came a fatalistic courage--a courage he had not
dreamed he possessed. With icy calmness he closed the fingers of his
right hand tightly about the shaft of his spear and brought it up level
with his shoulder, point foremost, ready for a cast when the great beast
should charge.

Slowly Sadu crouched for the spring, his giant head flattened almost to
the ground, massive hindquarters drawn beneath him like powerful
springs, his long tail extended and quivering.

Voicing a thunderous roar, Sadu sprang.

* * * * *

Racing across the plains and through the jungles of a savage world,
moving with unflagging swiftness by night and by day, came Tharn, mighty
warrior of an era already old twenty thousand years before the founding
of Rome--an era which witnessed the arrival to recognizable prehistory
of the first _true man_.

Somewhere to the south of this Cro-Magnon fighting man, separated by
endless vistas of primeval forest, grass-filled plains and towering
mountain ranges, were the girl he loved and the men who had taken her.

Still fresh in Tharn's memory were the events of the past few weeks: the
battles in Sephar's arena; the bloody revolt engineered by Tharn and his
friends; the arrival of his father and fifty warriors of his tribe; the
ascension of his close friend, Katon, to the kingship of Sephar; the
finding of his own mother, long given up for dead after disappearing
from the tribal caves ten summers before; the stunning shock upon
learning that Jotan had taken Dylara with him when he and his party of
fellow Ammadians began their journey back to far-off Ammad, mother
country of a civilization and culture far in advance of the Cro-Magnon
cave dwellers.[1]

[1] "Warrior of the Dawn", December, 1942-January, 1943, _Amazing
Stories_.--Ed.

The thrust of a knife from the cowardly and treacherous hand of Sephar's
high priest had come near to costing Tharn his life on the eve of his
departure in quest of Dylara. As it was, an entire moon passed before
the caveman was able to leave his bed.

Pryak, the high priest, had died horribly in payment of his treachery;
but Tharn suffered a thousand deaths from enforced idleness while the
girl he loved was being carried farther and farther from the one person
who possessed the ability to effect her rescue.

And then, over a moon ago, Tharn bade farewell to his mother and to the
father whose name he bore, and plunged into the heart of the unfam