im pause. Adventurous as he
was, he had small respect for mere pig-headed recklessness. He was
resolved to solve the problem--but after all it could abide his more
thorough preparation.

"Come back," he ordered, turning to the impetuous Mo. "She says they
are too many for us two. They have killed five of her people. We will
go back to the Caves, and after three sleeps for good counsel, we will
return with fire and find the destroying Thing."

II

On their return to the Caves, Grom gave the strange woman and her baby
to his faithful slave Ook-ootsk, who accepted the gift with enthusiasm
because, being a Bow-leg, he had not been allowed to take any of the
Cave Women to wife. He lavished his attentions upon the unhappy
stranger, but he could make no more of her speech than Grom had done.
The girl A-ya, however, in a moment of peculiar insight had gathered,
or thought she gathered, from the stranger's signs, that the dreadful
and destroying Thing was something that flew--therefore, a great
flesh-eating bird. But she gathered, also, that it was something which
in some way bore a resemblance to fire--for the woman, after getting
over her first terror of the dancing flames, kept pointing to them and
then to her wounds in a most suggestive way. This, however, as Grom
rather scornfully pointed out, was too absurd. There was nothing that
could be in the least like fire itself; and the wounds of the
fugitives had no likeness whatever to the corrosive bites of the
flame. A-ya took the correction submissively, but held her own
thought; and when a day or two later, events proved her to have been
right, she discreetly refrained from calling her lord's attention to
the fact--a point upon which Grom was equally reserved.

With so provocative a mystery waiting to be solved, Grom could not
long rest idle. Had she not known well it would be a waste of
breath, A-ya would have tried to dissuade him from the perilous, and
to her mind profitless, adventure. It was one she shrank from in
spite of her tried courage and her unwavering trust in Grom's prowess.
The mystery of it daunted her. She feared it in the same way that
she feared the dark. But she kept her fears to herself, and claimed
her long-established right to go with Grom on the expedition. Grom
was willing enough, for there was no one whose readiness and nerve, in
a supreme crisis, he could so depend upon, and he wanted her close at
hand with her fire-basket. There was nothing