im checked
her. She felt the hopelessness of fighting her fate. The flame
flickered out, leaving her eyes dull and leaden. She rose listlessly,
and followed her new lord to the tree in which he had his dwelling of
woven branches.

At the foot of the tree the Black Chief stopped, stood back, and
signed the girl to ascend. A climber as expert as himself, she
clutched the rough trunk with accustomed hands. Then she hesitated,
and shut her eyes. Should she obey, yielding to her fate? Mawg, her
late captor, she had hated with a murderous hate; yet she had
submitted to him, in a dim way biding her time for vengeance. He was
of her own race; and it was in her mind, her spirit--though she
herself could not so analyze the emotion--that she hated him. But this
new master was an alien, and of a lower, beastlier type. Toward him
she felt a sick bodily repulsion. Behind her tight-shut lids the dark
went red. She stood rigid and quivering, stormed through by a raging
impulse to tear out either his throat or her own. She was herself a
more advanced product of her own advanced race, and urged by impulses
still new and imperfectly applied to life. But the countless centuries
of submission were in her blood also; and they whispered to her
insidiously that she was lawful prey. A huge hand fell significantly
upon the back of her neck. She jumped, gave a sobbing cry, and sprang
up into the tree. Who was she to challenge doom for an idea, a hundred
thousand years before her time.

* * * * *

Some days' journey to the westward of the swampy refuge of the
Bow-legs, a tall hunter was making his way warily through the forest.
His color, his build, and his swift grace of movement proclaimed him
of the same race as Mawg and the girl A-ya, acquitting him easily of
any kinship with the People of the Trees. In height and weight he was
much like Mawg, but lighter in complexion, somewhat less hairy, and of
a frank, sagacious countenance. His eyes were of a blue-gray, calm and
piercing, yet with a look in them as of one who broods on mysteries.
He was obviously much older than Mawg, his long, thick hair and short,
close-curling beard being liberally touched with gray. He carried in
one hand a peculiar long-handled club, which he had fashioned by
lashing, with strips of green hide, a split and jagged flint-stone
into the cleft head of a stick. In the other hand he bore two long,
slender spears, their tips har