of hurriedly woven branches, in the highest swaying of the tree-tops, where not even 157 the leopard, cunning climber though she was, could come at him without giving timely warning. And so, doggedly and swiftly making his way due east, he came at length to the fringes of that vast region of swampy meres and fruitful, rankly wooded islets which was occupied by the Bow-legs.
Here he had need of all that wood-craft which had so often enabled him to stalk even the wary antelope. The light color of his skin being a betrayal, he rubbed himself with clayey ooze till he was of the same hue as the Bow-legs. Crawling through the undergrowth at dusk as soundlessly as a snake, or swinging along smoothly through the branches like a gray ape in the first confusing glimmer of the dawn, he made short incursions among the outlying colonies, but could find no sign of the girl, or Mawg, in whose hands he imagined her still to be. But working warily around the outskirts of the tribe, to northward, he came at last upon the stale but unmistakable trail of a flight and a pursuit. This he followed up till the pursuit came stragglingly to an end, and the trail of the fugitive stood out alone and distinct. One clear footprint in the wet earth revealed itself clearly as Mawg’s––for there was no such thing as confounding that arched and moulded imprint with those left by the apish men. Feverishly the hunter cast about for another trail, smaller and slimmer. Forward he searched for it, and then back among the trampings of the pursuers. But in vain. Clearly Mawg had been the sole fugitive.
Grôm sat down in sudden despair. If Mawg, who 158 at least was no coward, had fled alone, then surely the girl was dead. Grôm’s club and his spears dropped from his nerveless hands. His interest in life sank into a sick indifference, a dull anguish which he did not even try to understand. It was well for him that no prowling beast came by in that moment of his unseeing weakness. Then a new thought came to him, and his despair flamed into rage. He leapt to his feet, clutching at his shaggy beard. The girl had been seized, without doubt, by the great Black Chief. The thought of this defilement to his woman, the mother of his man-child, drove him quite mad for the moment. Snatching up his weapons, he roared with anguish, and ran blindly forward along the trampled trail, ready to hurl himself upon the whole loathsome tribe. A gigantic leopard, crouching in a thicket of scarlet poinsettia beside the trail, made as if to pounce upon him as he went by––but shrank back, instead, with flattened ears, daunted by his fury.
But presently the madness burned itself out. As sanity returned he checked his rush, glanced once more watchfully about him, and at length stepped furtively into the thick of the jungle. Now more than ever was his coolest craft demanded, that A-ya might be plucked from the monster’s arms.