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The Story of Ab

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The marsh was passed, night had fallen, but he ran on, pressing into the
bear and tiger haunted forest beyond. Anything, anything, to make him
forget the strange feeling and the thing which made him run! He plunged
into a forest path, utterly reckless, wanting relief, a seeker for
whatever might come.

In that age and under such conditions as to locality it was inevitable
that the creature, man, running through such a forest path at night, must
face some fierce creature of the carnivora seeking his body for food. Ab,
blinded of mood, cared not for and avoided not a fight, though it might be
with the monster bear or even the great tiger. There was no reason in his
madness. He was, though he knew it not, a practical suicide, yet one who
would die fighting. What to him were weight and strength to-night? What to
him were such encounters as might come with hungry four-footed things? It
would but relieve him were some of the beasts to try to gain his life and
eat his body. His being seemed valueless, and as for the wild beasts--and
here came out the splendid death-facing quality of the cave man--well, it
would be odd if there were not more deaths than one! But all this was
vague and only a minor part of thought.

Sometimes, as if to invite death, he yelled as he ran. He yelled whenever
in his fleeting visions he saw Oak lying dead again. So ran the man who
had killed another.

There was a growl ahead of him, a sudden breaking away of the bushes, and
then he was thrown back, stunned and bleeding, because a great paw had
smitten him. Whatever the beast might be, it was hungry and had found what
seemed easy prey. There was a difference, though, which the animal,--it
was doubtless a bear--unfortunately for him, did not comprehend, between
the quality of the being he proposed to eat just now and of other animals
included in his ordinary menu. But the bear did not reason; he but plunged
forward to crush out the remaining life of the runner his great paw had
driven back and down and then to enjoy his meal.

The man was little hurt. His skin coat had somewhat protected him and his
sinewy body had such toughness that the hurling of it backward for a few
feet was not anything involving a fatality. Very surely and suddenly had
been thrust upon him now the practical lesson of being or dying, and it
was good for the half-crazed runner, for it cleared his mind. But it made
him no less desperate or careless. With strength almost maniacal he leaped
at what he would have fled from at any other time, and, swinging his ax
with the quickness of light, struck tremendously at the great lowering
head. He yelled again as he felt stone cut and crash into bone, though
himself swept aside once more as a great paw, sidestruck, hurled him into
the bushes. He bounded to his feet and saw something huge and dark and
gasping floundering in the pathway. He thought not but ran on panting. By
some strange freak of forest fortune abetting might the man wandering of
mind had driven his ax nearly to the haft into the skull of his huge
assailant. It may be that never before had a cave man, thus armed, done so
well. The slayer ran on wildly, and now weaponless.

Soon to the runner the scene changed. The trees crowded each other less
closely and there was less of denned pathway. There came something of an
ascent and he breasted it, though less swiftly, for, despite the impelling
force, nature had claims, and muscles were wearying of their work. Fewer
and fewer grew the trees. He knew that he was where there was now a sweep
of rocky highlands and that he was not far from the Fire Country, of which
Old Mok had so often told him. He burst into the open, and as he came out
under the stars, which he could see again, he heard an ominous whine, too
near, and a distant howl behind him. A wolf pack wanted him.

He shuddered as he ran. The life instinct was fully awakened in him now,
as the dread from which he had run became more distant. Had he heard that
close whine and distant howl before he fairly reached the open he would
have sought a treetop for refuge. Now it was too late. He must run ahead
blindly across the treeless space for such harborage as might come. Far
ahead of him he could see light, the light of fire, reaching out toward
him through the darkness. He was panting and wearied, but the sounds
behind him were spur enough to bring the nearly dead to life. He bowed his
head and ran with such effort as he had never made before in all his wild
and daring existence.

The wolves of the time, greater, swifter and fiercer than the gaunt gray
wolves of northern latitudes and historic times, ran well, but so did
contemporaneous man run well, and the chase was hard. With his life to
save, Ab swept panting over the rocky ground with a swiftness begotten of
the grand last effort of remaining strength, running straight toward the
light, while the wolf pack, now gathered, hurled itself from the wood
behind and followed swiftly and relentlessly. Ever before the man shone
the light more brightly; ever behind him became more distinct the sound
made by the following pack. It was a dire strait for the running man. He
was no longer thinking of what he had lately done. He ran.

[Illustration: WITH A GREAT LEAP HE WENT AT AND THROUGH THE CURLING CREST
OF THE YELLOW FLAME]

The light he had seen extended as he neared it into what looked like a
great fence of flame lying across his way. There were gaps in the fence
where the flame, still continuous, was not so high as elsewhere. He did
not hesitate. He ran straight ahead. Closer and closer behind him crowded
the pursuing wolves, and straight at the flame he ran. There was one
chance in many, he thought, and he took it without hesitation. Close
before him now loomed the wall of flame. Close behind him slavering jaws
were working in anticipation, and there was a strain for the last rush.
There was no alternative. Straight at the fire wall where it was lowest
rushed Ab, and with a great leap he went at and through the curling crest
of the yellow flame!

The man had found safety! There was a moment of heat and then he knew
himself to be sprawling upon green turf. A little of the strength of
desperation was still with him and he bounded to his feet and looked
about. There were no wolves. Beside him was a great flat rock, and he
clambered upon this, and then, over the crest of the flames could see
easily enough the glaring eyes of his late pursuers. They were running up
and down, raging for their prey, but kept from him beyond all peradventure
by the fire they could not face. Ab started upright on the rock panting
and defiant, a splendid creature erect there in the firelight.

Soon there came to the man a more perfect sense of his safety. He shouted
aloud to the flitting, snarling creatures, which could not harm him now;
he stooped and found jagged stones, which he sent whirling among them.
There was a savage satisfaction in it.

Suddenly the man fell to the ground, fairly groaning with exhaustion.
Nature had become indignant and the time for recuperation had been
reached. The wearied runner lay breathing heavily and was soon asleep. The
flames which had afforded safety gave also a grateful warmth in the chill
night, and so it was that scarcely had his body touched the ground when he
became oblivious to all about him, only the heaving of the broad chest
showing that the man lying fairly exposed in the light was a living thing.
The varying wind sometimes carried the sheet of flame to its utmost extent
toward him, so that the heat must have been intense, and again would carry
it in an opposite direction while the cold air swept down upon the
sleeping man. Nothing disturbed him. Inured alike to heat and cold, Ab
slept on, slept for hours the sleep which follows vast strain and
endurance in a healthy human being. Then the form lying on the ground
moved restlessly and muttered exclamations came from the lips. The man was
dreaming.

For as the sleeper lay there--he remembered it when he awoke and wondered
over it many times in after years--Oak sprang through the flames, as he
himself had done, and soon lay panting by his side. The lapping of the
fire, the snapping and snarling of the wolves beyond and the familiar
sound of Oak's voice all mingled confusedly in his ears, and then he and
Oak raced together over the rough ground, and wrestled and fought and
played as they had wrestled and fought and played together for years. And
the hours passed and the wind changed and the flames almost scorched him
and Ab started up, looking about him into the wild aspect of the Fire
Country; for the night had passed and the sun had risen and set again
since the exhausted man had fallen upon the ground and become unconscious.

Ab rolled instinctively a little away from the smoky sheets of flame and,
sitting up, looked for Oak. He could not see him. He ran wildly around
among the rocks looking for him and despairingly called aloud his name.
The moment his voice had been hoarsely lifted, "Oak!" the memory of all
that had happened rushed upon him. He stood there in the red firelight a
statue of despair. Oak was dead; he had killed Oak, and buried him with
his own hands, and yet he had seen Oak but a minute ago! He had bounded
through the flames and had wrestled and run races with Ab, and they had
talked together, and yet Oak must be lying in the ground back there in the
forest by the little hill. Oak was dead. How could he get out of the
ground? Fear clutched at Ab's heart, his limbs trembled under him. He
whimpered like a lost and friendless hound and crouched close to the
hospitable fire. His brain wavered under the stress of strange new
impressions. He recalled some mutterings of Old Mok about the dead, that
they had been seen after it was known that they were deep in the ground,
but he knew it was not good to speak or think of such things. Again Ab
sprang to his feet. It would not do to shut his eyes, for then he saw
plainly Oak in his shallow hole in the dark earth and the face Ab had
hurried to cover first when he was burying his friend, there under the
trees. And so the night wore away, sleep coming fitfully from time to
time. Ab could not explore his retreat in the strange firelight nor run
the risks of another night journey across the wild beasts' chosen country.
He began to be hungry, with the fierce hunger of brute strength, sharpened
by terrific labors, but he must wait for the morning. The night seemed
endless. There was no relief from the thoughts which tortured him, but, at
last, morning broke, and in action Ab found the escape he had longed for.




CHAPTER XX.


THE FIRE COUNTRY.

It was light now and the sun shone fairly on Ab's place of refuge. As his
senses brought to him full appreciation he wondered at the scene about
him. He was in a glade so depressed as to be a valley. About it, to the
east and north and west, in a wavering, tossing wall, rose the uplifting
line of fire through which he had leaped, though there were spaces where
the height was insignificant. On the south, and extending till it circled
a trifle to east, rose a wall of rock, evidently the end of a
forest-covered promontory, for trees grew thickly to its very edge and
their green branches overhung its sheer descent. Coming from some crevice
of the rocks on the east, and tumbling downward through the valley, was a
riotous brook, which disappeared through some opening at the west. Within
this area, thus hemmed in by fire and rock, appeared no living thing save
the birds which sang upon the bushes beside the small stream's banks and
the butterflies which hung above the flowers and all the insect world
which joined in the soft, humming chorus of the morning. It was something
that Ab looked upon with delighted wonder, but without understanding. What
he saw was not a marvel. It was but the result of one of many upheavals at
a time when the earth's cooled shell was somewhat thinner than now and
when earthquakes, though there were no cities to overthrow, at least made
havoc sometimes by changing the face of nature. There had come a great
semi-circular crack in the earth, near and extending to the line of the
sheer rock range. The natural gas, the product of the vegetation of
thousands of centuries before, had found a chance to escape and had poured
forth into the outer world. Something, perhaps a lightning stroke and a
flaming tree, perhaps some cave man making fire and consumed on the
instant when he succeeded, had ignited the sheet of rising gas, and the
result was the wall of flame. It was all natural and commonplace, for the
time. There were other upleaping flame sheets in the surrounding region
forever burning--as there are in northern Asia to-day--but Ab knew of
these fires only from Old Mok's tales. He stood wonderstruck at what he
saw about him.

But this man in the valley was young and very strong, with tissues to be
renewed, and the physical man within him clamored and demanded. He must
eat. He ran forward and around, anxiously observant, and soon learned that
at the western end of the valley, where the little creek tumbled through a
rocky cut into a lower level, there was easy exit from the
fire-encompassed and protected area. He clambered along the creek's rough,
descending side. He emerged upon an easier slope and then found it
possible to climb the hillside to the plane of the great wood. There must,
he thought, be food of some sort, even for a man with only Oak's knife in
his possession! There was the forest and there were nuts. He was in the
forest soon, among the gray-trunked, black-mottled beeches and the rough
brown oaks. He found something of what he sought, the nuts lying under
shed leaves, though the supply was scant. But nuts, to the cave man, made
moderately good food, supplying a part of the sustenance he required, and
Ab ate of what he could find and arose from the devouring search and
looked about him.

He was weaponless, save for the knife, and a flint knife was but a thing
for closest struggle. He longed now for his ax and spear and the strong
bow which could hurt so at a distance. But there was one sort of weapon to
be had. There was the club. He wandered about among the tops of fallen
trees and wrenched at their dried limbs, and finally tore one away and
broke off, later, with a prying leverage, what made a rough but available
club for a cave man's purposes. It was much better than nothing. Then
began a steady trot toward what should be fair life again. There were
vague paths through the forest made by wild beasts. As he moved the man
thought deeply.

He thought of the fire-wall, and could not with all his reasoning
determine upon the cause of its existence, and so abandoned the subject as
a thing, the nub of which was unreachable. That was the freshest object in
his mind and the first to be mentally disposed of. But there were other
subjects which came in swift succession. As he went along with a dog's
gait he was not in much terror, practically weaponless as he was. His eye
was good and he was going through the forest in the daylight. He was
strong enough, club in hand, to meet the minor beasts. As for the others,
if any of them appeared, there were the trees, and he could climb. So, as
he trotted he could afford to think.

And he thought much that day, this perplexed man, our grandfather with so
many "greats" before the word. He had nothing to divert him even in the
selection of the course toward his cave. He noted not where the sun stood,
nor in what direction the tiny head-waters of the rivulets took their
course, nor how the moss grew on the trees. He traveled in the wood by
instinct, by some almost unexplainable gift which comes to the thing of
the woods. The wolf has it; the Indian has it; sometimes the white man of
to-day has it.

As he went Ab engaged in deeper and more sustained thought than ever
before in all his life. He was alone; new and strange scenes had enlarged
his knowledge and swift happenings had made keener his perceptions. For
days his entire being had been powerfully affected by his meeting with
Lightfoot at the Feast of the Mammoth and the events which had followed
that meeting in such swift succession. The tragedy of Oak's death had
quickened his sensibilities. Besides, what had ensued latest had been what
was required to make him in a condition for the divination of things. The
wise agree that much stimulant or much deprivation enables the brain
convolutions to do their work well, though deprivation gets the cleaner
end. The asceticism of Marcus Aurelius was productive of greater results
than the deep drinking of any gallant young Roman man of letters of whom
he was a patron. The literature of fasting thinkers is something fine. Ab,
after exerting his strength to the utmost for days, had not eaten of
flesh, and the strong influences to which he was subjected were exerted
upon a man still, practically, fasting. For a time, the rude and
earth-born child of the cave was lifted into a region of comparative
sentiment and imagination. It was an experience which affected materially
all his later life.

Ever to the trotting man came the feelings which must follow fierce love
and deadly action and vague remorse and fear of something indefinable. He
saw the face and form of Lightfoot; he saw again the struggle,
death-ending, with the friend of youth and of mutual growing into manhood.
He remembered dimly the half insane flight, the leaps across the dreaded
morass and, more distinctly, the chase by the wolves. The aspect of the
Fire Country and of all that followed his awakening was, of course, yet
fresh in his mind. He was burdened.

Ever uprising and oppressing above all else was the memory of the man he
had killed and buried, covering the face first, so that it might not look
at him. Was Oak really dead? he asked himself again! Had not he, Ab, as
soon as he slept again, seen, alive and well, the close friend of his? He
clung to the vision. He reasoned as deeply as it was in him to reason.

As he struggled in his mind to obtain light there came to him the fancy of
other things dimly related to the death mystery which had perplexed him
and all his kind. There must be some one who made the river rise and fall
or the nut-bearing forest be either fruitful or the hard reverse. Who and
what could it be? What should he do, what should all his friends do in the
matter of relation to this unknown thing?

With this day and hour did not come really the beginning of Ab's thought
upon the subject of what was, to him and those he knew, the supernatural.
He had thought in the past--he could not help it--of the shadow and the
echo. He remembered how he and Oak had talked about the echo, and how they
had tried to get rid of the thing which had more than once called back to
them insolently across the valley. Every word they shouted this hidden
creature would mockingly repeat and there was no recourse for them. They
had once fully armed themselves and, in a burst of desperate bravery, had
resolved to find who and what the owner of this voice was and have, at
least, a fight. They had crossed the valley and ranged about the woodland
whence the voice seemed to have come, but they never found what they
sought!

The shadow which pursued them on sunny afternoons had puzzled them in
another way. Very persistent had been the flat, black, earth-clinging and
distorted thing which followed them so everywhere. What was this black,
following thing, anyhow, this thing which swung its unsubstantial body
around as one moved but which ever kept its own feet at the feet of the
pursued, wherever there was no shade, and which lay there beside one so
persistently?

But the echoes and the shadows were nothing as compared with the things
which came to one at night. What were those creatures which came when a
man was sleeping? Why did they escape with the dawn and appear again only
when he was asleep and helpless, at least until he awoke fairly and seized
his ax?

The sun rose high and dropped slowly down toward the west, where the far
ocean was, and the shadows somewhat lengthened, but it was still light
along the forest pathways and the untiring man still hurried on. He was
now close to his country and becoming careless and at ease. But his
imagination was still busy; he could not free himself of memory. There
came to him still the vision of the friend he had buried, hiding his face
first of all. The frenzy of his wish for knowing rushed again upon him.
Where was Oak now? he demanded of himself and of all nature. "Where is
Oak?" he yelled to the familiar trees beside his path. But the trees, even
to the cave man, so close to them in the economy of wild life, so like
them in his naturalness, could give no answer.

So the cave man struggled in his dim, uncertain way with the eternal
question: "If a man die shall he live again?" So the human mind still
struggles, after thousands of centuries have contributed to its
development. A wall more impassable than the wall of flame Ab had so
lately looked upon still rises between us and those who no longer live. We
reach out for some knowledge of those who have died, and go almost into
madness because we can grasp nothing. Silence unbroken, darkness
impenetrable ever guard the mystery of death. In the long ages since the
cave man ran that day, love and hope have in faith erected, beyond the
grim barriers of blackness and despair, fair pavilions of promise and
consolation, but to the stern examiners of physical fact and reality there
has come no news from beyond the walls of silence since. We clamor
tearfully for some word from those who are dead, but no answer comes. So
Ab groped and strove alone in the forest, in his youth and ignorance, and
in the youth and ignorance of our race.

Upon the pathway along the river's bank Ab emerged at last. All was
familiar to him now. There, by the clump of trees in the flat below, was
the place where he and Oak had dug the pit when they were but mere boys
and had learned their first important lessons in sterner woodcraft. Soon
came in sight, as he ran, the entrance to the cave of his own family. He
was home again. But he was not the one who had left that rude habitation
three days before. He had gone away a youth. He had come back one who had
suffered and thought. He came back a man.




CHAPTER XXI.


THE WOOING OF LIGHTFOOT.

Lightfoot, when Ab seized Oak, had fled away from the two infuriated men,
as the hare runs, and had sped into the forest. She had the impetus of new
fear now and ran swiftly as became her name, never looking behind her, nor
did she slacken her pace, though panting and exhausted, until she found
herself approaching the cave where lived her playmate, Moonface, not more
than an hour's run from her own home.

The fleeing girl was fortunate in stumbling upon her friend as soon as she
came into the open space about the cave. Moonface was enjoying herself
lazily that afternoon. She was leaning back idly in a swing of vines to
which she had braided a flexible back, and was blinking somnolently in the
sunshine as the visitor leaped from the wood. Moonface recognized her
friend, gave a quavering cry of delight and came slipping and rolling
recklessly to the ground to meet her. Lightfoot uttered no word. She stood
breathless, and was rather carried than led by Moonface to an easy seat,
moss-padded, upon twisted tree roots, which was that young lady's ordinary
resting-place. Upon this seat the two sank, one overcome with past fear
and present fatigue, and the other with an all-absorbing and demanding
curiosity. It was beyond the ordinary scope of the self-restraining forces
in Moonface to await with calm the recovery of Lightfoot's breath and
powers of conversation. She pinched and shook her friend and demanded,
half-crying but impatiently, some explanation. It was a great hour for
Moonface, the greatest in her life. Here was her friend and dictator
panting and terrified like some weak, hunted-down thing of the wood. It
was a marvel. At last Lightfoot spoke:

"They are fighting at the foot of the hill!" she said, and Moonface at
once guessed the whole story, for she was not blind, this wide-mouthed
creature.

"Why did you run away?" she asked.

"I ran because I was scared. One of them must be dead before this time. I
am glad I am alive myself," Lightfoot gasped. Then the girl covered her
face with her hands as she recalled Ab's face, distorted by passion and
murderous hate, and Oak's equally maddened look as, before the onrush, he
had grasped her so firmly that the marks of his fingers remained blue upon
her arms and slender waist and neck.

Then Lightfoot, slow to regain her composure, told tremblingly the story
of all that had occurred, finding comfort in the unaffrighted look upon
the face, as well as in the reassuring talk, of her easy-going,
unimaginative and cheerful and faithful companion. She remained as a guest
at the cave overnight and the next forenoon, when she took her way for
home, she was accompanied by Moonface. Gradually, as the hours passed,
Lightfoot regained something of her usual frame of mind and a little of
her ordinary manner of careless light-heartedness, but when home had been
reached and the girls had rested and eaten and she heard Moonface telling
anew for her the story of the flight in the wood, while her father,
Hilltop, and her two strapping brothers listened with interest, but with
no degree of excitement, she felt again the wild alarm and horror and
uncertainty which had affected her when first she fled from what was to
her so dreadful. She crept away from the cave door near which the others
sat enjoying the balmy midsummer afternoon, beckoning to one of her
brothers to follow her, as the big fellow did unquestioningly, for
Lightfoot had been, almost from young girlhood, the dominant force in the
family, even the strong father, though it was contrary to the spirit of
the time, admiring and yielding to his one daughter without much comment.
The great, hulking youth, well armed and ready for any adventure, joined
her, nothing both, and the two disappeared, like shadows, in the depths of
the forest.

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