rn
thickets. "Uya," she screamed, "there goes thine enemy! There goes thine
enemy, Uya! Why do you devour us nightly? We have tried to snare him!
There goes thine enemy, Uya!"

But the lion who preyed upon the tribe was taking his siesta. The cry
went unheard. That day he had dined on one of the plumper girls, and his
mood was a comfortable placidity. He really did not understand that he
was Uya or that Ugh-lomi was his enemy.

So it was that Ugh-lomi rode the horse, and heard first of Uya the lion,
who had taken the place of Uya the Master, and was eating up the tribe.
And as he hurried back to the gorge his mind was no longer full of the
horse, but of the thought that Uya was still alive, to slay or be slain.
Over and over again he saw the shrunken band of women and children
crying that Uya was a lion. Uya was a lion!

And presently, fearing the twilight might come upon him, Ugh-lomi began
running.

IV--UYA THE LION

The old lion was in luck. The tribe had a certain pride in their ruler,
but that was all the satisfaction they got out of it. He came the very
night that Ugh-lomi killed Uya the Cunning, and so it was they named him
Uya. It was the old woman, the fire-minder, who first named him Uya. A
shower had lowered the fires to a glow, and made the night dark. And as
they conversed together, and peered at one another in the darkness, and
wondered fearfully what Uya would do to them in their dreams now that he
was dead, they heard the mounting reverberations of the lion's roar
close at hand. Then everything was still.

They held their breath, so that almost the only sounds were the patter
of the rain and the hiss of the raindrops in the ashes. And then, after
an interminable time, a crash, and a shriek of fear, and a growling.
They sprang to their feet, shouting, screaming, running this way and
that, but brands would not burn, and in a minute the victim was being
dragged away through the ferns. It was Irk, the brother of Wau.

So the lion came.

The ferns were still wet from the rain the next night, and he came and
took Click with the red hair. That sufficed for two nights. And then in
the dark between the moons he came three nights, night after night, and
that though they had good fires. He was an old lion with stumpy teeth,
but very silent and very cool; he knew of fires before; these were not
the first of mankind that had ministered to his old age. The third night
he came between the outer fire and the