Cave Girl | Page 5

clutching desperately with
fingers and toes.
His progress was impeded by the cudgel to which he still clung, but he
did not drop it; though why it would have been difficult to tell, unless it
was that his acts were not purely mechanical, there being no room in
his mind for aught else than terror.
Close behind him came the foremost cave man; yet, though he had
acquired the agility of a monkey through a lifetime of practice, he was
amazed at the uncanny speed with which Waldo Emerson clawed his
shrieking way aloft.
Half-way up the ascent, however, a great hairy hand came almost to his
ankle. It was during the perilous negotiation of one of the loose and
wabbly ladders--little more than small trees leaning precariously
against the perpendicular rocky surface--that the nearest foe-man came
so close to the fugitive; but at the top chance intervened to save Waldo,
for a time at least. It was at the moment that he scrambled frantically to
a tiny ledge from the frightfully slipping sapling. In his haste he did by

accident what a resourceful man would have done by intent--in pushing
himself onto the ledge he kicked the ladder outward--for a second it
hung toppling in the balance, and then with a lunge crashed down the
cliff's face with its human burden, in its fall scraping others of the
pursuing horde with it.
A chorus of rage came up from below him, but Waldo had not even
turned his head to learn of his temporary good fortune. Up, ever up he
sped, until at length he stood upon the topmost ledge, facing an
overhanging wall of blank rock that towered another twenty-five feet
above him to the summit of the bluff.
Time and again he leaped futilely against the smooth surface, tearing at
it with his nails in a mad endeavor to climb still higher. At his right was
the low opening to a black cave, but he did not see it--his mind could
cope with but the single idea: to clamber from the horrible creatures
which pursued him. But finally it was borne in on his half-mad brain
that this was the end--he could fly no farther--here, in a moment more,
death would overtake him.
He turned to meet it, and below saw a number of the cave men placing
another ladder in lieu of that which had fallen. In a moment they were
resuming the ascent after him. On the narrow ledge above them the
young man stood, chattering and grinning like a madman. His pitiful
cries were not punctuated with the hollow coughing which his violent
exercise had induced.
Tears rolled down his begrimed face, leaving crooked, muddy streaks
in their wake. His knees smote together so violently that he could
barely stand, and it was into the face of this apparition of cowardice
that the first of the cave men looked as he scrambled above the ledge
on which Waldo stood.
And then, of a sudden, there rose within the breast of Waldo Emerson
Smith-Jones a spark that generations of overrefinement and
emasculating culture had all but extinguished--the instinct of
self-preservation by force. Heretofore it had been purely by flight. With
the frenzy of the fear of death upon him, he raised his cudgel, and,

swinging it high above his head, brought it down full upon the
unprotected skull of his enemy.
Another took the fallen man's place--he, too, went down with a broken
head. Waldo was fighting now like a cornered rat, and through it all he
chattered and gibbered; but he no longer wept.
At first he was horrified at the bloody havoc he wrought with his crude
weapon. His nature revolted at the sight of blood, and when he saw it
mixed with matted hair along the side of his cudgel, and realized that it
was human hair and human blood, and that he, Waldo Emerson
Smith-Jones, had struck the blows that had plastered it there so thickly
in all its hideousness, a wave of nausea swept over him, so that he
almost toppled from his dizzy perch.
For a few minutes there was a lull in hostilities while the cave men
congregated below, shaking their fists at Waldo and crying out threats
and challenges. The young man stood looking down upon them,
scarcely able to realize that alone he had met savage men in physical
encounter and defeated them. He was shocked and horrified; not, odd to
say, because of the thing he had done, but rather because of a strange
and unaccountable glow of pride in his brutal supremacy over brutes.
What would his mother have thought could she have seen her precious
boy now?
Suddenly Waldo became conscious from the corner of his eye that
something was creeping upon him from behind