The little village of the horse-hunters, if village it could be called when it was a sort of communal dwelling house, was built upon a very flat and scantily herbaged plain, forming an elevated mesa, rather sharply defined by cliff-sides. These cliffs were not continuously precipitate or high, on all sides; and at one point access to the summit was readily gained by broken inclines which actually permitted the inhabitants of this isolated spot to form a rude road, so skillfully constructed that by adaptation and selection, a pathway had been built or smoothed to the bottom of the citadel of rock on which the village stood. The butte rose with receding walls, disposed in ascending steps or terraces from a canyon-like valley, from which again escape to the country beyond was gained by less easy means.

The butte of the horse-hunters formed indeed a depressed elliptical elevation, planular at the top, which stood at the intersection of two canyons, whose walls actually rose above it on all sides. Its position was very picturesque. Running southwestward a deep gorge opened, which extended back around the insular terrace, and divided on its north eastern exposures into two tributary canyons of extreme depth and narrowness. These two smaller arroyos united in the larger gorge, and in both of them a stream, with intermittent flow, gave a temporary animation to the dismal loveliness, the confluence of the rivers making a more considerable body of water in the larger canyon. From the plain of the butte’s crest, encircling walls were seen on all sides; southward the descending vista, along the broken and bold declivities of the large canyon with the river it contained reduced to a white ribbon; northward the ascending vistas, in the two narrower canyons with vertical walls, the streams running through their deep defiles, reduced to a white thread.

The butte only, amongst the eminences about it, was at all easily approached, and then its ascent on one side alone offered any attractive invitations. The rocks of the canyon were variously colored, and the myriad fancy which had carved and trenched and cut them into innumerable profiles, had indulged in a still wider complexity of invention in its panoramic marvels of color. Bands of blood red lay across the exposed strata, fading with inconstant undulations into brown and yellow ochres—purple shades filled up the diversified pallet, and white strips of quartz or unctuous edges of clay streaked the cliffs with weird and sudden contrasts.

In the mornings the extraordinary picture was dim with mists, the tricks of optical interference, reflection and diffraction raising strange phantoms in the silent gorges, and at night the shadows stealing upward and quenching the radiant illumination imparted an almost theatrical effectiveness, as if an artful scene shifter had manipulated the setting sun, and pulled into place the changing and relevant flies and screens.

It was in the latter time that shadows settled like a flood upon the home of the horse-hunters—when the sunlight still fell on the heights about them, and they were submerged in a twilight night long before the sun had deserted the uplands.

It was the evening of the day when Ogga killed the mastodon that the four medicine men of the little village—Shan, Flitout, Slin and Slaggar—squatted on the edge of the mesa, gazing with half shut, squinting eyes, into the vacancy before them. They had attained a sufficient distinction in ugliness, querulousness, abiding and carefully nurtured vindictiveness to hold without question in that aboriginal community, the preeminence their position implied. Their mutual distrust of one another had rendered more acute their craftiness of demeanor. They incessantly quarreled, and the religious exhibitions of their thaumaturgic powers were made none the less ridiculous by their evident desire to excell their rivals in impossible antics. Nature had furnished them with contrasted physical features, but a common calling, and a very uniform tendency to intrigue produced a noticeable resemblance amongst them. They were seldom separate from each other, although their companionship led them into the most discordant wrangles which usually ended in an encounter which excelled in acerbity of language, rather than in bodily violence.

Perhaps expressions in that early age were more restricted than in a later age, but as Renan has pointed out, primal language gained in compression what it lacked in capriciousness, and the squabbles and fights of the four doctors, consisting generally of hair-pulling and flesh scratching, like modern duels amongst cats, were punctuated by sharp and shrieking exclamations which had sufficient poignancy of meaning to make the melee more prolonged and vigorous.

It may be objected that the assumption of Medicine Men amongst these prehistoric and glacial people is audacious and impossible. But in this current of pictures given in this absolutely veracious reconstruction of that vanished time, it must be remembered that the author is dealing with ethnic conditions that had reached some degree of complexity. The instincts and rudimentary or moral or psychic motions in men had begun their sway long before the time given in this story. Men had been long upon the earth, and their distribution which involved means and ways more primitive and considerably slower than the railroad or the steamship, had been accomplished through a process of migration which not only brought them under influences in Nature contrasted and various, and developed self-initiative and constructive faculties, but by every possible avenue of appeal stirred their fear and reverence, and very quickly inaugurated morality and intensity of religious practices. And such practices would have developed quite rapidly as the imagination was powerfully excited by their environment.

It has been from the first assumed that in this Ice Age, as depicted in this story, the arctic severity of the north did, at least in the western portion of this continent, come close at hand with far milder conditions, and that the severity of self-preservation in this zone was not at all so urgent as to repress or degrade or eliminate religious customs. This is in itself, however, a concession to unnecessary censoriousness, as the Esquimaux who to-day live in the ice, have well advanced religious customs of humane and symbolic interest.

That medicine men or something like, them should have reached an almost instantaneous importance is most likely. The credulity of an aboriginal mind increased by the wonders of natural phenomena and the hardships of life, the mystery of death and the growth of many natural feelings of love and terror, would have quite quickly started the pretensions of crazy or inflamed, senile or adroit, individuals who could have easily insisted upon their special privileges and powers of divination, and by reason of ingenuity and fortuitous circumstance, given their pretensions a very deceiving appearance of reality.

At any rate, the four worthies to whom the attention of the reader is now invited—Shan, Flitout, Slin and Slaggar—were veritable facts at the very time when the mountain of Zit was incased in the broad skirts of a semi-continental ice-sheet, when Ogga the hunter killed the mastodon in the steppe country south of the glacier, and when Lhatto left the upland of the Sierras in the Fair Land to kill seal in the coast waters of the Pacific. And they were also, be it insisted with no less emphasis, the medicine men of the horse-hunters who lived in the Canyon Country east of the Fair Land, and who had begun to assume some premonitional resemblances to the Pueblo Indians of today.

The Horse-Hunters were an outlying settlement of kindred peoples to the south and their present location was found useful as bringing them near the grazing grounds of the wild horses in the river bottoms of the Fair Land. The exchanges amongst aboriginal peoples,—their commerce,—was more general than might be at first supposed and the Horse-Hunters found ample opportunities for making useful bargains with the horses they secured. Their origin, like that of all these disassociated and stray inhabitants, was even then lost in antiquity. Their habits and the business which helped to sustain them, were hereditary. They occupied a peculiar and inaccessible retreat, not contiguous even to their hunting fields. These latter were, however, reached by a trail which presented few difficulties for the conduct of their captives, though the way was long and circuitous. The aspect of their whole life was unique and unintelligible, though they seldom were inclined to improve or explain it. How they came to the lonely table-land, and why, in so remote a position they should have found it convenient to pursue their peculiar calling, were unanswered, unanswerable questions. The hunters amongst them were not many, generally the young and artful, and though they captured and subdued horses, they found no use for them. The wild people further south who became their customers came to the mesa with food supplies, clothing and implements, and took away the animals, and thus the Horse-Hunters, in an impoverished and sad way, maintained their strange and lofty seclusion.

The four worthies who pretended to direct the spiritual destinies of the colony, had arisen, and their varying statures and girths, as they turned to the waning light in the sky above them, became apparent, as well as the less easily defined peculiarities of their physiognomies. Shan was a strong and high man, braced with broad thighs which, from the execution of many trying and prolonged dances, displayed their muscles in rigid relief, but his narrow chest and pinched neck imparted insignificance to the rest of his figure. His appearance was completed by a large head, heavily covered with tangled locks, from which a face of mingled cruelty and deceit gazed at you from lancet shaped eyes, one of which had been disabled by disease, and the second, compelled to do duty for two, opened wide with a sinister glare beneath a low straight hairy eyebrow. His nose was thin and beaked, his mouth distorted and sunken, which, in the infrequent occasions when he became amused, opened with a cackling laugh and revealed a single incisor.

Flitout, who stood next to him, was a thin and shrunken man, stooping and angular, with a peculiar flapping of his arms, symptomatic of some nervous irritability or weakness, which gave him a not unfanciful resemblance to a wounded bird trying to fly. His face was even more concealed than that of Shan’s by the coarse and unkempt hair which framed it, and as he lifted his head, his bright and restless eyes moving incessantly, betokened some mental excitement or disorder which much of his conduct showed was not far removed from insanity. His face was really pallid, but the grease, paint and dirt which seamed or smeared it, concealed the evidences of his anaemic and dissipated condition. His voice was cracked and piping, a cough racked his weary chest with intermittent spasms, and he spat with malevolent zeal at almost everything moving near him.

Slin alone in this extraordinary company was fat, or of such proportions as made, in contrast with his associates, that epithet appropriate. But this greater bulk carried with it no compensatory advantages. His bulging eyes, thick cheeks and puffed lips, were disfigured with pimples and pustules. His distended abdomen was suspended above short and thick set legs. His arms, lengthened by some freak of satirical cunning, reached to his knees, an adjustment of parts which, taken in conjunction with protruding and heavy ears, and a skull, alone, amongst the four, largely deprived of its natural covering, gave him a very real likeness to an orang-outang. His disposition was, perhaps, as simian as his looks, and while he owed to that fact some sense of humour, it was also responsible for his wickedness, his jealousy and his uncontrollable fits of temper.

Slaggar was the youngest of them all and not without pretense to natural proportions. He was of medium size and apparently muscular. It was his peculiar pigmentation that attracted comment. He was in a state of partial decoloration. Irregular patches of pinkish white skin, like geographic markings, were distributed over his face, and two, extending from the angles of his mouth to the corners of his eyes, made his grimace or scowls equally hideous and shocking.

The four men were covered quite imperfectly with skins, and around the neck of each hung a perforated stone, while ivory beads decorated the knuckles of their hands, and ribbons of red and yellow ochre striped their naked legs.

The salutation to the parting day completed, they sat down again with their eyes fixed on the almost irresolvable depths of gloom beneath them. The full moon was just then climbing in the east. Suddenly there emerged amongst them from the shadows a short stalwart figure with a face, could it have seen clearly, of real distinction and aboriginal comeliness. It was Lagk, the son of the headman of the little tribe, a hunchback.

A voice from the shadows—“Are there any horse?”

“No,” from the four doctors, in a basso from Shan, a falsetto from Flitout, a tenor from Slin, and a barytone from Slaggar. The four started to their feet and faced the inquirer.Then came the voice, even and monotonous in intonation, “I go to fetch them.”

“Not to-night,” exclaimed Flitout with a nasal snarl, as he directed his expectoration at a moving object at his feet.

“Why! The moon is up—the way I know. To-morrow I will be at the fields. I will drive in many.”

“Well,” added the nonchalant Slaggar, as the moon, peering now upon them with its orb almost fully developed above the rim of cliffs, revealed the entire group, “Luck and return.” “Pray to Zit and watch the eye of the moon,” was the adjuration from Shan. The interview might have ended then had not the insolent Slin ventured to interject, “And keep your hump on your back.”

The young man dropped the thongs and ropes and lassos of hide which he held, the stone knife from his hand also, and flung himself with a loud imprecation upon the grinning and wriggling Silenus before him. Slin, surprised by the sudden resentment, and fearing his capacious abdomen might meet with some untoward violence from his young assailant, jumped behind his companions, who quite unwilling to incur the enmity of the young brave, avoided the efforts of Slin to form of their interposed bodies a screen, and quickly jumped aside. Slin, quivering with uncertainty, his talon-like hands spread in deprecation before him, still dodging and screaming some unintelligible apology for his insult, was struck fairly in his rumpled and creased visage by the irate youth. He stumbled and fell on his back, a piteous spectacle of helplessness, his short legs kicking in the air in an exposure not altogether deprived of some of the coarser elements of comedy.

His official comrades seemed irresolute in this extremity, as to whether their rival should be left to his humiliation, or whether the dignity of their craft required some united assertion of self-protection. Lagk, half expecting their attack, stood with clenched fists, one hand reaching to the ground to recover the dropped knives. The outlook was somewhat too serious for the spirit of the three religious mendicants, and they drew back, quite aware that their recoil was interpreted as cowardice, and yet quite unable to conduct any action that might save their dignity.

Slin had recovered his upright position but not his equanimity. The struggle between his rage and the sense of his own physical impotence was not unnoticed by Lagk, who taunted him to some sort of explosion: “Put more toads in the hump on your own belly, and then you can touch the hump on my back, old liar.”

Slin was furious, he cowered in a passion of hate and futile vindictiveness—his glance fell on his inert but uneasy companions. If he could divert the eye of the youth to them, their discomfiture might lead to some resistance that would be more dangerous than his own, for the unconcerned horse-tamer.

“They told me to say it. They said your hump would curse you. They said you got it because Zit hated you. They said your hump has a snake in it and it bites, bites, bites all the time.” As Slin uttered this improvised and well conceived lie he pointed to his astounded friends, in whose varied expressions of confusion nothing was more clear than a fundamental dissatisfaction with the turn the affair was taking. As Slin closed his sentences, his shrill voice rose higher and higher with insertive ferocity upon the last words. He had not miscalculated the effect of the scathing taunt. Lagk, with the keen susceptibility of an injured man, his own strained sense of suffering exasperated into rage by these repeated allusions to his deformity, knelt to the earth, seized a big pebble, and leaning forward, hurled it at the bewildered group. They sprang apart and the stone rolled over the mesa, and with its last hesitating turn, plunged down the cliff side into the shadows.

The situation became at once dramatic. Flitout, least adapted for physical defense, was fleeing with asthmatic coughs across the plain, his arms flapping, producing a spectral imitation of an ambling heron. Shan, behind him, was using his stiff legs with adroit agility; Slaggar alone withdrew with sullen and menacing gestures of defiance, while Slin, thus momentarily relieved of his fears, and enjoying an oblique revenge, had recovered his equanimity, and while rubbing a somewhat injured posterior with one hand, controlled his laughter with the other by holding it over his mouth.

The hero of the fracas disdained pursuit, but contented himself with suddenly changing Slin’s illusions by kicking him in the shin and telling him to follow his brave associates.

Lagk turned and looked at the full moon flooding this place of mysteries and wonder; a thousand shadows, ten thousand surfaces of light covered the cathedral depths, and far out upon the illimitable wilderness of spire and butte, crevice, gorge, ravine, wall and canyon-slope, the silver glory stayed. Lagk was hardly sentimental, but upon him as upon all these wondering hearts the poetic power of nature wrought its indispensable and irrevocable spell.

Lagk was a strong and formidable figure, though the accident of his youth had produced a disfiguring thickening and shortening of his chest. He was one of the most successful of the horse-hunters and tamers, and his skill had won him the apt nickname of the hoofed beast’s master. Masterful he was in many ways, and his imperious scorn of the doctors who were superstitiously regarded by his contemporaries, was only one exhibition of his proud and fearless nature.

He strode across the mesa, passed through the shadow of the walls of the communal house and descended the road, which with many turns and deflections and straight level lengths, formed the avenue of exit and entrance for their lonely settlement.

The method adopted or inherited by the horse-tamers for the capture and subduing of their four-footed prisoners was effective, but it required boldness, resources and strength in its executants. The horse lived in droves or families along the edges and in the grass lands of the Fair Country. Thither the horse-hunters repaired, and equipped with strong lassos, with which even in that ancient day they were well supplied, awaited the approach of their prey. The custom was to entice or drive, or simply wait for their horses to pass near the edge of the woods in the neighborhood of some tree, and then to lasso some convenient individual and running back to the tree, hold him by winding the lasso’s end around the tree. If the hunters were in companies the lassos were thrown in numbers over the unfortunate animal and he became fastened to as many trees. His struggles were generally unavailing, and he could after some hours, be thrown and vanquished.

A more cruel but even more effective system, was to starve the horse after his capture until his strength and spirit visibly diminished, and then slowly to revive him. This peculiar practice was pursued with great refinement by the horse-hunters and its results were astonishing—pliant and obedient servants were made of the most obstreperous and apparently invincible beasts. Lagk and his people did not ride the horse, though amongst their customers there were skillful horsemen; they drove or led him back to their camp in the canyon, where at regular seasons the occupants of the southern settlements convened, and a market day—the prototype of all bargaining and commercial haggling since—was inaugurated.

Lagk was festooned with lassos, his skill enabling him to use them in succession on the same animal. In this way he quickly reduced it to submission, and he often returned to the camp from his expeditions with half a dozen captives.

When Lagk reached the end of the long slant, his pathway almost brilliantly illumined by the zenith-soaring moon, he found a pleasant heat radiating from the walls of rock, and creeping to a familiar shelter, he lay down and slept.

Long before the dawn, just as Ogga left his stony bed, Lagk had shaken off the clinging drowsiness of the night, and had resumed his walk. The trail led him through narrow defiles and over interposed table-lands, but presented at no point great difficulties, even the last ascent which extricated him from the aisles of the canyon country, not claiming any extreme test of endurance.

It was a slope or talus of splintered rock, fragments dejected by frost or heat, rain and sun, from the steep channelled palisades above, that arrested Lagk for a moment just at the beginning of this last station in his journey. He stood looking at the gray, herb-sprinkled surface, like the stone heap of chippings and refuse in a modern quarry. He took a thick dense rock from the ground and hurled it against the lower face of the cliff,—a vibration, a dislodgement of loose particles that came rattling down in diminishing numbers, and some readjustment of the flakes in the talus,—and then suddenly a buzz increasing to a rasping insistent locust cry, and there appeared over the extended incline the emergent heads of the desert rattlers. Sinister and threatening, the bodies raised for a foot or so, and thrown into recoiled loops swinging uneasily with a graceful restlessness, the snakes, except for size, acted with one impulse and one posture. Their flat heads, darting tongues, and checkered bodies swam before Lagk’s eyes like a low thicket of animated plants. He drew back and hurled a pebble amongst them. The half expiring susurra sprang again into a fierce sibilancy, and the aroused beasts started out with a simultaneous motion that made them seem like animal springs worked together, at one and the same pressure. They shot forward, bending their elated bodies, and then, in a single sweep, that spread with unanimity amongst them, raising their squamate heads and falling backward like so many hundred curved and elastic wands.

Lagk hastened on; the day was climbing fast, and a long distance intervened before his feet touched the hunting fields. At last he descended the slope of a pass that brought him to a southern portion of the same valley, in whose northern extension lay the lake that has been described, and where Lhatto and Ogga saw the cruel sepulchre of the wild horses. It was then that Lagk realized the presence of the volcanic disturbance that clouded Zit. The ashes and dirt fell around him and far away from the summit of the pass he discerned on those frozen heights he had never visited, but which to him were a sort of Olympus, and which only in the clearest days he could see, the wreaths of smoke, the rushing pillars of darkness, and the forked radiance playing on their sides or lighting them with livid lambency.

Long did Lagk watch the ominous clouds; he forgot his errand, and stood like some carven image in the open pass above a chaparral with eyes fixed on the unearthly picture. And as he looked the earth tremors came. A mocking bird flew to a tree near him, jumping with excited interest from branch to branch and uttering the “cha-cha-la-ca” of the Texan Guan. Some thrushes lingered near the mute spectator and sang. A tit-mouse whistled its sweet, clear notes in his ear, a group of woodpeckers gathered near him on a projecting bough like a little colony of colored toys. Some ground squirrels ran forward and halted like a corvee of minute cavalry in front of him, and while he remained unmoved, unnoticing, the sullen movement of terror in the air and earth brought strangely into his companionship a mountain lion, less rare then than to-day, crawling with prostrate paunch, upon a lifted cornice of rock, her outline designated in the sky in a black silhouette. Below him in the trail of the descending pass, a bear suddenly blocked the way, snuffing the air, and scratching anxiously upon the trembling earth. Above him aimlessly wheeled a company of bats.

The singular congery of associates gathered around the solitary figure, momentarily, in the still panic of the instant, forgetful of their natural antipathies and fears, resembled some adamic renewal of intercourse between man and Nature. Even while the motionless group was thus assembled, Lagk’s ears caught the sound of trampling feet, the thunder of a thousand desperate hoofs beating the valley floor. He looked hastily towards the distance and his trained eye saw the phalanx of wild horses stampeding up the valley.And yet he remained apathetic and estranged. The terror of Zit rested on the face of all things, the security of the foot-stool was gone, the reverberations of rumbling thunder coming nearer, the still darkening sky, encompassed the whole circle of attention. Again Lagk looked to the north, and still the birds and animals, and even the crouching puma, stayed like rivetted and dead beings.

Rapidly the storm gathered and the enlarging circuit of the electric tempest spread around them and the crawling thunders deepened into bomb-like explosions. The flood gates of the sky opened, and pitchy darkness wiped out the heavens and the earth. Lagk hurried to a crevice in the rocks, a seam of dislocation deep and wide enough to shelter him. The frightened animals dissolved away and the drenched mountain side, deserted and smitten, was lit in every recess when the blinding lightning flashed. The wind, in furious gusts, tore through the oak trees, howling and moaning, its exasperation raised to a sharp shriek, as it sped through the fissured cliffs.

Lagk crept from his hiding place in the morning, stiff and depressed. He sat long in the sun, wondering, eating mechanically of the food he had brought with him in a skin bag. But the returning serenity of the world, the resumed chorus of the birds, the cleared ether, his own improved spirits restored his quailed courage, and as he again saw Zit triumphant, shining, immobile, the order of things as he knew it, seemed renewed and he bethought himself of his errand.

He did not turn down the pass to the valley where he had seen the stream of doomed horses hastening. Had his footsteps been attended by any sympathetic observer, the latter would have wondered why he climbed so toilsomely up a pinched, scarcely possible trail to a shoulder of the mountain range. The difficult way surmounted, Lagk found himself upon a projecting spur of rock set out from the mountain mass and rising to an apex from which a very broad view of the region was obtained. He continued his scramble up to this apex—a cluster of riven quartz or granite pinnacles—and here the beauties of a great quarry table-land on one side, the flanks wooded and irregular, falling into the horse valley on the other, Zit and its icy assemblage of peaks far north, and the canyon country to the east, like an etching on a copper plate, were revealed. Lagk lingered a long time watching the shifting lights, and seemingly fascinated by the wondrous picture. He even lay flat in the warming sun upon one glistening quartz cleavage, and slept. The place cherished and suited him and he seemed to have forgotten the purpose of his expedition.

It was late in the afternoon that as Lagk, yet in his stupor of admiration or uncertainty, looked upon the trough shaped table-land in which springs and brooks from the mountain, by slow approximation, formed the head waters of a stream, he saw a solitary horse moving with a limp and broken gait, upon the flat plain below him. It was at the river’s edge, and, with a stumbling and pained approach to the water, throwing up its head and whinneying, it slowly entered the stream and drank.

Lagk cautiously left his aery, swinging himself down the rocks by saplings, the tough branches of low rhododendrons, and sliding here and there over pine needles. It was not long before he too was on the upland, creeping out toward the spot where the lonely horse stood, snorting and switching its tail with nervous reiteration. As Lagk drew nearer, he could see that the animal had injured a fore-leg, and was yet, at intervals, shivering with terror. He raised himself, and as he did so the horse, turning, caught sight of him. With a broken plunge, he sprang from the river’s shallows and ran directly towards Lagk, whinneying in apparent recognition. It was a surprising and disconcerting issue. Lagk was motionless with wonder. The animal came nearer and nearer, and as its movements were friendly and reassuring Lagk awaited it.

It came forward sniffing portentously. Lagk raised his hand and called it soothingly; the wild beast submitted with nonchalant affection. It pushed its nose upon Lagk’s hand and pressed upon him with eagerness. Its spirit subdued by the anarchy in nature seemed tamed into obedience, and it almost nestled, in its big equine way, against the delighted horse-tamer. Lagk walked over the open plain and his complacent companion followed him. Lagk examined the wounded leg, and the horse noted his interest with satisfaction. Rest would soon restore the sprained ankle of the horse and Lagk, knowing a pine grove a mile or so further on, patted and encouraged the creature, and after intervals of halting, as night fell, the two slunk together into the wood. Lagk tied his willing comrade to a tree with the deepening shadows and, still weary with his own amazement and exposure, he lay down in the shielded spot and passed into the nebulous fancies of an over wrought and mystified mind.

It was the dawn, dewy and slumbrous, the mists rose from the river, they sped outward above the tips of the trees, they clung in tiny clouds to the ground. Lagk awoke and leading the horse, now somehow fastened to him by ties of friendliness, walked to the river and drank. He looked around him, his eye swept the hillside, and there in the mist just as he was, phantasmal and yet half expected, stood a man and woman. It was Ogga and Lhatto. Why half expected?Lagk could not have explained his eagerness to see them closer nor how, in feeling this curiosity, expectations seemed to forestall all wonder that these new creatures should be there. There seemed to be a naturalness in it, that his heart, his mind, his eyes should meet, in the adumbrant day, some nascent answer to his dreaming thoughts. And so he walked toward them. Neither Ogga nor Lhatto moved. The tenderness of their own happiness forbade the consciousness of interruption.

Lagk came close; Ogga strong, triumphant, with the wildness of that younger day incorporated in his steel sinews, his dark lines, his piercing eye, the unchecked richness and color of his hair, in his arrowy and shooting gestures, in the demeanor of an unsoiled and dustless youth, gazed at him with recognition. It was Lagk, the son of the herdsman, whom he had thrown from the cliff in defense of his pet.

And Lagk, strong too, and though not triumphant, confident and brave, bearing many traces of physical nobility, not altogether dwarfed by his infirmity, and with a face not unlike the visage he beheld, gazed also with recognition. It was Ogga who had pushed him from the cliff, who had brought upon him the ridicule of the Medicine Men, who made him now hesitating before the charms of the wild woman before him. Lagk had never felt before the presence of a beautiful woman.Small wonder that his blood rushed to his cheek, that his eyes blazed with retaliation, that his hands clutched tightly upon the knife in his belt. The sense of wrong unnerved and over-mastered him. He sprang at Ogga with an uplifted arm, but Lhatto ran between them, and Ogga, curbing his own quickly roused resentment, spoke even softly, “Lagk, let that be gone. It is over. I am your friend.”

Lagk stumbled backward, and his head fell against the warm shoulder of the horse, who had moved forward with himself. The mute friendship of the animal turned his thoughts, and the three, with the horse following, walked to the river in silence.

Ogga told Lagk of his life, how he had met Lhatto, that they were man and wife, and Lhatto also told her story. They asked Lagk about himself, they spoke of the death of the horses, of the terrors that had threatened Zit, and as soon as the sun rose and it grew warmer and the hunger of the night had been appeased, they seemed eager and happy in each other’s company, and the melancholy and brooding Lagk felt a strange pleasure entering his heart. It was a fitful and perilous joy.

His eyes sought Lhatto with increasing earnestness, with desire. She was so different from all women he had seen. Her grace, her sweet strength and aptness, the potency of her beauty, was a revelation, for in the camp of the horse-hunters and amongst the trading people of the south, he had not met such a woman. They were coarse and shrunken, age had wrinkled and distorted them, work had made them pinched and ailing; exposure, a rude life, and perhaps no heritage of shape or feature, deprived them of charm. They did not please his eye.

Ogga and Lhatto were exceptionable and yet not unique. The prehistorics were living close upon the period of emergence from something animal and unformed. Traces of a strange or a debased ancestry lingered amongst them, but it was not wonderful, not impossible, that in many instances the efforts of nature, always ascending, always ameliorating and artful, should produce types of human perfection. Nature so quickly raises her ideals and her mechanism is so perfect, her power to follow up an ideal with execution so implicit! The outlines and muscles of a wild animal are sometimes the very acme of possible physical expression, the beauty of an animal’s eye surpasses description, the grace of an animal’s movement touches the keenest criticism with despair, the adaptive structure of an animal’s frame and bones excels the widest appreciation of art and of artificers.

Have we not seen amongst savage races, whose routine of life brings them into the air, trains them to run, to lie in wait, to fight, to urge wild beasts, to watch the telltale skies for storm, to strive with the inert resistance of stone, and refractory materials; who know the plants of the forest, the bark of the trees, the trail and scent of the beasts, have we not seen those who have been formed into strict types of beauty? And thought has left upon them too, its refining stamp, poetry has lit the flame of their eyes, and emotion spread the seal of its presence and of its pressure over the whole face.

In Winthrop’s Canoe and the Saddle occurs this opulent description of Prince and Poins (by soubriquet) his Indian guides. “It was worth a shirt, nay shirts, merely to be escorted by these graceful centaurs. No saddle intervened between them and their horses, no stirrup compelled their legs, a hair rope, twisted around the mustang’s lower lip, was their only horse furniture. ‘Owhhigh tenas,’ the younger, claimed to be one of Owhhigh boys. Nowhere have I seen a more beautiful youth; he rode like an Elgin marble. A circlet of Otter fur, plumed with an eagle’s feather, crowned him. His forehead was hardly perceptibly flattened, and his expression was honest and merry, not like the sombre, suspicious visage of Loolocan, disciple of Talipus.”

And again of the chief Kamaiakan, clad in the surplus and the dregs of human hosiery and tailoring, the superb writer says: “Yet Kamaiakan was not a scare-crow. Within this garment of disjunctive conjunction he stood a chieftainly man. He had the advantage of an imposing presence and hearing and above all a good face, a well lighted Pharos, at the top of his colossal frame. We generally recognize whether there is a man looking at us from behind what he chances to use for eyes, and when we detect the man we are cheered or bullied, according to what we are. It is intrinsically more likely that the chieftainly man will be an acknowledged chief among simple savages than in any of the transitional phases of civilization preceding the educated simplicity of social life, whither we now tend. Kamaiakan, in order to be the chiefest chief of the Yakimahs, must be clever enough to master the dodges of salmon, and the will of wayward mustangs; or, like Fine-Ear, he must know where Kamas-bulbs are mining a passage for their sprouts; or he must be able to tramp farther and far better than his fellows; or by a certain tamanous that is in him, he must have power to persuade or convince, to win or overbear, he must be best as a hunter, a horseman, a warrior, an orator. These are personal attributes, not heritable; if Kamaiakan, Junior, is a Nature’s nobody, he takes no permanent benefit by his parentage.”

But nature fails to hit the mark persistently. Her efforts, always intentionally perfect through the obstruction of accident, of heredity, of use and of misuse, decline into homeliness and torpidity, and even abortions. Now amongst wild people, let it be insisted amongst these prehistorics, fortunate conjunctions of mother and father, of embryo and environment, of employment and indulgence, might naturally have been mingled with mistakes, indirection, harm, over-work, deprivation, hunger and hardships of surroundings. But where such fortunate conjunctions happened, where the efflorescence, the flowering, came to view under the smile of some creative fancy reckless of tradition or conventions, making the thing on which it worked beautiful, according to the law of the thing’s type, may not, even at the earliest moment, may not such images and glories have arisen?

In Lhatto and in Ogga such an image and glory was realized, and its power, its attractiveness, was felt by Lagk; he yielded to it as a bird yields to the call of music, as flowers yield to the summons of the sun, as rivers yield to the encompassing embrace of the ocean, as all things incomplete and yearning yield to the complementary that makes them full and complete, adequate and strong.

And the three, with the changing days, still wandered on southward in those summer hours full of unlacing heat, of fragrance and endless mystery, rich in the languid temper of air that develops sense and feeling, and germinates and brings to fruitage the bud of love. So Lagk loved Lhatto.The days were serene and clear. Zit’s contest with the Fire-Breather had been followed by peace so unmistakable and reassuring that it was a conviction with the three nomads that the Fire-Breather had abandoned an unequal fight. The last plume of smoke had faded away, the earth had again lapsed into sleep, the glacier sky only reflected the poignant splendor of the ice-cap.

The strange animal companion of their journey still followed, and he had not been unwisely used. The instinct for human companionship is soon awakened, indeed, the currents of response spring into motion almost by anticipation with the dog and horse. Kindness fostered the natural union, and the horse attached itself with servile affection to the careful and painstaking Lagk.

Both Lagk and Ogga were skillful in woodcraft. They shaped bows and arrows, they wrought in stone, they knit the braided boughs above the fire. Lagk was ingenious and conniving in various skills. He shaped artful traps for bird and beast, he called the wild things to him by mimic whistles, notes and cries, he knew the flowers of the wood and plain, he devised keen hooks and caught gleaming fish from the rivers, he burrowed in the banks of the streams for the pearl unios, and he found wonderful spiral shells on the land, he chased the radiant insects, and sometimes returned from his excursions with tesselated snakes wound about his arms. And all these wonders and many more he diligently sought for, to bring them to Lhatto, and he would tell her what he knew, and Lhatto learned to care for him, to feel an interest in his knowledge, even in his attentions.

And it was then, even in that old, old time as it has ever been since: The persuasion of kindness and indulgent interest was mistaken by the forlorn heart which essayed to find in them its peace and satisfaction, for a woman’s love. The cruel misconception worked quickly upon the nervous and excitable temperament of Lagk, and his darkening scowls, when Ogga drew Lhatto to himself, grew deeper in their dread and hatred. They betrayed a plotting soul, dark in its sense of injury, apt to provocation and retaliation, and driven by physical inferiority to schemes of cunning and deceit, to impish freaks of sin and shame.

The love of Ogga and Lhatto was primal and strong, and carried in itself and made affirmative in them, the simple principles of the moral law. Without doubt the moral law may have been ignored in savage communities, in the irregular gatherings of primal populations, in those first avulsions from the life of beasts, of ethnic cultures. And yet, who knows? The sudden step from tree climbing and nest building monkeys to the attitude and attention of men may have brought with it some equally sudden illumination, some transcendent push that raises men at that first instant above the levels they sank to later, even as the first dawn of day is brighter than the succeeding hours. But, however imagined, the love of Ogga and Lhatto lifted their union above accidental intercourse and fitted it to things supreme and eternal.

The singular migration of these three with the ancillary horse, may awaken ridicule in the reader accustomed to some anxious calculations about the weather, the size and appointments of his room, his nearness to a market and the conveniences of transportation for his wife and family. The domesticities of Arcadia scarcely conform to the intricacies of the West End Avenue, nor are the virgin instincts of men cramped or deteriorated by the stiffening varnish of self-indulgence.

Their casual camps embraced a wide loveliness and variety. The open forest, the glades, the timbered uplands, the valley levels, defile and peak, lakes set like sapphires within beryl rims of trees, rushing torrents carrying in their waters the tint of the washed woods, and holding in their mirrowy pools the cold and painted trout, the cliff side from whose prominence the world seemed suddenly displayed, or the climbing pinnacle whence even the blue ocean like a dream swam upon their vision, still tireless in its endless task of renewing and destroying continents, and still, with the witchery of its deathless charm, calling men to its pale lips.And to them were gathered the most rare of incidents, the appurtenances of nature swelled their resources in sport and pleasant episodes, the arsenal of the skies beset their path with thrilling dangers, and all living things accompanied them in a procession of beauty and wonderment and terror. They saw the black snake snare the fledged firstlings of the nest, they met the shrike impaling its furred captive on the thorn, the herons were startled from their hidden homes, rising cloudlike in discordant streams to the overhanging trees; the hawk, before their eyes, set its talons in the squealing chipmunk, and the water moccasin glided within their reach after the leaping frog along the slimy edges of pond and pool; the lizards basked in the sunshine, their eyes glimmering like gold-encircled stones, undisturbed at their approach, and anon, the silence of some valley changed in a moment to the mocked minstrelsy of an orchestra, when the migrant birds invaded it.

Deer with timid outlook awaited them within the sheltering shadows of the forest, their missiles lamed the shuddering partridge in the fields, and Ogga fought the wild bear, where the edges of the pines laid their pencilled shadows on the lichened rocks; Lagk trapped the beaver at its clumsy dam, inundating the woods, and changing a forest glade to a luxuriant dilapidation of moss covered logs, he chased the keen whistling bat to its last covert.The cougar slunk to its lairs with menace and distrust before them, and, in their adventuresome invasion, they essayed to trace the grizzly to the verge of its retreat in the mountain caves.

The scenic and theatrical diversity of storms filling the air with colliding vapors, and the earth’s broad floor with deluge, and seaming the spent spaces of the heavens with fire, surrounded them.

They saw the stiff oaks snap before the cyclone’s blow, and through the snapping boughs of the pines caught the lightning in its race to earth.

Beasts and birds and plants crowded then into a shorter space, in an area to which fled the evicted tenantry of the north, and into which by an equal impulse of migration, entered the denizens of the south. These were their clustering companions. They moved amongst them, merged and lost, as part themselves of the aboriginal concourse, and yet lifted above all this commotion, this myriad footed and colored and flowered tapestry of life by the carriage within themselves of the destiny of men, by the possession of a secret emotion that was to be finally resolved in the tragedy of death.

A note of interrogation may be here interposed. How was it that Ogga and Lhatto and Lagk should thus move away from their occupations and attachments, and begin an aimless wandering, a listless adventure among perils and surprises and uncertainties? It can be understood better by implication and suggestion rather than by explanation. It was not rational. It was ethnic. It belonged to the period of zoological settlement. It was part of the animal movement which was establishing biological centres, determining geographical range, bringing too the sparse population of the world into a heterogeneous distribution, by which the world itself might become more quickly peopled.

And there were imminent reasons too. To roam, to pass from place to place, to follow streams, to thread mountain passes, to trace the shore, to pass north and south, east and west by centrifugal impulses, which cannot be defined or limited, belonged to the infancy of the race as they now solely are implanted in the infancy of the individual.

Who shall gauge the “world fever” in the youth of a day which knew no boarded and bricked and stone domiciles? When the contact with the elements and all the retinue of their phenomena with the beast, the fish, the plant, was so quick, so constant, so marked, that man was drawn into, or rather was the finished expression of geographic mutability, of the ebb and flow of life in its incessant effort to cover and possess the earth.

The nomads in the deflections of their travel drew towards the sea coast. Lhatto told Lagk of the great plain of water, and her pictures, not inadroitly made, gave her absorbed listener a desire to see the liquid wonder. Ogga had not been unobservant. The love which Lagk bore Lhatto, his unconcealed devotion, the simple earnestness of his industrious attentions came to his ears, and passed before his eyes, not inaudible nor unseen. But from the confidence of his possession, from the massiveness and rigorous simplicity of his nature, he did not care to impugn the motives of Lagk, nor the fidelity of Lhatto. He felt a tacit self-reproach that he had ever injured Lagk, that he had forced him to a lower physical level, and it seemed, in his magnanimous motion for restitution, some consolation that Lagk found joy in Lhatto’s company, and that Lhatto returned to him a certain measure—not traitorous nor fatal—of affection.

They finally reached the coast range, a wide and fertile vale had been traversed, the foot hills of an encompassing mountain chain surmounted, the dark forests, entombing the gray rocks in a sepulchre of shadow, crossed, and upon the flat shoulders of the mountain the three stood looking westward over the ultra-marine floor of the ocean, with its lighter aqua-marine margins, while scarcely moving, though turreted upward in the zenith, in illimitable surfaces of resistance, the white cumuli formed an ermine wall against the unimaginable Orient. The scene was splendid in its breadth and inspiration, and in the clear atmosphere, its coloring was simple and strong. It was almost noon.Lagk gazed as if the splendor, the beauty, the oceanic magnitude of the water had stunned him. What traces of genealogical survival in his memory, remote, unfathomable, dimly rising to the surface of his psychic consciousness, may not have contributed to his profound feeling! For sometime, doubtless before Zit was imprisoned in the glaciers, his ancestors, wanderers on the earth, had crossed that azure field, had trailed along its resounding shores, and fed themselves upon the life, the fish and mollusks, that spun a web of being upon the edges of its unfructified and barren breast.

Lagk turned questioningly to Lhatto: “When we came you said I could hear the story of the Great Water Spirit. There is the great water—tell me the story. Ogga will listen too.” Ogga was quite willing. And so Lhatto, sitting between them, with her head in her hands that rested on her knees, and her eyes fixed, as if in corroborative inquiry, upon the sea, told the Legend of the Great Water Spirit.

The Legend of the Great Water Spirit.

“Many, many suns ago the Great Water Spirit was in the air over the whole earth, so that Zit could not be seen. It was a white spirit that was very sorry because it had no children, and it cried, and its tears ran down upon the earth and wet the trees and the rocks. And then it stopped crying. And the little lizard that had run into the wet places which the tears of the Great Water Spirit made, when they dried up whispered very loud, ‘Great Water Spirit, you have no children, cry much and you will have more children.’ So the Great Water Spirit cried again and its tears ran down upon the earth and made holes of water. And the little lizard ran into the holes of water and kept quiet until they too were dried up. Then it whispered very loud again, ‘Great Water Spirit, you have no children, cry much and you will have children.’

“And the Great Water Spirit cried again, and its tears ran down and made holes of water and little running places. And as it cried, Zit began to be seen, but all its tears that fell upon Zit were changed to ice, and as the Great Water Spirit cried it grew thinner and thinner. And the little lizard was happy a long time in the holes of water and the running places, and when they dried up again it had grown bigger and could talk more and it called out very loud, ‘Oh, Great Water Spirit, you have no children, cry until you die and you will have children.’

“And then the Great Water Spirit made terrible noises and cried and cried, until the tears hid Zit again and the mountains and the trees, and the tears ran down in rivers from the hills, and the ground was full of tears and spouted them up again, (springs,) but where they fell upon Zit they only made snow and ice. And still the Great Water Spirit cried and the tears tore the ground and carried down trees and pushed out rocks, and the tears ran on and on, until they came together and made the ocean, and then the Great Water Spirit died and the air was clear, but the tears ran on over the ground. But when the Fire-Breather up high (the Sun) sent its arrows on the ocean, the Great Water Spirit went up again in the air and made the clouds, and when it saw the holes and murmuring and spouting places dry, it cried again, and the tears kept its children—for these were its children—alive. And all water runs to the ocean and the ocean is the grave and the cradle too of the Great Water Spirit.

“The tears of the Great Water Spirit are the rain. When the Water Spirit is glad there is no rain, and when the Water Spirit is not glad there is rain. And the ocean is all the tears of the Great Water Spirit. And the Water Spirit wanted things to live in the ocean. And so it saw on the hills the foxes, and it went over them and cried, and the tears came down big and fast and the foxes were carried into the ocean and made seals. And the Water Spirit saw snakes and lizards and little birds on the hills, and it went over them and cried, and the tears came down big and fast and the snakes and lizards and the little birds made the fishes of the ocean, because they were carried into the sea.“And many, many suns ago, before Zit was, and the Ice Spirit was not, there came a boat on the ocean, and when the Great Water Spirit saw it, he was very angry. And he cried and blew and the tears filled the boat and the blowing upset it, and the Men Spirits in it were killed.

“But the Men Spirits made another boat and pushed it out on the ocean, and they pushed it so fast that it got a great way over the ocean before the Great Water Spirit saw it, and when he saw it, he ran over the water making much noise, and he cried great tears and blew—but the fire spirit (the Sun) shot his arrows at him so that he ran off, and the Men Spirits in the boat came to the land and lived here.

“And more Men Spirits came and walked over the land. And then the Great Water Spirit was more angry and he cried and blew, and tears came from his eyes, and snow blew out of his mouth, and he asked Zit to help him. And Zit made it very cold, and Zit kept the Fire-Breather under the ground, and he made it so cold that the rivers were solid, and the ground was hid under the snow, and the Men Spirits and the bear and the wolf and the deer came away, and the trees and flowers went with them, and Zit ruled alone, over the ice. But when the Fire-Breather moves, the ice goes back a little and the day comes when Zit will die.”

As Lhatto finished, Ogga, who stood by her side, bent upon her and kissed her on the neck. Lagk had his eyes fixed on Lhatto; the movement and action of Ogga seemed to bewilder and infuriate him. He drew aside hastily, his black eyes glittering, his mobile mouth drawn into a scowl, and his nervous hands clenched hard upon one another as if under some superhuman control to restrain them. The next instant, as if seized with a sudden resolve, he leaped through some juniper bushes and disappeared.

Lhatto and Ogga were alone. Ogga knelt by the woman’s side and took her hands and drew her face and body nearer to his own. “Lagk loves you,” he said.

Lhatto smiled. Who shall measure the subtle sense of joy which comes to a woman, even to a wild emancipated creature like Lhatto, from a man’s admiration! “Perhaps,” answered Lhatto. “I know it,” persisted Ogga, and he raised her hands and placed them upon his shoulders, and a darkness passed over his visage that surrendered its impotent suspicions as Lhatto flung her face upon his own, and held him closer and closer, and the whisper crept into his ear: “He may love me, but I love you, Ogga, and it is all well with us.”

Lagk reappeared, his face was at the aperture of the parted junipers; behind him the horse was standing, and his head above Lagk’s seemed to peer forward with almost the same frightened eagerness as his master. Lagk had seen, had heard all and the momentary agony that creased his face with frowns, passed into a sullen contraction of the brows, a settled, determined, half pre-occupied glance at Ogga as he led the horse upon the upland table—its back covered by thongs and lassos laid there by Lagk.

He left the horse and approached Ogga and Lhatto, yet oblivious of his presence. They rose instantly, their eyes filled with that light that in the savage, as in the modern, does most certainly send its throbbing fires of passion and yearning and rapture into those strange organs from whose windows man’s soul looks out upon the world.

Lagk seemed almost unconcerned. He motioned to Ogga to follow him. The two went out through the junipers, that sprang back again, and Lhatto was left alone. Lagk led Ogga through some scattered woods and brought him out upon a higher upland sparsely clothed in grass. There the two men became engaged in earnest talk. Lagk motioned to the horizon and his gesticulations became vehement and rapid. Ogga listened, his arms folded, the braids of his hair framing the brown face, thrown slightly forward, while the half bent shoulders expressed his interest in the recital of his friend. At length the appeal prevailed, if appeal it was, and Ogga walked on, out upon the upland, his ivory spear in his hand, the nephrite knife about his neck, and the stone sledge in his belt.

It was curious and not altogether reassuring then to watch Lagk. He threw his hands backward upon his deformed shoulders, lifted them in the air, and brought them back upon his breast with the spread fingers buried in the exposed flesh of his bosom. His face, capable of violent changes in expression, became sombre and thoughtful, and then there stole over it an increasing smile, that seemed fed by some anticipation of pleasure, and lit his face with a wicked and baleful joy. Lagk watched Ogga until the receding form disappeared, dropping down behind rocks and trees. Lagk stood for an instant longer, as if gathering his thoughts for the execution of his plans.

Then he stole back through the juniper trees and saw Lhatto had resumed her first posture, her head in her hands, her elbows on her knees, and her face turned in reverie to the distant sea. The horse was pulling upon the branches of a maple. Lagk stepped quietly in upon the place that was soon to become the stage of so much terror. He moved noiselessly to the side of Lhatto, holding a leathern thong of considerable length in his hand. He leaned upon her. She hastily drew herself upward. With an inarticulate shout, Lagk threw in rapid coils the thong about her, pinning her arms closely to her side. They were drawn tight and strongly; like a vise they held her arms helpless and motionless. The action was so daring, so unexpected that Lhatto almost yielded to it without resistance. An instant later she looked at Lagk. His face was close to hers, his breath brushed her cheeks, a strange gleam of exultation shone in his eyes. He seized her in his arms and pushed his lips upon her with the violence of ravenous desire. Lhatto jumped to her feet and struck him away with a savage kick.

It was not well aimed. It hurt, but the hurt incensed Lagk. The color had rushed to Lhatto’s face, her chest rose and fell with the tumult of her own anger and disgust, but the flaming of her temper made her more beautiful, more desirable, and Lagk felt the tension of his craven thoughts. Lhatto was motionless. She made no attempt to escape. She looked at Lagk—her arms straightened to her side, giving her a strained uprightness—with a curious interest, her eyes wide apart and her lips compressed, and a red spot in her cheeks that spread to the spaces beneath her eyes, glowing darkly under her bronzed skin.

But Lagk waited no longer. A leathern thong gathered in his hands, snatched from the horse’s back, with bowed body he sped like a ferret forward, and whirled the cord about Lhatto’s legs. He ran on around her, drawing nearer and nearer with every loop of his circuit tightening the web that held her rigid like an imprisoned fly, until he had come quite close to her absolutely still form. He stopped in front of her and as he turned his face to hers she spat upon it. It was like a spark to a magazine. The hidden revolt which Lagk nursed, which made him rebellious against the humiliation of his deformity, which defiled the springs of his good nature and had fed the poisonous growths of envy and malice and discontent, burst furiously into flame. From his jagged lips, malediction started.

He threw his arms around the helpless woman and swung her from him with rage. The torrent of his indignation was not assuaged by the sad picture of her fall upon the stony ground. He stood over her and taunted her helplessness, swore she should be his, that Ogga would not return, that he would carry her to the eyrie of the horse hunters, that the Medicine Men would help him, that her life should no longer be by the side of the Great Water Spirit. And then the tempestuous and fickle creature, in an outburst of wailing love, knelt by Lhatto, raised her head and besought her to think well of him; he would make her his wife, he would treat her well, he loved her, he would bring her birds and wild animals, and train horses for her, he would make her beautiful with flowers and plumes, he would show her the stars in the sky, and tell her where the fish lived, she should forget Ogga, Ogga had gone away, he had forgotten her, Ogga was dead, Ogga wanted him, Lagk, to take her to his home.

His supplications became piteous and cringing. The wild man, touched with the deathless passion which no art of modern affectation or sycophancy can disguise or control, was in a paroxysm of despair. He laid his head on Lhatto’s bound arm and implored her to be kind to him. And Lhatto still was mute. His anger was rekindled. He raised her roughly and carried her like a log to the horse. He said nothing, but strapped her Mazeppa-like to the horse’s back. He was even tender, placing soft skins between her and the animal. His vagaries of temper, the illicit madness of his first thoughts had been succeeded by stolid determination, and he made haste to vanish with his captive from their little camp.

The equipment with which he left it was slight enough. A lasso hung around his neck, a few knives of stone were stuck in his belt, and with nothing else he led the horse, carrying the still motionless Lhatto, from the upland, and began the toilsome descent to the lowland, trusting to his own sense of direction and the accidents of topography, to find his way back to the canyon country, but, above all, solicitous, that by means of his tortuous advance, he might escape pursuit. It required some skill to bring on the horse without accident or injury to its burden, but Lagk was both skillful and thoughtful, and slowly the two threaded a devious path, while Ogga hunted the strange new beast which Lagk had urged him to capture.