He had seen Nadara as he had battled with Thandar, and recognized her as the girl he had desired a year before—the girl whom this stranger had robbed him of.
Now he was determined to wreak vengeance on the man and at the same time recapture the girl.
Thandar and Nadara turned back into the jungle where but a single enemy could attack them at a time in the narrow trails. Here they managed to elude pursuit for several hours, coming again into the forest nearly a mile below the beach where the Priscilla had lain at anchor.
Thurg and his fellows had apparently given up the chase—they had neither seen nor heard aught of them for some time. Now the two hastened back through the wood to reach a point on the shore opposite the yacht.
At last they came in sight of the harbor. Thandar halted. A look of horror and disappointment supplanted the expression of pleasurable anticipation that had lighted his countenance—the yacht was not there.
A mile out they discerned her, steaming rapidly north.
Thandar ran to the beach. He tore the black panther’s hide from his shoulders, waving it frantically above his head, the while he shouted in futile endeavor to attract attention from the dwindling craft.
Then, quite suddenly, he collapsed upon the beach, burying his face in his hands.
Presently Nadara crept close to his side. Her soft arms encircled his shoulders as she drew his cheek close to hers in an attempt to comfort him.
“Is it so terrible,” she asked, “to be left here alone with your Nadara?”
“It is not that,” he answered. “If you were mine I should not care so much, but you cannot be mine until we have reached civilization and you have been made mine in accordance with the laws and customs of civilized men. And now who knows when another ship may come—if ever another will come?”
“But I am yours, Thandar,” insisted the girl. “You are my man—you have told me that you love me, and I have replied that I would be your mate—who can give us to each other better than we can give ourselves?”
He tried, as best he could, to explain to her the marriage customs and ceremonies of his own world, but she found it difficult to understand how it might be that a stranger whom neither might possibly ever have seen before could make it right for her to love her Thandar, or that it should be wrong for her to love him without the stranger’s permission.
To Thandar the future looked most black and hopeless. With his sudden determination to take Nadara back to his own people he had been overwhelmed with a mad yearning for home.
He realized that his past apathy to the idea of returning to Boston had been due solely to recollection of Boston as he had known it—Boston without Nadara; but now that she was to have gone back with him Boston seemed the most desirable spot in the world.
As he sat pondering the unfortunate happenings that had so delayed them that the yacht had sailed before they reached the shore, he also cast about for some plan to mitigate their disappointment.
To live forever upon this savage island did not seem such an appalling thing as it had a year before—but then he had not realized his love for the wild young creature at his side. Ah, if she could but be made his wife then his exile here would be a happy rather than a doleful lot.
What if he had been born here too? With the thought came a new idea that seemed to offer an avenue from his dilemma. Had he, too, been native born how would he have wed Nadara?
Why through the ceremony of their own people, of course. And if men and women were thus wed here, living together in faithfulness throughout their lives, what more sacred a union could civilization offer?
He sprang to his feet.
“Come, Nadara!” he cried. “We shall return to your people, and there you shall become my wife.”
Nadara was puzzled, but she made no comment; content simply to leave the future to her lord and master; to do whatever would bring Thandar the greatest happiness.
The return to the dwellings of Nadara’s people occupied three never-to-be-forgotten days.
How different this journey by comparison with that of a year since, when the cave girl had been leading the terror-stricken Waldo Emerson in flight from the bad men toward, to him, an equally horrible fate at the hands of Korth and Flatfoot!
Then the forest glades echoed to the pads of fierce beasts and the stealthy passage of naked, human horrors. No twig snapped that did not portend instant and terrifying death.
Now Korth and Flatfoot were dead at the hands of the metamorphosed Waldo. The racking cough was gone. He had encountered the bad men and others like them and come away with honors. Even Nagoola, the sleek, black devil-cat of the hideous nights, no longer sent the slightest tremor through the rehabilitated nerves.
Did not Thandar wear Nagoola’s pelt about his shoulder and loins—a pelt that he had taken in hand to hand encounter with the dread beast?
Slowly they walked beneath the shade of giant trees, beside pleasant streams, or, again, across open valleys where the grass grew knee high and countless, perfumed wild flowers opened a pathway before their naked feet.
At night they slept where night found them. Sometimes in the deserted lair of a wild beast, or again perched among the branches of a spreading tree where parallel branches permitted the construction of rude platforms.
And Thandar was always most solicitous to see that Nadara’s couch was of the softest grasses and that his own lay at a little distance from hers and in a position where he might best protect her from prowling beasts.
Again was Nadara puzzled, but still she made no comment.
Finally they came to her village.
Several of the younger men came forth to meet them; but
