Before Adam

sed the performance during the several preceding days, and it had given us no little glee. Broken-Tooth did not want to go, and every time his mother left the cave he sneaked back into it. Wh

th. About this time the two younger children joined in. And finally, lik

for at least half an hour, and then came to live with Lop-Ear and me. Our cave was small, but with squeezing there was room for

ut it must have been the play. We were having a great time playing tree tag. And such tag! We leaped ten or fifteen-foot gaps as a matter of course. And a twenty or twenty-five foot deliberate drop clear down to the ground was nothin

n any of us, and in the course of the game he discovered one difficult "slip" that nei

the branch to the ground it must have been seventy feet, and nothing intervened to break a fall. But about tw

early reached him he would let go. The teetering branch was like a spring-board. It threw him far out, backward, as he fell. And as he fell he turned around sidewise in the air so as to face the other branch into which he

there came a low warning cry from Lop-Ear. I looked down and saw him in the main fork of the tree crouching close against the trunk. Instinctively I crouched

he wore around his waist and over his shoulders a ragged piece of bearskin. And then I saw his hands and feet, and more clearly his features. He was very much like my kind, except that he was less ha

othing; of which to be afraid. Red-Eye or any of our strong men would have been more than a match for him. He was old, too, wizened with age, and the hair on his f

ow that death lurked in that bent piece of wood? But Lop-Ear knew. He had evidently seen the Fire People before and knew something of their ways. The Fire-Man pee

nawares, also hastily reversed, but did not win the protecti

ground. I danced up and down on my lofty perch with delight. It was a game! The F

t over my horizontal limb and chattered down at him. I wanted to play. I wanted to have him try to hit me with the thing. He saw me

xion on the matter. I no longer cared to play, but crouched trembling close to my limb. A second arrow and a third soar

d, the arrow leaped upward, and Broken-Tooth, uttering a terrible scream, fell off the branch. I saw him as he went down, turning over and over

nding slightly and settling down again. Still he lived, for he moved and squirmed, clawing with his hands and feet

-to find, often, my mother or nurse, anxious and startled, by my bedside, passing soothing h

are gone. Lop-Ear and I, in a cautious panic, are fleeing through the trees. In my right leg is a burning pain; and from the flesh, protruding head and shaft from either s

e stopped and looked back. Then he returned to me, climbing into the fork and examining the arrow. He tried to pull it out, but one w

hat, and myself whimpering softly and sobbing. Lop-Ear was plainly in a funk, and yet his conduct in remaining by me, in spite

ten meditate upon this scene-the two of us, half-grown cubs, in the childhood of the race, and the one mastering his fear, beating down his selfish impulse of flight, in order to stand by and succor the other. And there rises up before me all that was there foreshadowed, and I see visions of Damon and Py

g was bleeding profusely. Some of the smaller veins had doubtless been ruptured. Running out to the end of a branch, Lop-Ear gathered a handful of green lea