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As I sat and watched the cave-mouths I became aware that the Folk were watching me. Soon they were thrusting their heads out. A little later they were calling back and forth to one another. In the hurry and confusion it had happened that all had not gained their own caves. Some of the young ones had sought refuge in other caves.
The beasts came over the barrier and the fires like a yelling flood. But now, finding all opposition so suddenly withdrawn, the flood divided upon the massive, thrusting figure of Ook-ootsk as upon a black rock in mid-stream. It united again behind him, surging pell-mell for the Cave-mouths, where in the crush the weaker and lighter were savagely torn and trampled underfoot.
There were ravines in it, and dark holes resembling cave-mouths. One was near us. Alan gazed at it apprehensively. "I say, Glora, I don't like sitting here." I had been telling her all we knew of Polter. She listened quietly, seldom interrupting me. Then she said: "I understand. I tell you now about Polter as I have seen him." She talked for five or ten minutes.
The wooden floor of the room had expanded to a spread of cellular surface, ridged with broken, tubelike tunnels; pits and jagged cave-mouths. A knothole yawned like a crater a hundred feet away. "We are too small," Glora protested hurriedly. "The door is where you say, Dr. Kent, but miles away." With the other drug, the room contracted. The floor surface shrank and smoothed a little.
He descended one of the run-ways to a drinking-place, returning a few minutes later by another run-way. Again he stood and watched us carefully, for a long time. Then he turned on his heel and limped into the forest, leaving us calling querulously and plaintively to one another from the cave-mouths.
And while he did this, taking no notice of me, the Folk crowded at the cave-mouths and watched. At last he evidently decided that there was no danger lurking about. He was returning from the head of the run-way, from where he had taken a peep down at the drinking-place. His course brought him near, but still he did not notice me.
For her I harvested the wild rice, tamed the barley, the wheat, and the corn. For her, and the seed to come after whose image she bore, I have died in tree-tops and stood long sieges in cave-mouths and on mud-walls. For her I put the twelve signs in the sky. It was she I worshipped when I bowed before the ten stones of jade and adored them as the moons of gestation.
And thereafter, for a time, the Bow-legged hosts changed the path of their migration, sweeping far to the southward to avoid the land of the Little Hills. A white, high-sailing moon streamed down into the amphitheater, where the scarred remnant of the tribe of the Little Hills, squatting before their cave-mouths, took counsel.
Bleak winds and driving, icy rains out of the north had no longer any power to distress them. But when the storm was violent, with drenching and persistent rain, then it was found necessary to feed the fires before the cave-mouths lavishly with dry fuel from the stores which Grôm's forethought had caused to be accumulated under shelter.
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