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Updated: June 15, 2025
Grôm's wounds proved to be deep, but not fatal to one of these clean-blooded sons of the open and the wind. It was some days before it was clearly borne in upon him that A-ya had been carried off alive by the Bow-legs. Then, with a great cry, he sprang to his feet. The blood spouted afresh from his wounds, and he fell back in a swoon.
Profoundly awed, but master of his spirit, he stood leaning upon his spear in the thick dark till the last of that strange humming note had died away. Then, through a silence so thick it seemed to choke him, he called aloud: "A-ya! where are you?" "Grôm!" came the girl's answer, a sobbing cry of relief and joy, from almost, as it seemed, beneath his outstretched hand.
Then Bawr, ever subtle in the reading of his people's hearts, suggested to him that even such a feat as the rescue of the girl A-ya might not be impossible to the subjugator of the fire and the slayer of a whole people. And from that moment Grôm began climbing steadily back to life. The clay-colored, ape-like, bow-legged men squatted in council.
He bent it to its limit and eased it slowly back again, studying the new force imprisoned in the changing curve. At last he asked who had made it. "I did," answered A-ya, very proud of her achievement now that she found it taken so seriously by one being to whom her adventurous spirit really deferred. "No, I did!" piped the boy, with an injured air. The mother laughed indulgently.
He measured with his eyes the distance to the nearest thickets that looked dense enough for a shelter. "We'll have to run for those bushes," he said presently. "They can't fly in where the branches are thick. It breaks their wings." "Good," said young Mô. But A-ya, whose shapely shoulders and thighs were already covered with hideous wounds, trembled at the prospect.
Descending presently into a region of ledges and ravines clothed with dense thickets, they found on every hand traces of the giant bears and the saber-tooth tigers whom they had driven from the caves in the Valley of Fire. Grôm hurriedly whirled the smoldering torch into a flame, and from it lighted a couple of resinous brands, one for himself, and one for A-ya to carry.
Had she not known well it would be a waste of breath, A-ya would have tried to dissuade him from the perilous, and to her mind profitless, adventure. It was one she shrank from in spite of her tried courage and her unwavering trust in Grôm's prowess. The mystery of it daunted her. She feared it in the same way that she feared the dark.
A moment more and it was bitten in two, and the crocodiles were fighting monstrously among themselves for the writhing fragments. "You got us out of that just in time," said Grôm, grinning upon the little scout with approval. A-ya wrung the water out of her heavy hair with both hands, and threw the masses back with an upward toss of her head. "I hate ants," she said, shuddering.
The naked brown surface beneath the feet of the tribe was nothing more than a thin crust overlying a lake of some dense, dark, strange-smelling liquid. His first impulse, naturally, was to turn back and A-ya, with wide eyes of terror, was already dragging fiercely at his elbow. But to turn back was utterly impossible.
Surrounded as A-ya was, at that moment, by the hordes of her captors, any attempt at her rescue would have been hopeless folly. There was something going on among the bow-legged mob which Grôm, from his hiding-place could not at first make out. Then he saw that the Chief was trying to instruct his powerful but clumsy followers in the handling of the club and spear.
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