h vine she scraped against was pictured in her mind as the
sinuous coils of Sleeza, the snake; each fluttering of a disturbed bird
was an aroused panther or leopard.

She was not going on this way much farther; her nerves, steady as they
were, could not take much of such suspense. Only deep enough into the
jungle to keep the inexperienced Ammadians from following her trail;
with the coming of Dyta, the sun, she would locate a game trail pointing
in the direction she wished to go, then descend to the ground and follow
it.

An hour later her trembling limbs refused to continue this inch-by-inch
progress. And so Dylara made her way toward the high flung branches of a
forest patriarch to where Jalok, the panther, and Tarlok, the leopard,
dare not go. Here the foliage was less compact and Uda's pale beams
displayed to her rapt eyes an endless sea of tree tops everywhere about
her.

Finding a comfortable fork fully a hundred feet above the jungle floor,
Dylara composed herself to wait the coming of dawn. Finally she drifted
off to sleep, while far below a lion roared that he had made his kill
and filled his belly for the night.

And not long after, a jungle dweller, swinging swiftly through the
trees, came to a sudden halt on a swaying branch as a vagrant breeze
brought the scent of her to its quivering nostrils. For a full minute it
remained motionless as if carved from stone, then it turned sharply
aside and went on, fairly flying along the dizzy pathway of swaying
boughs, following that scent spoor to its source.

* * * * *

While Tharn was puzzling over the strange disappearance of Trakor, his
keen ears caught a sudden yell of surprise from the direction of
Gerdak's caves, followed by a chorus of exultant exclamations that told
him the Cro-Magnards had flushed some sort of game and had succeeded in
bringing it down.

Quickly he lowered his captive to a broad branch, stuffed a handful of
leaves into its mouth, bound them there with a short length of vine,
then lashed the wrists to the tree bole. This done he was on the point
of swinging off to investigate what lay behind those sounds when he
caught a glimpse of a familiar object swinging from a neighboring
branch.

His blackwood bow and quiver of arrows left earlier with Trakor! With
them in their accustomed places along his back and shoulder, Tharn swung
the short distance between tree and clearing. From a wide branch he
gazed dow