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Grôm looked behind him, and saw the last of the women and children, shepherded vehemently by A-ya with the butt of her spear, vanishing down the steep toward the beach. "It is time for us to go too," shouted Grôm, clutching the lame slave by the arm to drag him off. But Ook-ootsk wrenched himself free.
But she kept her fears to herself, and claimed her long-established right to go with Grôm on the expedition. Grôm was willing enough, for there was no one whose readiness and nerve, in a supreme crisis, he could so depend upon, and he wanted her close at hand with her fire-basket. There was nothing to keep her at home, as the children were looked after by Ook-ootsk.
The women, and the lame slave Ook-ootsk with the old men, who, though their hearts were still high, were too frail of their hands for such a heavy task as raft-building remained before the Caves under the command of A-ya, Grôm's mate.
At the same time she gave a sharp alarm-cry, at which the lame slave, Ook-ootsk, arose, shaking off the swarm of children, and came hobbling towards her with his weapons in both hands. An old woman pounced upon the startled, wide-eyed children, and in a twinkling had them shepherded into the cave-mouth, out of sight.
He had a swift vision of the squatting form of Ook-ootsk thrusting upward with reddened spear at the breast of a black monster which hung over him like a mountain. Then the mountain rolled forward upon him, blotting him out, and Grôm slipped hurriedly over the brink and down the path. At the rafts it was bedlam.
But the lame Ook-ootsk, squatting misshapen in Grôm's doorway with A-ya's baby in his ape-like arms grew more and more anxious. As he conveyed to Grôm, the longer the delay the greater the force which was being gathered for the assault.
This old woman sat rocking and keening beside the body of her mate whom the bear had slain; while Ook-ootsk crawled off into a neighboring hollow to look for certain healing herbs which should cleanse and astringe his wounds.
At the center of the line, immediately before the main Cave-mouth whose yawning entrance seemed to be the objective of the swarming beasts A-ya was heading the battle, with the lame slave, Ook-ootsk, crouched fighting at her side like a colossal frog gone mad.
Here he found that half the little ones had been killed in that swift incursion of Mawg, and that nearly all the old men and women had been slaughtered in defending their charges. Across Grôm's doorway, crouching on his face and with his great teeth buried in the throat of a dead Bow-leg, lay the lame captive, Ook-ootsk.
It was apparent from the accounts which Ook-ootsk was able to give that the invasion would take place as soon as possible after their hordes were adequately armed with the new weapons. This, said Ook-ootsk, would be soon after the dry season had set in.
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