The wonder stick

by Stanton A. Coblentz

It was with difficulty that she crowded her way onto the narrow terrace that fronted the cave, for dozens had preceded her, gaping speechlessly at the scene beneath. And how amazingly that scene had changed! Where yesterday there had been thick clusters of bushes and long stretches of woods, there was now a blackened waste, with here and there a pile of brush feebly smoking, here and there the charred and dismantled trunk of a tree standing as a lonely sign-post of ruin. Down-stream, as far as one could see, there was only desolation and ashes; up-stream, however, a chance turn in the wind had spared the woods—and the contrast between the still green expanses and the flame-swept desert was ghastly beyond all words.

But the destruction of the forest was not what disturbed the watching people. That which alarmed them was that the fire had not rid them of their foe. Many of the beast-men must have been slain, for did not every returned warrior boast of killing his scores? Yet, to judge from the throng that collected by the river bank, one would have thought that the dead had all come to life again. Swarming up-stream from the devastated areas to the fringe of the remaining woods, the beast-men had made camp serenely beneath the very eyes of their rivals, although well beyond range of stones.

It was a doleful tale that Yonyo brought Ru on the following morning. "The beast-men will not go away," she reported. "We pray and pray to the fire-god and the gods of the woods, but our foes will not go away. And so none of us can leave the cave now, for fear of the beast-men's clubs. We cannot go down to fight them any more, for many of our men have been lost, and the bad spirits have hurt the others so that they cannot swing a club. And so what shall we do, Ru? What shall we do? Our meat gets less and less, and we cannot go out to hunt for more. Soon there will be none left, and no berries any more, nor even any roots or nuts; and the women will cry out, and the men will grumble and complain, and the babes will die. Soon, soon after that, we shall all die!"

"No! We will not die!" denied Ru, fiercely. "We will not die! The cave-god will not let us!"

Then, snatching several slender shafts of wood from the ground, he thrust them before her eyes. "See, Yonyo! See! Our enemies will be the ones that die! These sticks will kill a man!"

Yonyo, astonished, observed that the sticks were tipped with little pointed bits of flint.

"How did you do that, Ru?" she gasped.

"At first I did not know how," explained Ru. "I tried to make the flint stay on the stick, but it would not stay. Then I split one of the sticks at the end without meaning to; and I found that I could push the rock in, and keep it there. And so I have split the other sticks with my cleaver, and filled them all with flint. If one of them strikes a man, it will be mightier than Grumgra's club."

"But can you make them hit hard enough?" inquired Yonyo.

"They can hit very hard." And Ru, picking up his bow, sent the arrow with a sharp thud against the cave wall.