the future of the tribe looked secure.

So sharp had been the lessons lately administered to the prowling
beasts--the terrible saber-tooth, the giant red bear of the caves, the
proud black lion, and the bone-crushing cave hyena--that even the
stretch of bumpy plain outside the circle of the fires, to a distance
of several hundred paces, was considered a safe playground for the
children of the tribe. On the outermost skirts of this playground, to
be sure, just where the reedy pools and the dense bamboo thickets
began, there was a fire kept burning. But this was more as a reminder
than as an actual defense. When a bear or a saber-tooth had once had a
blazing brand thrust in his face, he acquired a measure of discretion.
Moreover, the activities of the tribe had driven all the game animals
to some distance up the valley; and it was seldom that anything more
formidable than a jackal or a civet-cat cared to come within a
half-mile of the fires.

It was now two years since the rescue of A-ya from her captivity among
the Bow-legs. Her child by Grom was a straight-limbed, fair-skinned
lad of somewhere between four and five years. She sat cross-legged
near the sentinel fire, some fifty yards or so from the edge of the
thickets, and played with the lad, whose eyes were alight with eager
intelligence. Behind her sprawled, playing contentedly with its toes
and sucking a banana, a fat brown flat-nosed baby of some fourteen or
fifteen months.

Both A-ya and the boy were interested in a new toy. It was, perhaps,
the first whip. The boy had succeeded in tying a thin strip of green
hide, something over three feet in length, to one end of a stick which
was several inches longer. The uses of a whip came to him by unerring
insight, and he began applying it to his mother's shoulders. The
novelty of it delighted them both. A-ya, moreover, chuckled slyly at
the thought that the procedure might, on some future occasion, be
reversed, not without advantage to the cause of discipline.

At last the lithe lash, so enthusiastically wielded, stung too hard
for even A-ya, with all her stoicism, to find it amusing. She snatched
the toy away and began playing with it herself. The lash, at its free
end, chanced to be slit almost to the tip, forming a loop. The butt of
the handle was formed by a jagged knot, where it had been broken from
the parent stem. Idly but firmly, with her strong hands she bent the
stick, and slipped the loop over the jagged kn