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Updated: June 16, 2025
But, though children, they were many, and she closed up behind him for a guard, grasping more firmly the shaft of her short, serviceable spear. She saw the broad, black, scowling visage of young Mawg, towering over a little group of his kinsfolk, and eyeing her with mingled greed and rage, and she divined at once that he was at the back of whatever mischief might be brewing.
Mawg, her late captor, she had hated with a murderous hate; yet she had submitted to him, in a dim way biding her time for vengeance. He was of her own race; and it was in her mind, her spirit though she herself could not so analyze the emotion that she hated him. But this new master was an alien, and of a lower, beastlier type. Toward him she felt a sick bodily repulsion.
Having no remotest comprehension of the language of the Bow-legs which Mawg was speaking with them Grôm could get little clue to the drift of their talk. They gesticulated frequently toward the east, and then again toward the caves at the valley-mouth, so Grôm guessed readily enough that they were planning something against his people.
To this end, therefore, when Mawg and his fellow-renegades fell into their hands, instead of tearing them to pieces in bestial sport, they had spared them, and made much of them, and set themselves diligently to learn all that the strangers could teach.
Grôm followed, quickly but coolly. A-ya, who had waited with her eyes watchfully on Mawg, stepped close to Grôm's side; and all three swung upwards into the higher branches as the two lions arrived beneath. Glaring up into the tree with shrewd, malevolent eyes, the great beasts realized that, for the present at least, the tree man-creatures were quite out of reach.
His wives had been good wives and dutiful, and he had been content with them. But it occurred to him that neither of them would ever have thought to come with him on this expedition. "I could not stay without you," said the girl again. "Also, I was afraid of Mawg," she added cunningly. A wave of jealous wrath surged through Grôm's veins.
"What were you afraid of?" asked Grôm. "I was afraid of Mawg. I am afraid of him!" she answered, sitting up and shaking the hair from her eyes, and staring out fearfully over the gray transparent plains. "Why should you fear Mawg?" demanded Grôm proudly. "Am not I your man? And am not I always with you? Many such mad brutes as Mawg could not take you from me."
This giant and Mawg, refusing to be awed by the tremendous phenomenon of the fire, went leaping along the lines of their followers, urging them forward, and pointing out that their enemies stood close beside the flames and took no hurt. On the front ranks themselves this reasoning seemed, at first, to produce little effect.
They were all armed with spears and stone-headed clubs, such as their people had been unacquainted with up to the time of their attack upon the Tribe of the Little Hills. It was apparent to Grôm that the renegade Mawg, who towered among them arrogantly, had been teaching them what he knew of effective weapons.
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