Kitabı oku: «In the Morning of Time», sayfa 10
Absorbed in meditations upon his new weapons, Grôm set himself to build a small fire before the entrance of the grotto. The red coals from his fire-basket he surrounded and covered with dry grass, dead twigs, and small sticks. Then, getting down upon all fours, he blew long and steadily into the mass till the smoke which curled up from it was streaked with thin flames. As the flames curled higher, his ears caught the sound of something stirring within the cave. He looked up, peering between the little coils of smoke, and saw a pair of eyes, very close to the ground, glaring forth at him from the darkness.
With one hand, he coolly but swiftly fed the fire to fuller volume, while with the other he reached for and clutched his club. The eyes drew back slowly to the depths of the cave. Appearing not to have observed them, Grôm piled the fire with heavier and heavier fuel, till it was blazing strongly and full of well-lighted brands. Then he stood up, seized a brand, and hurled it into the cave. There was a harsh snarl, and the eyes disappeared, the owner of them having apparently shrunk off to one side.
A moment or two later the interior was suddenly lighted up with a smoky glare. The brand had fallen on a heap of withered grass which had formerly been Grôm’s couch. Grôm set his teeth and swung up his club; and in the same instant there shot forth two immense cave-hyenas, mad with rage and terror.
The great beasts were more afraid of the sudden flare within than of the substantial and dangerous fire without. The first swerved just in time to escape the fire, and went by so swiftly that the stroke of Grôm’s club caught him only a light, glancing blow on the rump. But the second of the pair, the female, was too close behind to swerve in time. She dashed straight through the fire, struck Grôm with all her frantic weight, knocked him flat, and tore off howling down the valley, leaving a pungent trail of singed fur on the air.
Uninjured save for an ugly scratch, which bled profusely, down one side of his face, Grôm picked himself up in a rage and started after the fleeing beasts. But his common sense speedily reasserted itself. He grunted in disgust, turned back to the fire, and was soon absorbed in new experiments with the bow. As for the blaze within the cave, he troubled himself no more about it. He knew it would soon burn out. And it would leave the cave well cleansed of pestilential insects.
All that afternoon he experimented with his bundle of shafts, to find what length and what weight would give the best results. One of the arrows he shattered completely, by driving it, at short range, straight against the rock-face of the mountain. Two others he lost, by shooting them, far beyond his expectations, over the edge of the plateau and down into the dense thickets below him, where he did not care to search too closely by reason of the peril of snakes. The bow, as his good luck would have it, though short and clumsy was very strong, being made of a stick of dry upland hickory. And the cord of raw hide was well-seasoned, stout and tough; though it had a troublesome trick of stretching, which forced Grôm to restring it many times before all the stretch was out of it.
Having satisfied himself as to the power of his bow and the range of his arrows, Grôm set himself next to the problem of marksmanship. Selecting a plant of prickly pear, of about the dimensions of a man, he shot at it, at different ranges, till most of its great fleshy leaves were shredded and shattered. With his straight eye and his natural aptitude, he soon grasped the idea of elevation for range, and made some respectable shooting. He also found that he could guide the arrow without crooking his finger around it. His elation was so extreme that he quite forgot to eat, till the closing in of darkness put an end to his practice. Then, piling high his fire as a warning to prowlers, he squatted in the mouth of the cave and made his meal. For water he had to go some little way below the lip of the plateau; but carrying a blazing balsam-knot he had nothing to fear from the beasts that lay in ambush about the spring. They slunk away sullenly at the approach of the waving flame.
That night Grôm slept securely, with three fires before his door. Every hour or two, vigilant woodsman that he was, he would wake up to replenish the fires, and be asleep again even in the act of lying down. And when the dawn came red and amber around the shoulder of the saw-toothed peak, he was up again and out into the chill, sweet air with his arrows.
The difficulty which now confronted him was that of giving his shafts a penetrating point. Being of a very hard-fibered cane, akin to bamboo, they would take a kind of splintering-point of almost needle sharpness. But it was fragile; and the cane being hollow, the point was necessarily on one side, which affected the accuracy of the flight. There were no flints in the neighborhood, or slaty rocks, which he could split into edged and pointed fragments. He tried hardening his points in the fire; but the results were not altogether satisfactory. He thought of tipping some of the shafts with thorns, or with the steely points of the old aloe leaves; but he could not, at the moment, devise such a method of fixing these formidable weapons in place as would not quite destroy their efficiency. Finally he made up his mind that the thing to use would be bone, ground into a suitable shape between two stones. But this was a matter that would have to await his return to the Caves, and would then call for much careful devising. For the present he would perforce content himself with such points as he had fined down and hardened in the fire.
This matter settled in his mind, Grôm burned to put his wonderful new weapon to practical test. He descended cautiously the steep slope from the eastern edge of his plateau–a broken region of ledges, subtropical thickets, and narrow, grassy glades, with here and there some tree of larger growth rising solitary like a watch-tower. Knowing this was a favorite feeding-hour for many of the grass-eaters, he hid himself in the well-screened crotch of a deodar, overlooking a green glade, and waited.
He had not long to wait, for the region swarmed with game. Out from a runway some thirty or forty yards up the glade stepped a huge, dun-colored bull, with horns like scimitars each as long as Grôm’s arm. His flanks were scarred with long wounds but lately healed, and Grôm realized that he was a solitary, beaten and driven out from his herd by some mightier rival. The bull glanced warily about him, and then fell to cropping the grass.
The beast offered an admirable target. Grôm’s arrow sped noiselessly between the curtaining branches, and found its mark high on the bull’s fore-shoulder. It penetrated–but not to a depth of more than two or three inches. And Grôm, though elated by his good shot, realized that such a wound would be nothing more than an irritant.
Startled and infuriated, the bull roared and pawed the sod, and glared about him to locate his unseen assailant. He had not the remotest idea of the direction from which the strange attack had come. The galling smart in his shoulder grew momentarily more severe. He lashed back at it savagely with the side of his horn, but the arrow was just out of his reach. Then, bewildered and alarmed, he tried to escape from this new kind of fly with the intolerable sting by galloping furiously up and down the glade. As he passed the deodar, Grôm let drive another arrow, at close range. This, too, struck, and stuck. But it did not go deep enough to produce any serious effect. The animal roared again, stared about him as if he thought the place was bewitched, and plunged headlong into the nearest thicket, tearing out both arrows as he went through the close-set stems. Grôm heard him crashing onward down the slope, and smiled to think of the surprise in store for any antagonist that might cross the mad brute’s path.
This experiment upon the wild bull had shown Grôm one thing clearly. He must arm his arrows with a more penetrating point. Until he could carry out his idea of giving them tips of bones, he must find some shoots of solid, pithless growth to take the place of his light hollow canes. For the next hour or two he searched the jungle carefully and warily, looking for a young growth that might immediately serve his purpose.
But there in the jungle everything that was hard enough was crooked or gnarled, everything that was straight enough was soft and sappy. It was not till the sun was almost over his head, and the heat was urging him back to the coolness of his grotto, that he came across something worth making a trial of. On a bleak wind-swept knoll, far out on the mountain-side, lay the trunk of an old hickory-tree, which had evidently been shattered by lightning. From the roots, tenacious of life, had sprung up a throng of saplings, ranging from a foot or two in height to the level of Grôm’s head. They were as straight and slim as the canes. And their hardness was proved to Grôm’s satisfaction when he tried to break them off. They were tough, too, so that he almost lost his patience over them, before he learned that the best way to deal with them was to strip them down, in the direction of the fiber, where they sprang from the parent trunk or root. Having at length gathered an armful, he returned to his grotto and proceeded to shape the refractory butts in the fire. As he squatted between the cave door and the fire he made his meal of raw flesh and plantains, and gazed out contemplatively over the vast, rankly-green landscape below him, musing upon the savage and monstrous strife which went on beneath that mask of wide-flung calm. And as he pondered, the fire which he had subjugated was quietly doing his work for him.
The result was beyond his utmost expectations. After judicious charring, the ends being turned continually in the glowing coals, he rubbed away the charred portions between two stones, and found that he could thus work up an evenly-rounded point. The point thus obtained was keen and hard; and as he balanced this new shaft in his hand he realized that its weight would add vastly to its power of penetration. When he tried a shot with it, he found that it flew farther and straighter. It drove through the tough, fleshy leaf of the prickly pear as if it hardly noticed the obstruction. He fashioned himself a half-dozen more of these highly-efficient shafts, and then set out again–this time down the ravine–to seek a living target for his practice.
The ravine was winding and of irregular width, terraced here and there with broken ledges, here and there cut into by steep little narrow gullies. Its bottom was in part bare rock; but wherever there was an accumulation of soil, and some tiny spring oozing up through the fissures, there the vegetation grew rank, starred with vivid blooms of canna and hibiscus. In many places the ledges were draped with a dense curtain of the flat-flowered, pink-and-gold mesembryanthemum. It was a region well adapted to the ambuscading beasts; and Grôm moved stealthily as a panther, keeping for the most part along the upper ledges, crouching low to cross the open spots, and slipping into cover every few minutes to listen and peer and sniff.
Presently he came to a spot which seemed to offer him every advantage as a place of ambush. It was a ledge some twenty feet above the valley level, with a sort of natural parapet behind which he could crouch, and, unseen, keep an eye on all the glades and runways below. Behind him the rock-face was so nearly perpendicular that no enemy could steal upon him from the rear. He laid his club and his spear down beside him, selected one of his best arrows, and hoped that a fat buck would come by, or one of those little, spotted, two-toed horses whose flesh was so prized by the people of the Caves. Such a prize would be a proof to all the tribe of the potency of his new weapon.
For nearly an hour he waited, moveless, save for his ranging eyes, as the rock on which he leaned. To a hunter like Grôm, schooled to infinite patience, this was nothing. He knew that, in the woods, if one waits long enough and keeps still enough, he is bound to see something interesting. At last it came. It was neither the fat buck nor the little two-toed horse with dapple hide, but a young cow-buffalo. Grôm noticed at once that she was nervous and puzzled. She seemed to suspect that she was being followed and was undecided what to do. Once she faced about angrily, staring into the coverts behind her, and made as if to charge. Had she been an old cow, or a bull, she would have charged; but her inexperience made her irresolute. She snorted, faced about again, and moved on, ears, eyes and wide nostrils one note of wrathful interrogation. She was well within range, and Grôm would have tried a shot at her except for his seasoned wariness. He would rather see, before revealing himself, what foe it was that dared to trail so dangerous a quarry. The buffalo moved on slowly out of range, and vanished down a runway; and immediately afterwards the stealthy pursuer came in view.
To Grôm’s amazement, it was neither a lion nor a bear. It was a man, of his own tribe. And then he saw it was none other than the great chief, Bawr himself, hunting alone after his haughty and daring fashion. Between Grôm and Bawr there was the fullest understanding, and Grôm would have whistled that plover-cry, his private signal, but for the risk of interfering with Bawr’s chase. Once more, therefore, he held himself in check; while Bawr, his eyes easily reading the trail, crept on with the soundless step of a wild cat.
But Grôm was not the only hunter lying in ambush in the sun-drenched ravine. Out from a bed of giant, red-blooming canna arose the diabolical, grinning head and monstrous shoulders of a saber-tooth, and stared after Bawr. Then the whole body emerged with a noiseless bound. For a second the gigantic beast stood there, with one paw uplifted, its golden-tawny bulk seeming to quiver in the downpour of intense sunlight. It was a third as tall again at the shoulders as the biggest Himalayan tiger, its head was flat-skulled like a tiger’s, and its upper jaw was armed with two long, yellow, saber-like tusks, projecting downwards below the lower jaw. This appalling monster started after Bawr with a swift, crouching rush, as silent, for all its weight, as if its feet were shod with thistledown.
Grôm leapt to his feet with a wild yell of warning, at the same time letting fly an arrow. In his haste the shaft went wide. Bawr, looking over his shoulder, saw the giant beast almost upon him. With a tremendous bound he gained the foot of a tree. Dropping his club and spear, he sprang desperately, caught a branch, and swung himself upward.
But the saber-tooth was already at his heels, before he had time to swing quite out of reach. The gigantic brute gathered itself for a spring which would have enabled it to pluck Bawr from his refuge like a ripe fig. But that spring was never delivered. With a roar of rage the monster turned instead, and bit furiously at the shaft of an arrow sticking in its flank. Grôm’s second shaft had flown true; and Bawr, greatly marveling, drew up his legs to a place of safety.
With the fire of that deep wound in its entrails the saber-tooth forgot all about its quarry in the tree. It had caught sight of Grôm when he uttered his yell of warning, and it knew instantly whence the strange attack had come. It bit off the protruding shaft; and then, fixing its dreadful eyes on Grôm, it ceased its snarling and came charging for the ledge with a rush which seemed likely to carry it clear up the twenty-foot perpendicular of smooth rock.
Grôm, enamored of the new weapon, forgot the spear which was likely to be far more efficient at these close quarters. Leaning far out over the parapet, he drew his arrow to the head and let drive just as the monster reared itself, open-jawed, at the wall. The pointed hickory went down into the gaping gullet, and stood out some inches at the side of the neck. With a horrible coughing screech the monster recoiled, put its head between its paws, and tried to claw the anguish from its throat. But after a moment, seeming to realize that this was impossible, it backed away, gathered itself together, and sprang for the ledge. It received another of Grôm’s shafts deep in the chest, without seeming to notice the wound; and its impetus was so tremendous that it succeeded in getting its fore-paws fixed upon the ledge. Clinging there, its enormous pale-green eyes staring straight into Grôm’s, it struggled to draw itself up all the way–an effort in which it would doubtless have succeeded at once but for that first arrow in its entrails. The iron claws of its hinder feet rasped noisily on the rock-face.
Grôm dropped his bow beside him and reached for the spear. His hand grasped the club instead; but there was no time to change. Swinging the stone-head weapon in air, he brought it down, with a grunt of huge effort, full upon one of those giant paws which clutched the edge of the parapet. Crushed and numbed, the grip of that paw fell away; but at the same moment one of the hinder paws got over the edge, and clung. And there the monster hung, its body bent in a contorted bow.
Bawr, meanwhile, seeing Grôm’s peril, had dropped from his tree, snatched up his spear and club, and rushed in to the rescue. It was courage, this, of the finest, counting no odds; for down there on the level he would have stood no ghost of a chance had the beast turned back upon him. Grôm yelled to him to keep away, and swung up his club for another shattering blow. But in that same moment the great glaring eyes filmed and rolled upwards; blood spouted from between the gaping jaws; and with a spluttering cough the monster lost its hold. It fell, with a soft but jarring thud, upon its back, and slowly rolled over upon its side, pawing the air aimlessly. The arrow in the throat had done its work.
With fine self-restraint Bawr refrained from striking, that he might seem to usurp no share in Grôm’s amazing achievement. He stood leaning upon his spear, calmly watching the last feeble paroxysm, till Grôm came scrambling down from the ledge and stood beside him. He took the bow and arrows, and examined them in silence. Then he turned upon Grôm with burning eyes.
“You found the Fire for our people. You saved our people from the hordes of the Bow-legs. You have saved my life now, slaying the monster from very far off with these little sticks which you have made. It is you who should be Chief, not I.”
Grôm laughed and shook his head. “Bawr is the better man of us two,” said he positively, “and he is a better chief. He governs the people, while I go away and think new things. And he is my friend. Look, I will teach him now this new thing. And we will make another just like it, that when we return to the Caves Bawr also shall know how to strike from very far off.”
With their rough-edged spear-heads of flint they set themselves to the skinning of the saber-tooth. Then they went back to the high plateau, where Bawr was taught to shoot a straight shaft. And on the following day they returned to the fires of the tribe, carrying between them, shoulder high, slung upon their two spears, this first trophy of the bow, the monstrous head and hide of the saber-tooth.
CHAPTER IX
THE DESTROYING SPLENDOR
I
To Grôm, hunting farther to the south of the Tribal Fires than he had ever ranged before, came suddenly a woman running, mad with fright, a baby clutched to her bosom. She fell at Grôm’s feet, gibbering breathlessly, and plainly imploring his protection. Both she and the child were streaming with blood, and covered with strange cup-like wounds, as if the flesh had been gouged out of them with some irresistible circular instrument.
Grôm swiftly fitted an arrow to his bow, and peered through the trees to see what manner of adversary the fugitive was like to bring upon him. At the same time, he gave a piercing cry, which was answered at once from some distance behind him.
Having satisfied himself (the country being fairly open) that the woman’s pursuer, whatever it might be, was not close upon her heels, and that no immediate danger was in view, he turned his attention upon the woman herself. She was not of his race, and he looked down upon her with cold aversion. At first glance he thought she was one of the Bow-legs. But the color of her skin, where it could be seen for the blood, was different, being rather of a copper-red; and she was neither so hairy on the body nor of so ape-like proportions. She was sufficiently hideous, however, and of some race plainly inferior to the People of the Caves. The natural instinct of a Cave Man would have been to knock her and her offspring on the head without ceremony–an effective method of guarding his more highly developed breed from the mixture of an inferior blood. But Grôm, the Chief and the wise man, had many vague impulses moving him at times which were novel to the human play-fellows of Earth’s childhood. He disliked hurting a woman or a child. He might, quite conceivably, have refused to concern himself with the suppliant before him, and merely left her and her baby to the chances of the jungle. But the peculiar character of her wounds interested him. She aroused his curiosity. Here was a new mystery for him to investigate. The woman was saved.
Knowing a few words of the Bow-legs’ tongue, which he had learned from his lame slave Ook-ootsk, he addressed the crouching woman, telling her not to fear. The tongue was unintelligible to her, but the tones of his voice seemed to reassure her. She sat up, revealing again the form of the little one, which she had been shielding with her hair and her bosom as if she feared the tall white hunter might dash its brains out; and Grôm noted with keen interest that the child also had one of those terrible, cup-shaped wounds, almost obliterating its fat, copper-colored shoulder. He saw, also, that the woman’s face, though uncomely, was more intelligent and human than the bestial faces of the Bow-legs’ women. It was a broad face, with very small, deep-set eyes, high cheek bones, a tiny nose, and a very wide mouth, and it looked as if some one had sat on it hard and pushed it in. The idea made him smile, and the smile completed the woman’s reassurance. She poured a stream of chatter quite unlike the clicks and barkings of the Bow-legs. Then she crept closer to Grôm’s feet, and proceeded to give her little one the breast. It was twisting uneasily with the pain of its dreadful wound, but it nursed hungrily, and with the prudent stoicism of a wild creature it made no outcry.
As Grôm stood studying the pair, the mother kept throwing glances of horror over her shoulder, as if expecting her assailants to arrive at any moment. Grôm followed her eyes, but there was no sign of any pursuit. Then he observed the fugitives’ wounds more closely, and noted that the blood upon them was already, in most cases, pretty well coagulated. He noted also certain other wounds, deep, narrow punctures, like stabs. He guessed that they could not be much less than an hour old. The Thing, whatever it was, which had inflicted them–the Thing with so strange a mouth, and so strange a way of using it–had apparently given up the pursuit. Grôm’s curiosity burned within him, and he was angry at the woman because she could not speak to him in his own language, or at least in that of the Bow-legs. It seemed to him willful obstinacy on her part to refuse to understand the Bow-legs’ tongue. He stooped over her, and roughly examined one of the wounds with his huge fingers. She winced, but made no complaint, only covering her baby with her hair and her arms in terror lest it should suffer a like harsh handling.
With a qualm of compunction, which rather puzzled him, Grôm gave over his investigating, and turned to a tall, slim youth with a great mop of chestnut hair who at this moment came running up to him. It was A-ya’s young brother, Mô, Grôm’s favorite follower and hunting mate; and he had come at speed, being very swift of foot, in answer to Grôm’s signal. Breathing quickly, he stood at Grôm’s side, and looked down with wonder and dislike upon the crouching woman.
Briefly Grôm explained, and then pointed to the inexplicable wounds. The youth, unable to believe that any human creature should be unable to comprehend plain human speech, such as that of the Cave People, tried his own hand at questioning the woman. He got a flow of chatter in reply, but, being able to make nothing out of it, he imagined it was not speech at all, and turned away angrily, thinking that she mocked him. Grôm, smiling at the mistake, explained that the woman was talking her own language, which he intended presently to learn as he had learned that of the Bow-legs.
“But now,” said he, “we will go and see what it is that has bitten the woman. It is surely something with a strange mouth.”
Mô, who was not only brave to recklessness, but who would have followed Grôm through the mouth of hell, sprang forward eagerly. Grôm, who realized that the mystery before him was a perilous one, and who loved to do dangerous things in a prudent manner, looked to his bow-string and saw that his arrows were handy in his girdle, before he started on the venture. Besides his bow he carried the usual two spears and his inseparable stone-headed club. Though danger was his delight, it was not the danger itself but the thrill of overcoming it that he loved.
The moment he stepped forward, however, the woman divined his purpose and leapt wildly to her feet. She sprang straight in front of him, screaming and gesticulating. She was plainly horror-stricken at the thought that the two men should venture into the perils from which she had so hardly escaped. To Grôm’s keen intelligence her gestures were eloquent. She managed to convey to him the idea of great numbers, and the impossibility of his dealing with them. When he attempted to pass her, she threw herself down and clung to his feet, shaking with her terror. When she saw that Grôm was at last impressed, she stretched herself out as if dead, and then, after a few moments of ghastly rigidity, with fixed, staring eyes, she came to and held up one hand with the fingers outspread.
This frantic pantomime Grôm could read in no other way than as an attempt to tell him that the unknown Something had killed five of the woman’s companions. The information gave him pause. Adventurous as he was, he had small respect for mere pig-headed recklessness. He was resolved to solve the problem–but after all it could abide his more thorough preparation.
“Come back,” he ordered, turning to the impetuous Mô. “She says they are too many for us two. They have killed five of her people. We will go back to the Caves, and after three sleeps for good counsel, we will return with fire and find the destroying Thing.”
II
On their return to the Caves, Grôm gave the strange woman and her baby to his faithful slave Ook-ootsk, who accepted the gift with enthusiasm because, being a Bow-leg, he had not been allowed to take any of the Cave Women to wife. He lavished his attentions upon the unhappy stranger, but he could make no more of her speech than Grôm had done. The girl A-ya, however, in a moment of peculiar insight had gathered, or thought she gathered, from the stranger’s signs, that the dreadful and destroying Thing was something that flew–therefore, a great flesh-eating bird. But she gathered, also, that it was something which in some way bore a resemblance to fire–for the woman, after getting over her first terror of the dancing flames, kept pointing to them and then to her wounds in a most suggestive way. This, however, as Grôm rather scornfully pointed out, was too absurd. There was nothing that could be in the least like fire itself; and the wounds of the fugitives had no likeness whatever to the corrosive bites of the flame. A-ya took the correction submissively, but held her own thought; and when a day or two later, events proved her to have been right, she discreetly refrained from calling her lord’s attention to the fact–a point upon which Grôm was equally reserved.
With so provocative a mystery waiting to be solved, Grôm could not long rest idle. Had she not known well it would be a waste of breath, A-ya would have tried to dissuade him from the perilous, and to her mind profitless, adventure. It was one she shrank from in spite of her tried courage and her unwavering trust in Grôm’s prowess. The mystery of it daunted her. She feared it in the same way that she feared the dark. 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.
It was a very little party which started southward from the Caves–simply Grôm, A-ya, young Mô, and a dwarfish kinsman of Grôm’s, named Loob, who was the swiftest runner in the tribe and noted for his cunning as a scout. He could go through underbrush like a shadow, and hide where there was apparently no hiding-place, making himself indistinguishable from the surroundings like a squatting partridge. Each one carried a bow, two light spears, and a club–except A-ya, who had no club, and only one spear. The weapon she chiefly relied upon was the bow, which she loved with passion. She considered herself the inventor of it; and in the accuracy of her shooting she outdid even Grôm. In addition to these weapons, each member of the party except the leader himself carried a fire-basket, in which a mass of red coals mixed with punk smouldered in a bed of moist clay.
The little expedition traveled Indian file, Grôm leading the way, with A-ya at his heels, then Loob the Scout, and young Mô bringing up the rear. They had started about dawn, when the first of the morning rose was just beginning to pale the cave-mouth fires. They traveled swiftly, but every two hours or so they would make a brief halt beside a spring to drink and breathe themselves and to look to the precious fires in the fire-baskets. When it wanted perhaps an hour of noon, they came to a little patch of meadow surrounding a solitary Judas-tree covered with bloom. Here they built a fire, for the replenishing of the coals in the fire-baskets, and as a menace to prowling beasts. Then they dined on their sun-dried meat and on ripe plantains gathered during the journey. Having dined, the three younger members of the party stretched themselves out in the shade for their noon sleep, while Grôm, whose restless brain never suffered him to sleep by day, kept watch, and pondered the adventure which lay before them.
