It was now two years since the rescue of A-ya from her captivity among the Bow-legs. Her child by Grôm was a straight-limbed, fair-skinned lad of somewhere between four and five years. She sat cross-legged near the sentinel fire, some fifty yards or so from the edge of the thickets, and played with the lad, whose eyes were alight with eager intelligence. Behind her sprawled, playing contentedly with its toes and sucking a banana, a fat brown flat-nosed baby of some fourteen or fifteen months.
Both A-ya and the boy were interested in a new toy. It was, perhaps, the first whip. The boy had succeeded in tying a thin strip of green hide, something over three feet in length, to one end of a stick which was several inches longer. The uses of a whip came to him by unerring insight, and he began applying it to his mother’s shoulders. The novelty of it delighted them both. A-ya, moreover, chuckled slyly at the thought that the procedure might, on some future occasion, be reversed, not without advantage to the cause of discipline.
At last the lithe lash, so enthusiastically wielded, 176 stung too hard for even A-ya, with all her stoicism, to find it amusing. She snatched the toy away and began playing with it herself. The lash, at its free end, chanced to be slit almost to the tip, forming a loop. The butt of the handle was formed by a jagged knot, where it had been broken from the parent stem. Idly but firmly, with her strong hands she bent the stick, and slipped the loop over the jagged knot, where it held.
Interested, but with no hint of comprehension in her bright eyes, she looked upon the first bow––the stupendous product of a child and a woman playing.
The child, displeased at this new, useless thing, and wanting his whip back, tried to snatch the bow from his mother’s hands. But she pushed him off. She liked this new toy. It looked, somehow, as if it invited her to do something with it. Presently she pulled the cord, and let it go again. Tightly strung, it made a pleasant little humming sound. This she repeated many times, holding it up to her ear and laughing with pleasure. The boy grew interested thereupon, and wanted to try the new game for himself. But A-ya was too absorbed. She would not let him touch it. “Go get another stick,” she commanded impatiently; but quite forgot to see her command obeyed.
As she was twanging the strange implement which had so happily fashioned itself under her hands, Grôm came up behind her. He stepped carefully over the sprawling brown baby. He was about to pull her 177 heavy hair affectionately; but his eyes fell upon the thing in her hands, and he checked himself.
For minute after minute he stood there motionless, watching and studying the new toy. His eyes narrowed, his brows drew themselves down broodingly. The thing seemed to him to suggest dim, cloudy, vast possibilities; and he groped in his brain for some hint of the nature of these possibilities. Yet as far as he could see it was good for nothing but to make a faintly pleasant twang for the amusement of women and children. At last he could keep his hands off it no longer. “Give it to me,” said he suddenly, laying hold of A-ya’s wrist.
But A-ya was not yet done with it. She held it away from him, and twanged it with redoubled vigor. Without further argument, and without violence, Grôm reached out a long arm, and found the bow in his grasp. A-ya was surprised that such a trifle should seem of such importance in her lord’s eyes; but her faith was great. She shook the wild mane of hair back from her face, silenced the boy’s importunings with an imperative gesture, and gathered herself with her arms about both knees to watch what Grôm would do with the plaything.
First he examined it minutely, and then he fastened the thong more securely at either end. He twanged it as A-ya had done. He bent it to its limit and eased it slowly back again, studying the new force imprisoned in the changing curve. At last he asked who had made it. 178
“I did,” answered A-ya, very proud of her achievement now that she found it taken so seriously by one being to whom her adventurous spirit really deferred.