For many days Waldo scraped and pounded the great skin as he had seen the cave men scrape and pound in the brief instant he had watched them with Nadara from the edge of the forest before the village of Flatfoot. At last he was rewarded with a pelt sufficiently pliable for the purpose of the rude apparel he contemplated.
A strip an inch wide he trimmed off to form a supporting belt. With this he tied the black skin about his waist, passed one arm through a hole he had made for that purpose near the upper edge; bringing the fore paws forward about his chest, he crossed and fastened them to secure the garment from falling from the upper part of his body.
It was a very proud Waldo that strutted forth in the finery of his new apparel; but the pride was in the prowess theft had won the thing for him—vulgar, gross, brutal physical prowess—the very attribute upon which he had looked with supercilious contempt six months before.
Next Waldo turned his attention toward the fashioning of a sword, a new spear, and a shield. The first two were comparatively easy of accomplishment—he had them both completed in half a day, and from a two-inch strip of panther hide he made also a sword belt to pass over his right shoulder and support his sword at his left side; but the shield almost defied his small skill and newborn ingenuity.
With small twigs and grasses he succeeded, after nearly a week of painstaking endeavor, in weaving a rude, oval buckler some three feet long by two wide, which he covered with the skins of several small animals that had fallen before his death-dealing stones. A strip of hide fastened upon the back of the shield held it to his left arm. With it Waldo felt more secure against the swiftly thrown missiles of the savages he knew he should encounter on his forthcoming expedition.
At last came the morning for departure. Rising with the sun, Waldo took his morning “tub” in the cold spring that rose a few yards from his cave, then he got out the razor that the sailor had given him, and after scraping off his scanty, yellow beard, hacked his tawny hair until it no longer fell about his shoulders and in his eyes.
Then he gathered up his weapons, rolled the boulders before the entrance to his cave, and turning his back upon his rough home set off down the little stream toward the distant valley where it wound through the forest along the face of the cliffs to Flatfoot and Korth.
As he stepped lightly along the hazardous trail, leaping from ledge to ledge in the descent of the many sheer drops over which the stream fell, he might have been a reincarnation of some primeval hunter from whose savage loins had sprung the warriors and the strong men of a world.
The tall, well-muscled, brown body; the clear, bright eyes; the high-held head; the sword, the spear, the shield were all a far cry from the weak and futile thing that had lain groveling in the sand upon the beach, sweating and shrieking in terror six short months before. And yet it was the same.
What one good but mistaken woman had smothered another had brought out, and the result of the influence of both was a much finer specimen of manhood than either might have evolved alone.
In the afternoon of the third day Waldo came to the forest opposite the cliffs where lay the home of Nadara. Cautiously he stole from tree to tree until he could look out unseen upon the honeycombed face of the lofty escarpment.
All was lifeless and deserted. The cave mouths looked out upon the valley, sad and lonely. There was no sign of life in any direction as far as Waldo could see.
Coming from the forest he crossed the clearing and approached the cliffs. His eye, now become alert in woodcraft, detected the young grass growing in what had once been well-beaten trails. He needed no further evidence to assure him that the caves were deserted, and had been for some time.
One by one he entered and explored several of the cliff dwellings. All gave the same mute corroboration of what was everywhere apparent—the village had been evacuated without haste in an orderly manner. Everything of value had been re-moved—only a few broken utensils remaining as indication that it had ever constituted human habitation.
Waldo was utterly confounded. He had not the remotest idea in which direction to search. During the balance of the afternoon he wandered along the various ledges, entering first one cave and then another.
He wondered which had been Nadara’s. He tried to imagine her life among these crude, primitive surroundings; among the beastlike men and women who were her people. She did not seem to harmonize with either. He was convinced that she was more out of place here than Flatfoot would have been in a Back Bay drawing-room.
The more his mind dwelt upon her the sadder he became. He tried to convince himself that it was purely disappointment in being thwarted in his desire to thank her for her kindness to him, and demonstrate that her confidence in his prowess had not been misplaced; but always he discovered that his thoughts returned to Nadara rather than to the ostensible object of his adventure.
In short he began to realize, rather vaguely it is true, that he had come because he wanted to see the girl again; but why he wanted to see her he did not know.
That night he slept in one of the deserted caves, and the next morning set forth upon his quest for Nadara. For three days he searched the little valley, but without results. There was no sign of any other village within it.
Then he passed over into another valley to the north. For weeks he wandered hither and thither without being rewarded by even a sight of a human being.
Early one afternoon as he was topping a barrier in search of other valleys he came suddenly face to face with a great, hairy man. Both stopped—the hairy one glaring with his nasty little eyes.
“I can kill you,” growled the savage.
Waldo had no desire to fight—it was information he was searching. But he almost smiled at the ready greeting of the man. It was the same that Sag the Killer had accorded him that day he had gone down to the sea for the last time.
It came as readily and as glibly from these primitive men as “good morning” falls from the lips of the civilized races, yet among the latter he realized that it had its counterpart in the stony stares which Anglo Saxon strangers vouchsafe one another.
“I have no quarrel with you,” replied Waldo. “Let us be friends.”
“You are afraid,” taunted the hairy one.
Waldo pointed to his sable garment.
“Ask Nagoola,” he said.
The man looked at the trophy. There could be no mightier argument for a man’s valor than that. He came a step closer that he might scrutinize it more carefully.
“Full-grown and in perfect health,” he grunted to himself. “This is no worn and mangy hide peeled from the rotting carcass of one dead of sickness.
“How did you slay Nagoola?” he asked suddenly.
Waldo indicated his spear, then he drew his garment aside and pointed to the vivid, new-healed scars that striped his body.
“We met at dusk at a cliff-top. He was above, I below. When we reached the bottom of the ravine Nagoola was dead. But it was nothing for Thandar. I am Thandar.”
Waldo rightly suspected that a little bravado would make a good impression on the intellect primeval, nor was he mistaken.
“What do you here in my country?” asked the man, but his tone was less truculent than before.
“I am searching for Flatfoot and Korth—and Nadara,” said Waldo.
The other’s eyes narrowed.
“What would you of them?” he asked.
“Nadara was good to me—I would repay her.”
“But Flatfoot and Korth—what of them?” insisted the man.
“My business is with them. When I see them I shall transact it,” Waldo parried, for he had seen the cunning look in the man’s eyes and he did not like it. “Can you lead me to them?”
“I can tell you where they are, but I am not bound thither,” replied the man. “Three days toward the setting sun will bring you to the village of Flatfoot. There you will find Korth also—and Nadara,” and without further parley the savage turned and trotted toward the east.