The Story of Ab | Page 2

OF THE BARRIERS.
XXIX. OLD HILLTOP'S LAST STRUGGLE.
XXX. OUR VERY GREAT GRANDFATHER.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BY SIMON HARMON VEDDER
"HIS GREAT TRUNK SHOT DOWNWARD AND BACKWARD,
PICKED UP THE MAN, AND HURLED HIM YARDS AWAY"
MAP
"AB SEIZED UPON TWO OF THE SNARLING CUBS, AND OAK

DID THE SAME"
"AB SPRANG TO HIS FEET, AND DREW HIS ARROW TO THE
HEAD"
"THE YOUNG MEN CALLED TO HER, BUT SHE MADE NO
ANSWER. SHE BUT FISHED AWAY DEMURELY"
"AB STOOD THERE WEAPONLESS, A CREATURE
WANDERING OF MIND"
"WITH A GREAT LEAP HE WENT AT AND THROUGH THE
CURLING CREST OF THE YELLOW FLAME!"
"THE GIRL COWERED BEHIND A REFUGE OF LEAVES AND
BRANCHES"
"UPON THE STRONG SHAFT OF ASH THE MONSTER WAS
IMPALED"

THE STORY OF AB.
CHAPTER I.
THE BABE IN THE WOODS.
Drifted beech leaves had made a soft, clean bed in a little hollow in a
wood. The wood was beside a river, the trend of which was toward the
east. There was an almost precipitous slope, perhaps a hundred and
fifty feet from the wood, downward to the river. The wood itself, a sort
of peninsula, was mall in extent and partly isolated from the greater
forest back of it by a slight clearing. Just below the wood, or, in fact,
almost in it and near the crest of the rugged bank, the mouth of a small
cave was visible. It was so blocked with stones as to leave barely room
for the entrance of a human being. The little couch of beech leaves
already referred to was not many yards from the cave.

On the leafy bed rolled about and kicked up his short legs in glee a
little brown babe. It was evident that he could not walk yet and his lack
of length and width and thickness indicated what might be a babe not
more than a year of age, but, despite his apparent youth, this man-child
seemed content thus left alone, while his grip on the twigs which had
fallen into his bed was strong, as he was strong, and he was breaking
them delightedly. Not only was the hair upon his head at least twice as
long as that of the average year-old child of today, but there were
downy indications upon his arms and legs, and his general aspect was a
swart and rugged one. He was about as far from a weakly child in
appearance as could be well imagined and he was about as jolly a
looking baby, too, as one could wish to see. He was laughing and
cooing as he kicked about among the beech leaves and looked upward
at the blue sky. His dress has not yet been alluded to and an apology for
the negligence may be found in the fact that he had no dress. He wore
nothing. He was a baby of the time of the cave men; of the closing
period of the age of chipped stone instruments; the epoch of mild
climate; the ending of one great animal group and the beginning of
another; the time when the mammoth, the rhinoceros, the great cave
tiger and cave bear, the huge elk, reindeer and aurochs and urus and
hosts of little horses, fed or gamboled in the same forests and plains,
with much discretion as to relative distances from each other.
It was some time ago, no matter how many thousands of years, when
the child--they called him Ab--lay there, naked, upon his bed of beech
leaves. It may be said, too, that there existed for him every chance for a
lively and interesting existence. There was prospect that he would be
engaged in running away from something or running after something
during most of his life. Times were not dull for humanity in the age of
stone. The children had no lack of things to interest, if not always to
amuse, them, and neither had the men and women. And this is the
truthful story of the boy Ab and his playmates and of what happened
when he grew to be a man.
It is well to speak here of the river. The stream has been already
mentioned as flowing to the eastward. It did not flow in that direction
regularly; its course was twisted and diverted, and there were bays and

inlets and rapids between precipices, and islands and wooded
peninsulas, and then the river merged into a lake of miles in extent, the
waters converging into the river again. So it was that the banks in one
place might form a height and in another merge evenly into a densely
wooded forest or a wide plain. It was so, too, that these conditions
might exist opposite each other. Thus the woodland might face the
plain, or the precipice some