In the Morning of Time

by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

Before the sun was clear of the horizon, the little party was again upon the march, but now going with the wariness of a sable. They no longer went Indian file, but flitting singly from tree to tree, from covert to covert, Grôm picking up the old trail of the fugitive, the rest of the party keeping him in view and peering ahead for some sign of the unknown Terror. The 209 red woman in her flight had left a sharp trail enough; but in the lapse of three days it had been so obliterated that all Grôm’s wood-craft was needed to decipher it, and his progress was slow. He began to be puzzled at the absence of any other trail, of any footsteps of a mysterious, unknown monster. Such tracks as crossed those of the fugitive, however terrible, were all familiar to his eye.

Suddenly he almost stumbled over a hideous sight. A low whistle brought his followers closing in upon him. The skeleton of a full-grown man lay outstretched in the grass. The bones were fresh––bloodstained and bright––and a swarm of blood-sucking insects arose from them. They were picked minutely clean, except for a portion of the skull, where the long, strong, densely matted hair seemed to have served as an effective armor. The bones were not pulled about, or crushed for their marrow, as they would have been if the victim had been the prey of any of the great carnivorous beasts. And there were no tracks about it save those of a few small rat-like creatures. It was clear that the Mystery, whatever it might be, had wings.

“A bird!” whispered A-ya, with a gleam of triumph in her eyes, at the same time glancing up into the tree-tops apprehensively. But Grôm did not think so. There were no marks of mighty claws on the turf around the skeleton.

Grôm cast about him an eager but anxious eye. The country was not densely wooded at this point, 210 but studded with low thickets, and set here and there with scattered trees. From a little way ahead came a gleam of calm water through the greenery. It was a scene of peace, and security, and summer loveliness. Its very beauty seemed to Grôm an added menace, as if some peculiar treachery must lurk behind it.

In the center of an open glade, not far from the skeleton, Grôm set his party to building a circle of fires, as likely to afford the surest kind of a refuge. A supply of fuel having been gathered, he directed A-ya and Mô to remain and tend the fires and not to leave the circle unless he should summon them. Loob, the cunning scout, he sent off to the left through the underbrush. He himself followed the trail of the fugitive––now doubled by that of the other fugitive whose skeleton lay there in the sun––down toward that gleam of water through the trees. A-ya gazed after him anxiously as he vanished, half minded to dare his displeasure and follow him.

Grôm was presently able to make out that the water was a wide, reedy lake or the arm of a shallow river. There was no wind, and the surface shone like clear glass. But once and again his eyes were dazzled by a dart of intense radiance, a great flash of rose or violet or blue-green flame, shooting over the surface of the water. A memory of what A-ya had professed to gather from the stranger woman rushed into his mind. Perhaps the Destroying Thing was like a bird, and nevertheless, at the same time, something like fire. He felt himself confronted by a 211 mystery which made even his tried nerves creep; and he hid himself in the densest undergrowth as he stole forward toward the water. He had forgotten, and forsaken, the trail he was following, in his haste to solve the problem of those darting splendors.

A few moments more and he gained the edge of an open glade which led straight to the water. He paused behind the screening leaves. Out over the water a bar of ruby light, surrounded by a globe of rose-pink mist, shot by and vanished from his narrow field of vision. He was just about to thrust out his head and crane his neck to follow the gorgeous apparition, when a peculiar dry rustling in the air above checked him. He glanced up cautiously, and saw hovering, not more than twenty or thirty yards away, a beautiful and dreadful being.

In shape it was exactly like a dragon-fly; but the length of its flaming violet body was greater than that of Grôm’s longest arrow. The spread of its two pairs of transparent, crystal-shining, colorless wings was even greater than the length of its body. Its enormous eyes, wells of purple fire which took up the whole of the top and sides of its monstrous head, seemed to see everywhere at once; and Grôm shivered with the feeling that they had spied him out and were peering into his very soul.

The awful eyes may have seen him, indeed; but at that moment they spied out something else which apparently concerned them more. With a pounce like a flash of violet lightning––and, indeed, almost as 212 swift––the bright shape swooped to the grass. The four shining wings waved there for a moment, and there seemed to be a mild struggle. Then the giant fly rose again, lightly, into the air, holding in the clutch of its six slender, jointed legs the body of one of those black, rat-like animals which Grôm knew so well as infesting the grass of all meadows near the water. The captor flew to a naked branch near the waterside, alighted upon it, and proceeded to make its meal, holding up the body between the end joints of its front pair of legs and turning it over and over deftly while its appalling jaws both crushed and mangled it. The process was amazingly swift. In the space of a couple of minutes all the blood, flesh, and soft material of the rat were squeezed out and sucked down. The remnants were rolled into a hard little ball, perfectly spherical, and scornfully tossed aside. And the monster, leaping into the air with a rustle of its glittering wings, flashed off over the water.

Almost in the same moment an amazingly loud rustle, like the sweep of a fierce gust of rain upon a rank of palmetto leaves, filled the air above the glade, and Grôm, looking up with a start, saw a great shoal of the radiant shapes storm by, as if with the rainbow entangled in their wings. He wondered upon what foray they were bent; and now for the first time he realized, with a creeping of the flesh, what it was that had overtaken the man whose skeleton he had found in the grass. The shoal swept out over the lake a little way, and then down the shore toward the 213 left; and Grôm drew a long breath as he assured himself that their course was taking them far from the fires of A-ya and Mô.