At length he decided that a little, white lie would be permissible, inasmuch as his mother’s health and the girl’s reputation were both at stake. So he had decided to mention that the girl’s aunt had been with them in the capacity of chaperon; that fixed it nicely, and on this point Waldo’s mind was more at ease.
Late in the afternoon they wound down a narrow trail that led from the plateau into a narrow, beautiful valley. A tree-bordered river meandered through the center of the level plain that formed the valley’s floor, while beyond rose precipitous cliffs, which trailed off in either direction as far as the eye could reach.
“There live my people,” said the girl, pointing toward the distant barrier.
Waldo groaned inwardly.
“Let us rest here,” he said, “until tomorrow, that we may come to your home rested and refreshed.”
“Oh, no,” cried the girl; “we can reach the caves before dark. I can scarcely wait until I shall have seen how you shall slay Flatfoot, and maybe Korth also. Though I think that after one of them has felt your might the others will be glad to take you into the tribe at the price of your friendship.”
“Is there not some way,” ventured the distracted Waldo, “that I may come into your village without fighting? I should dislike to kill one of your friends,” said Waldo solemnly.
The girl laughed.
“Neither Flatfoot nor Korth are friends of mine,” she replied; “I hate them both. They are terrible men. It would be better for all the tribe were they killed. They are so strong and cruel that we all hate them, since they use their strength to abuse those who are weaker.
“They make us all work very hard for them. They take other men’s mates, and if the other men object they kill them. There is scarcely a moon passes that does not see either Korth or Flatfoot kill some one.
“Nor is it always men they kill. Often when they are angry they kill women and little children just for the pleasure of killing; but when you come among us there will be no more of that, for you will kill them both if they be not good.”
Waldo was too horrified by this description of his soon-to-be antagonists to make any reply—his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth—all his vocal organs seemed paralyzed.
But the girl did not notice. She went on joyously, ripping Waldo’s nervous system out of him and tearing it into shreds.
“You see,” she continued, “Flatfoot and Korth are greater than the other men of my tribe. They can do as they will. They are frightful to look upon, and I have often thought that the hearts of others dried up when they saw either of them coming for them.
“And they are so strong! I have seen Korth crush the skull of a full-grown man with a single blow from his open palm; while one of Flatfoot’s amusements is the breaking of men’s arms and legs with his bare hands.”
They had entered the valley now, and in silence they continued on toward the fringe of trees which grew beside the little river.
Nadara led the way toward a ford, which they quickly crossed. All the way across the valley Waldo had been searching for some avenue of escape. He dared not enter that awful village and face those terrible men, and he was almost equally averse to admitting to the girl that he was afraid. He would gladly have died to have escaped either alternative, but he preferred to choose the manner of his death.
The thought of entering the village and meeting a horrible end at the hands of the brutes who awaited him there and of being compelled to demonstrate before the girl’s eyes that he was neither a mighty fighter nor a hero was more than he could endure.
Occupied with these harrowing speculations, Waldo and Nadara came to the farther side of the forest, whence they could see the towering cliffs rising steeply from the valley’s bed, three hundred yards away.
Along their face and at their feet Waldo descried a host of half-naked men, women, and children moving about in the consummation of their various duties. Involuntarily he halted.
The girl came to his side. Together they looked out upon the scene, the like of which Waldo Emerson never before had seen. It was as though he had been suddenly snatched back through countless ages to a long-dead past and dropped into the midst of the prehistoric life of his Paleolithic progenitors.
Upon the narrow ledges before their caves, women, with long, flowing hair, ground food in rude stone mortars. Naked children played about them, perilously close to the precipitous cliff edge.
Hairy men squatted, gorilla-like, before pieces of flat stone, upon which green hides were stretched, while they scraped, scraped, scraped with the sharp edge of smaller bits of stone. There was no laughter and no song.
Occasionally Waldo saw one of the fierce creatures address another, and sometimes one would raise his thick lips in a nasty snarl that exposed his fighting fangs; but they were too far away for their words to reach the young man.
5
Awakening
“Come,” said the girl, “let us make haste. I cannot wait to be home again! How good it looks!”
Waldo gazed at her in horror. It did not seem credible that this beautiful young creature could be of such clay as that he looked upon. It was revolting to believe that she had sprung from the loins of one of those half-brutes, or that a woman as fierce, repulsive, such as those he saw before him, could have borne her. It made him sick with disgust.
He turned from her. “Go to your people, Nadara,” he said, for an idea had come to him.
He had evolved a scheme for escaping a meeting with Flatfoot and Korth, and the sudden disgust which he felt for the girl made it easier for him to carry out his design.
“Are you not coming with me?” she cried.
“Not at once,” replied Waldo, quite truthfully. “I wish you to go first. Were we to go together they might harm you when they rushed out to attack me.”
The girl had no fear of this, but she felt that it was very thoughtful of the man to consider her welfare so tenderly. To humor him, she acceded to his request
“As you wish, Thandar,” she answered, smiling.
Thandar was a name of her own choosing, after Waldo had informed her in answer to a request for his name, that she might call him Mr. Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones. “I shall call you Thandar,” she had replied; “it is shorter, more easily remembered, and describes you. It means the Brave One.” And so Thandar he had become.
The girl had scarcely emerged from the forest on her way toward the cliffs when Thandar the Brave One, turned and ran at top speed in the opposite direction. When he came to the river he gave immediate evidence of the strides he had taken in woodcraft during the brief weeks that he had been under the girl’s tutorage, for he plunged immediately into the water, setting out up-stream upon the gravelly bottom where he would leave no spoor to be tracked down by the eagle eyes of these primitive men.
He supposed that the girl would search for him; but he felt no compunction at having deserted her so scurvily. Of course, he had no suspicion of her real sentiments toward him—it would have shocked him to have imagined that a low-born person, such as she, had become infatuated with him.
It would have been embarrassing and unfortunate, but, of course, quite impossible—since Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones could never form an alliance beneath him. As for the girl herself, he might as readily have considered the possibility of marrying a cow, so far from any such thoughts of her had he been.
On and on he stumbled through the cold water. Sometimes it was above his head, but Waldo had learned to swim—the girl had made him, partly by pleas, but largely by the fear that she would ridicule him.
As night came on he commenced to become afraid, but his fear now was not such a horribly prostrating thing as it had been a few weeks before. Without being aware of the fact, Waldo had grown a trifle less timid, though he was still far from lion-like.