he foot of the bare hills; and a pang of grief,
for an instant, twitched his massive features. Then he turned his eyes
to the right. Very far off, in a space of open ground by the
brookside, he marked the movement of confused, living masses, of a
dull brown on the green. A closer look convinced him that the
moving masses were men--new hordes of the beast-men, the gaping-nosed
Bow-legs.

"Grom is a true man," he muttered, with satisfaction, and went leaping
like a stag down the slope to rejoin the tribe. When news of what he
had seen was passed from mouth to mouth through the tribe every murmur
was hushed, and the sulkiest laggards pushed on feverishly, as if
dreading a rush of the beast-men from every cleft and glade.

The journey proved, for the most part, uneventful. Traveling in a
compact mass, only by broad day, their numbers and their air of
confidence kept the red bear and the saber-tooth, the black lion and
the wolf-pack, from venturing to molest them. By the Chief's orders
they maintained a noisy chatter, with laughter and shouting, as soon
as they felt themselves safely beyond range of the beast-men's ears.
For Bawr had observed that even the saber-tooth had a certain
uneasiness at the sound of many human voices together. At night--and
it was their rule to make camp while the sun was yet several hours
high--with the aid of their flint spear-heads they would laboriously
cut down the saplings of the long-thorned acacia, and surround the
camp with a barrier which the monsters dared not assail. Even so,
however, the nights were trying enough to the stoutest nerves. Half
the tribe at a time was obliged to stand on guard, and there was
little sleep to refresh the weariest when the shadows beyond the
barriers were alive with mutterings and prowlings, and terrible,
paling, gleaming eyes.

On the fourth day of the journey, however, the tribe met a foe whose
dense brain was quite unimpressed by the menace of the human voice,
and whose rage took no account of their numbers or their confidence.
An enormous bull urus--perhaps the same beast which some days earlier,
had driven Grom and the girl into the tree-tops--burst up, dripping
and mud-streaked from his wallow in a reedy pool, and came charging
upon the travelers with a roar. No doubt an outcast from the herd, he
was mad with the lust of killing. With shouts of warning and shrieks
of fear the tribe scattered in every direction. The nearest warriors
hurled their spea