carried. He tried to leap aside from the path of the charging beast, but it was too close. It rose upon its hind feet and struck at his head with a taloned fore paw, felling him, unconscious, to the ground.
IX – THE CHARNEL CAVES
VON HORST experienced a sensation of peace and well being. He was vaguely aware that he was awakening from a long and refreshing sleep. He did not open his eyes. He was so comfortable that there seemed no reason to do so, but rather to court a continuance of the carefree bliss he was enjoying.
This passive rapture was rudely interrupted by a growing realization that his head ached. With returning consciousness his nervous system awoke to the fact that he was far from comfortable. The sensation of peace and well being faded as the dream it was. He opened his eyes and looked up into the face of La-ja, bending solicitously close above his own. His head was pillowed in her lap. She was stroking his forehead with a soft palm.
'You are all right, Von?' she whispered. 'You will not die?'
He smiled up at her, wryly. ''O Death! Where is thy sting?'' he apostrophized.
'It didn't sting you,' La-ja assured him; 'it hit you with its paw.'
Von Horst grinned. 'My head feels as though it had hit me with a sledge hammer. Where is it? What became of it?' He turned his head painfully to one side and saw the dinosaur lying motionless near them.
'It died just as it struck you,' explained the girl. 'You are a very brave man, Von.'
'You are a very brave girl,' he retorted. 'I saw you running in to help me. You should not have done that.'
'Could I have stood and watched you being killed when you had deliberately drawn the charge of the zarith upon yourself to save me?'
'So that is a zarith?'
'Yes, a baby zarith,' replied the girl. 'It is well for us that it was not a full-grown one, but of course one would never meet a full-grown zarith in a forest.'
'No? Why not?'
'For one reason they are too big; and, then, they couldn't find any food here. A full-grown zarith is eight times as long as a man is tall. It couldn't move around easily among all these trees; and when it stood up on its hind feet, it'd bump its head on the branches. They kill thags and tandors and other large game that seldom enters the forests—at least not forests like this one.'
Von Horst whistled softly to himself as he tried to visualize a reptile nearly fifty feet in length that fed on the great Bos, the progenitors of modern cattle, and upon the giant mammoth. 'Yes,' he soliloquized, 'I imagine it's just as well that we ran into Junior instead of Papa. But, say, La-ja, what became of that man-thing the zarith was chasing?'
'He never stopped running. I saw him looking back after you made the loud noise with that thing you call peestol, but he did not stop. He should have come back to help you, I think; though he must have thought that you were sick in the head not to run. It takes a very brave man not to run from a zarith.'
'There wasn't any place to run. If there had been, I'd still be running.'
'I do not believe that,' said La-ja. 'Gaz would have run, but not you.'
'You like me a little better, La-ja?' he asked. He was starved for friendship—for even the friendship of this savage little girl of the stone age.
'No,' said La-ja, emphatically. 'I do not like you at all, but I know a brave man when I see one.'
'Why don't you like me, La-ja?' he asked a little wistfully. 'I like you. I like you—a lot.' He hesitated. How much did he like her?
'I don't like you because you are sick in the head, for one thing; for another, you are not of my tribe; furthermore, you try to order me around as though I belonged to you.'
'I'm sure sick in the head now,' he admitted; 'but that doesn't affect my good disposition or my other sterling qualities, and I can't help not being a member of your tribe. You can't hold that against me. It was just a mistake on the part of my father and mother in not having been born in Pellucidar; and really you can't blame them for that, especially when you consider that they never even heard of the place. And, La-ja, as for ordering you around; I never do it except for your own good.'
'And I don't like the way you talk sometimes, with a silent laugh behind your words. I know that you are laughing at me—making fun of me because you think that the world you came from is so much better than Pellucidar—that its people have more brains.'
'Don't you think that you will ever learn to like me?' he asked, quite solemn now.
'No,' she said; 'you will be dead before I could have time.'
'Gaz, I suppose, will attend to that?' he inquired.
'Gaz, or some other of my people. Do you think you could stand now?'
'I am very comfortable,' he said. 'I have never had such a nice pillow.'
She took his head, quite gently, and laid it on the ground; then she stood up. 'You are always laughing at me with words,' she said.
He rose to his feet. 'With you, La-ja; never at you.' he said.
She looked at him steadily as though meditating his words. She was attempting, he was sure, to conjure some uncomplimentary double meaning from them; but she made no comment.
'Do you think you can walk?' was all that she said.
'I don't feel much like dancing even a saraband,' he replied, 'but I think I can walk all right. Come on, lead the way to Lo-har and the lightsome Gaz.'
They resumed their journey deeper into the gloomy wood, speaking seldom as they toiled up the steep ascents that constantly confronted them. At length they came to a sheer cliff that definitely blocked their further progress in a straight line. La-ja turned to the left and followed along its foot. As she did not hesitate or seem in the slightest doubt, von Horst asked her why she turned to the left instead of to the right. 'Do you know the shortest way when you cannot go in a straight line?' he asked.
'No,' she admitted; 'but when one does not know and cannot follow one's head, then one should always turn to the left and follow one's heart.'
He nodded, comprehendingly. 'Not a bad idea,' he said. 'At least it saves one from useless speculation.' He glanced up the face of the cliff, casually measuring its height with his eyes. He saw the same great trees of the forest growing close to the edge, indicating that the forest continued on beyond; and he saw something else—just a fleeting glimpse of something moving, but he was sure that he recognized it. 'We are being watched,' he said.
La-ja glanced up. 'You saw something?' she asked.
He nodded. 'It looked like our white-haired friend, or another just like him.'
'He was not our friend,' remonstrated the literal La-ja.
'I was laughing with words, as you say,' he explained.
'I wish that I liked you,' said La-ja.
He looked at her in surprise. 'I wish that you did, but why do you wish it?'
'I would like to like a man who can laugh in the face of danger,' she replied.
'Well, please try; but do you really think that fellow is dangerous? He didn't look very dangerous when we saw him presenting the freedom of the forest to the zarith.'
She knit her brows and looked at him with a puzzled expression. 'Sometimes you seem quite like other people,' she said; 'and then you say something, and I realize that your head is very sick.'
Von Horst laughed aloud. 'I opine that the twentieth-century brand of humor doesn't go so well in the Pleistocene.'
'There you go again!' she snapped. 'Even my father, who is very wise, would not know what you were talking about half the time.'
As they moved along the foot of the cliff, they kept constantly alert for any further sign that they were being watched or followed.
'What makes you think that this white-haired man is dangerous?' he asked.
'He alone might not be dangerous to us: but where there is one there must be a tribe, and any tribe of
