It was as though he had been suddenly snatched back through countless ages to a long-dead past and dropped into the midst of the prehistoric life of his paleolithic progenitors.
Upon the narrow ledges before their caves, women, with long, flowing hair, ground food in rude stone mortars.
Naked children played about them, perilously close to the precipitous cliff edge.
Hairy men squatted, gorillalike, before pieces of flat stone, upon which green hides were stretched, while they scraped, scraped, scraped with the sharp edge of smaller bits of stone.
There was no laughter and no song.
Occasionally Waldo saw one of the fierce creatures address another, and sometimes one would raise his thick lips in a nasty snarl that exposed his fighting fangs; but they were too far away for their words to reach the young man.
V
Awakening
“Come,” said the girl, “let us make haste. I cannot wait to be home again! How good it looks!”
Waldo gazed at her in horror. It did not seem credible that this beautiful young creature could be of such clay as that he looked upon. It was revolting to believe that she had sprung from the loins of one of those half-brutes, or that a woman as fierce, repulsive, such as those he saw before him, could have borne her. It made him sick with disgust.
He turned from her.
“Go to your people, Nadara,” he said, for an idea had come to him.
He had evolved a scheme for escaping a meeting with Flatfoot and Korth, and the sudden disgust which he felt for the girl made it easier for him to carry out his design.
“Are you not coming with me?” she cried.
“Not at once,” replied Waldo, quite truthfully. “I wish you to go first. Were we to go together they might harm you when they rushed out to attack me.”
The girl had no fear of this, but she felt that it was very thoughtful of the man to consider her welfare so tenderly. To humor him, she acceded to his request.
“As you wish, Thandar,” she answered, smiling.
Thandar was a name of her own choosing, after, Waldo had informed her in answer to a request for his name, that she might call him Mr. Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones. “I shall call you Thandar,” she had replied; “it is shorter, more easily remembered, and describes you. It means the Brave One.” And so Thandar he had become.
The girl had scarcely emerged from the forest on her way toward the cliffs when Thandar the Brave One, turned and ran at top speed in the opposite direction. When he came to the river he gave immediate evidence of the strides he had taken in woodcraft during the brief weeks that he had been under the girl’s tutorage, for he plunged immediately into the water, setting out upstream upon the gravelly bottom where he would leave no spoor to be tracked down by the eagle eyes of these primitive men.
He supposed that the girl would search for him; but he felt no compunction at having deserted her so scurvily. Of course, he had no suspicion of her real sentiments toward him—it would have shocked him to have imagined that a lowborn person, such as she, had become infatuated with him.
It would have been embarrassing and unfortunate, but, of course, quite impossible—since Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones could never form an alliance beneath him. As for the girl herself, he might as readily have considered the possibility of marrying a cow, so far from any such thoughts of her had he been.
On and on he stumbled through the cold water. Sometimes it was above his head, but Waldo had learned to swim—the girl had made him, partly by pleas, but largely by the fear that she would ridicule him.
As night came on he commenced to become afraid, but his fear now was not such a horribly prostrating thing as it had been a few weeks before. Without being aware of the fact, Waldo had grown a trifle less timid, though he was still far from lion-like.
That night he slept in the crotch of a tree. He selected a small one, which, though less comfortable, was safer from the approach of Nagoola than a larger tree would have been. This also had he learned from Nadara.
Had he paused to consider, he would have discovered that all he knew that was worth while he had had from the savage little girl whom he, from the high pinnacle of his erudition, regarded with such pity. But Waldo had not as yet learned enough to realize how very little he knew.
In the morning he continued his flight, gathering his breakfast from tree and shrub as he fled. Here again was he wholly indebted to Nadara, for without her training he would have been restricted to a couple of fruits, whereas now he had a great variety of fruits, roots, berries, and nuts to choose from in safety.
The stream that he had been following had now become a narrow, rushing, mountain torrent. It leaped suddenly over little precipices in wild and picturesque waterfalls; it rioted in foaming cascades; and ever it led Waldo farther into high and rugged country.
The climbing was difficult and oftentimes dangerous. Waldo was surprised at the steeps he negotiated—perilous ascents from which he would have shrunk in palsied fear a few weeks earlier. Waldo was coming on.
Another fact which struck him with amazement at the same time that it filled him with rejoicing, was that he no longer coughed. It was quite beyond belief, too, since never in his life had he been so exposed to cold and wet and discomfort.
At home, he realized, he would long since have curled up and died had he been subjected to one-tenth the exposure that he had undergone since the great wave had lifted him bodily from the deck of the steamer to land him unceremoniously in the midst of this new life of hardships and terrors.
Toward noon Waldo began to
