of bewilderment
changing swiftly into hate.

"Up!" shouted Grom again. "The tree. They're coming!"

At this the fellow growled, but sprang up as if he had been jabbed
with a spear, and clambered into the tree as nimbly as a monkey. Grom
followed, quickly but coolly. A-ya, who had waited with her eyes
watchfully on Mawg, stepped close to Grom's side; and all three swung
upwards into the higher branches as the two lions arrived beneath.

Glaring up into the tree with shrewd, malevolent eyes, the great
beasts realized that, for the present at least, the tree man-creatures
were quite out of reach. Lashing their tufted tails in disappointment,
they turned aside to sniff, in surly scorn, at the dead, mountainous
hulk of the rhinoceros, which lay with one ponderous foot stuck up in
the air as if in clumsy protest at Fate. Comprehending readily the
manner of its death, they came back and lay down under the tree, and
fell to gnawing lazily at the body of one of the pig-tapirs which the
megatherium had torn in two. They had the air of intending to stay
some time, so Grom presently turned his attention to his rescued
rival.

Mawg was sitting on the next branch, a good spear's length distant,
and glowering at A-ya's lithe shapeliness with eyes of savage greed.
Grom knit his brows, and significantly passed an arm about the girl's
shoulders. Mawg shifted his attention to him.

"What do you want of me?" he demanded, in a thick, guttural voice.

"I thought you ran as if you did not want the lions to eat you,"
answered Grom.

Mawg stared with a stupid brutality and incomprehension; and the eyes
of the two men, meeting fairly, seemed to lock in a duel of
personalities.

They presented a significant contrast. Both, physically, superb
specimens of their race--the highest then evolved upon the youthful
earth--the elder man, in his ample forehead and calm, reasoning eyes,
displayed all the promise of the future; while the youth, low skulled
and with his dull but pugnacious eyes set under enormous bony brows,
suggested the mere brute from which the race had mounted. His hair was
shorter and coarser than Grom's, and foully matted; and his neck was
set very far forward between his powerful but lumpy shoulders. The
color of his coarse and furrowed skin was so dark as to make the
weathered tan of Grom and A-ya look white by contrast.

In no way lacking courage, but failing in will and steadiness, in a
dozen seconds Mawg involuntarily