Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 19, 2025
A louder roaring came out of the shadows, closer than before, and he saw A-ya's eyes dilate as she clutched at his knee. A slow smile spread across his bony face, and he turned about, rising to his feet as he did so, and lifting the girl with him. With a new, strange warmth at his heart he realized how fully the girl trusted him, how cool and steady was her courage.
But before he had gone a quarter of a mile he heard A-ya's voice calling him, wildly, insistently, mingled with excited yells from Mô. He shouted in reply and dashed madly for the fires. The peril of A-ya put all other considerations out of his mind.
An hour or two later, Grôm set out from the Caves alone in spite of A-ya's pleadings. He wanted complete solitude with his new weapon. Besides a generous bundle of canes, of varying lengths and sizes, he carried some strips of raw meat, a bunch of plantains, his spear and club, and a sort of rude basket, without handle, formed by tying together the ends of a roll of green bark.
Singularly happy with the girl A-ya, Grôm had been unwilling to receive other women into their little grotto, which branched off from the high arched entrance of the main cave. He might, however, have yielded, from policy and for the sake of the tribe, to pressure from the Chief, but for a look of startled anguish which he had seen leap into A-ya's eyes when he mentioned the matter to her.
The thing seemed to him to suggest dim, cloudy, vast possibilities; and he groped in his brain for some hint of the nature of these possibilities. Yet as far as he could see it was good for nothing but to make a faintly pleasant twang for the amusement of women and children. At last he could keep his hands off it no longer. "Give it to me," said he suddenly, laying hold of A-ya's wrist.
"We are all here," came the voices of the three men. They had fallen headlong at the second shock, as at the first; and in the darkness they had not dared to rise again, but lay waiting for their leader to tell them what to do. In half a dozen cautious, groping steps he was among them, and sank down by A-ya's side, clutching her to him to stop her trembling.
They snatched up Grôm's two spears and A-ya's broken one, and ran, down along the brook toward the line of the smoking hills. The bears, descending more slowly, came after them at a terrific, ponderous gallop. The girl ran, as she had said, well so well that Grôm who was famous in the tribe for his running, did not have greatly to slacken his pace in her favor.
He took also A-ya's young brother, the hot-head Mô; and Loob, the shaggy, little sharp-faced scout, who could run like a hare, hide like a fox, and fight like a cornered weasel. This he would have accounted, ordinarily, a sufficient party.
But as he found himself treated with invariable kindness, he began to develop an anxious gratitude and docility. On A-ya's tall form his little round eyes, shy and fierce at the same time, came to rest with an adoring awe.
As Grôm's mate, and his confidential associate in all his greatest ventures, A-ya's prestige in the tribe had come to be only less than that of Bawr and Grôm themselves. On the open, grassy level before the cave mouth, the two great fires burned steadily in the sun.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking