The Cave Man (Lancaster)

by G. B. Lancaster

The Cave Man

By G. B. Lancaster
Author of “The Knowledge of Two,” etc.

IN the kitchen, Sallie sang at the washtub, a low, monotonous crooning to the baby she rocked, with a foot on the lever that the Cave Man had fixed to the cradle. Up the stair—which was no more than a naked ladder with its lip hooked over the unboarded end of the ceiling—Janice was singing, too, in a wordless, reckless carol such as the oriole uses to express his pride when he preens his glossy black and orange at the mirror of some clear pool.

Janice preened at a six-by-seven-inch glass hung to a rafter on the rough wall. Her little white bed stood so close under the slant of the attic roof that she woke each morning to stare intimately at the thready brush marks where the Cave Man had lately whitewashed it. The stove, with its awkward joint thrusting out above the window, was weekly blackened by Sallie, and the skins that lay about the board floor—brown bear and lynx and deer, and, by the bed, a neatly sewed mat of gopher pelts for Janice's white, pampered feet—had been, shot all up and down the Northwest by the Cave Man. The jug and pitcher on the covered box that served as washstand were of the finest ware—one of Sallies wedding presents, and the linen smelled of lavender, as all Sallie's belongings had done in the long ago,

These things fully explained how her host and hostess had given of their utmost in welcome; but Janice's first night in the shack among the scattered woods of the prairie foothills had been an experience that no New York or university training had prepared her to face without dismay. The first awakening had come with the information that the alternative to her own marble-and-nickel-appointed bath was a tin tub every other night in the scullery—the Cave Man bathed at dawn, even with the thermometer thirty below, as now—and she had been awakening in one way or another ever since, and—to her never-ending amazement—enjoying it.

When Sallie Warrender had stepped out of those freshman rooms at college which she shared with Janice straight into the arms of Dick Luxford, who had instantly removed her to what was indubitably another planet, Janice, outraged and forlorn, had beat her brains and those of her friends for an explanation.

“I called him the Cave Man,” she had said to a sympathetic sophomore. “Sallie was sitting right here”—she had pointed to the exact spot on the flowered rug—“sorting out cotillion favors, and she came on one of Dick Luxford's. I had been at that party. My dear, I'll pledge my life it was his first. He stood against the wall like a huge, upended grizzly, and one expected him to roar instead of speak, though he looked pleasant enough, in a dark, rough-hewn, unfinished kind of way. I said that to Sallie. I called him a bear and a cave man. I said:

“'If he's come East hunting a wife, I'll know he's found her when I hear of one of my friends being clubbed and dragged out of the city by the hair.'”

“Sallie stuck up her chin—you know what a firm little pointed chin it is, for all her fairness and babyishness?—and she said:

“'I'd sooner have a man do that way than come around calculating if my dollars and his would be enough to buy him an extra automobile.'

“She did, sure as I live. And next thing I knew he had clubbed her and gone off with her. With Sallie—a little pale imp with no looks and no conversation! Probably he thought that she could cook.”

“Probably he was afraid to aspire to a beauty like yourself,” said the sophomore, departing; and Janice had nibbled candy and considered, after the scientific methods by which she usually dissected men.

“He never looked at me—or at any other girl. Can there be a spark in Sallie that appeals especially to cave men? She's a dear, but unless he's abnormal—— Is he really not sufficiently educated to recognize beauty when he sees it? Or does the West still hold relics of the original cave men, who were not particular as to the number of teeth or eyes their mates might have so long as there. was some one to cook for them and rear their brood? I believed I'd proved to the edge of exhaustion that there is only one type of man when he's looking for some one to love. If there is another and a rarer type, and Sallie has had the luck to annex it—why, I'll have to ask them to visit us, even if they come dressed in skins and woad.”

But that had been years ago. Janice had gone into society and worn jewels and broken hearts and forgotten Sallie and the Cave Man, until a certain brilliantly artificial knack of story writing had gained her a flash of fame and she had been seized with the imperious need of seeing life “in the raw,” in order to tell an idle world about it.

Searching through an old address book for inspiration, she had come on Sallie's name and had written straightaway:

“I want to see life as it was in the beginning before we began to tell lies, and I can afford to pay for my fancy, Tell me where to go, Sallie dear.”

“Come here,” Sallie had written back. “Dick and I and the Indians fill the bill. We can give you enough food and fresh air, and hardly any of anything else, and our charge is seven dollars, You can have all the attic beyond the rubberoid partition—Dick and I and the babies have the other side—and all the Rockies and the prairies and the woods beyond your window—no extra charge for regular sunsets and northern lights. But don't bring any of those arks you always had to have for your clothes. There is only one barn, and the mare and the cow need most of that—with the chickens.”

For three days, Janice's thirst for local color had failed. Then curiosity had taken her by the hand and led her into the unknown.

Here, during several days of secret and violent revolt, she had cried to herself: “How could Sallie do it? How could she?” Then, for a space, her questing spirit had held its tongue; after which it had spoken, confessing that it knew now how Sallie could. Janice had choked it at this point, telling it fiercely that it couldn't know; had no right to know; didn't and never would know. By every artifice of evasion familiar to women, she had evaded the crux of the matter for over two months: “But it is all so primitive and unnaturally natural, and it would be absurd to go home without getting more local color out of those Indians at the crossing, even if they do smell.” “But I never saw half the world from one window before, and I never ate corn cake and milk and went to bed at nine o'clock since I was five.” “But the babies are darlings, and dear old Sallie is none the less a tragedy because she doesn't know it. And to think that a woman—any woman—who scrapes her hair back till it raises her eyebrows and wears a checked apron to supper could hold the exclusive interest of even a cave man for seven years! Is there one girl in little old New York who would believe that without putting it to the proof? Is there?”

At this point she usually preferred to keep her thoughts nebulous and out of words.

She was trying to do so now, as she clipped the gray chinchilla hood close around the warm-tinted oval face and the pushing tendrils of bronze hair. Her singing had ceased some time back—at the moment when she had heard the Cave Man run the barn door open across the yard and speak to the mare in that vigorous voice of his, to be precise. She had not needed his voice or the heavy hurry of the shutter obeying its master to bring him to her thoughts. He had been the essence of the place since the beginning; primitive enough, with a certain crude, unstudied ease such as belonged to the animals and the woods; silent and hard as a frosty day when the mood took him; warm and boisterous as a Chinook wind when he those to play with the babies or to beguile Janice and Sallie down a snow slope on a hand sled; strangely and father dreadfully intriguing when he talked in the half lights of cold-blooded brutalities, and fiery give-and-take between passionate women and men, and justice more savage than the sin itself, and comedies such as the gladiators might have laughed at.

It was the naturalness of his outlook that so shook her, flashing before her dizzy glimpses of abysmal fires, primeval judgments, laws of beast and man still interlinked as they had been at the beginning. She had come out to look for types, and he was no type that she recognized. All her little civilized weapons could not plumb him; all her arts he seemed to burst through as a bear bursts a spider web.

How much of him Sallie interpreted she could never guess. Sallie was wound in a busy cocoon of her own spinning, and this big, indifferent savage of hers appeared content to leave her there. At her washtub she sang yet, to his child, monotonously, flatly, and the girl above looked at the dazzling reflection set in gray chinchilla and wondered if any woman but Sallie would have been so unafraid of the mischief that those scarlet lips and roguish dimples and limpid eyes and nose and forehead of the Goddess of Liberty had wrought and might again.

“Janice!”

It was the clear, far-echoing call that had sounded through these latter days, and yet it was not the same. Rough and indifferent it had been at first; then shy and abrupt; easily neutral after that; friendly; eager—her practiced ear had told off each stage with its accompaniments. Now it was not any of these, and because she knew why, she hesitated, with those limpid eyes shining back at her from the glass a little cruelly and the curved lips tight, while the silver-and-Russian-leather traveling clock on the packing box that served for a table ticked a half-minute round. She must hear him call again before she went. But it Sallie's voice that came up, hurried and kind as ever.

“Janice! Be quick, dear! Dick's waiting.”

“Coming,” she called, and her voice had something of the metallic, fluty sweetness of the veery; an exquisite voice, never slurred by the throb of the heart behind.

In the narrow passage, Sallie stood wiping her reddened arms in her apron, and through the door behind, the fretful wail of the baby and the smell of suds came out with a cloud of steam. Outside, where all the world sparkled like cut glass, the Cave Man was talking horse language to the impatient mare, and the grate of sleigh runners sounded on the frozen snow.

“Are you warm enough, Janice? Tell Dick not to forget the corn meal at Job's, will you? We're nearly out of it. Joan upset the barrel yesterday.”

Her voice was as faded as her fair hair and drawn little face. Her work-roughened hands were wrinkled with washing, and the neck above the ill-pinned collar showed scraggy already. To Janice, fresh from that intoxicating vision in the glass, came a flood of puzzled contempt and impatience. Sallie deserved what might befall her. Any woman deserved anything if she so wantonly and recklessly threw away all her sex's weapons. And if it were proved again that men were of one type only——

“I hear baby crying,” she said. “Shall I ask Dick to get some soothing syrup or something?”

“No. It's just his teeth. Only time can cure his troubles, poor little man. Run along, dear. You've got your snow boots? Dick said you meant to walk home across lots from the woods. That's right. Have a good time.”

The door shut, and in the narrow passage Janice stood a moment before she slowly went out to face that primal judgment and basic law which she had challenged last night in a man who had never whittled his outlook down to lesser, more civilized beliefs. The keen air caught her face with a stinging caress, and, as always, the great sweep of snowy earth and vivid sky and sunshine, dazzling among white, slim cottonwood boles, snatched her soul up a fiercely physical intensity of living such as seemed the natural environment of the Cave Man. He had rushed her up to this plane more than once of late, with that tremendous vitality of his which acted like a Valkyrie gallop on the senses. And all the while Sallie wore a checked apron and ignored the writer's necessity for studying type.

The scarlet-painted pung, with its shining runners and heap of black buffalo robes, struck an imperial note against the dull brown of the barn, the slaty-gray snake fence, and the squat white humps that were potato pit and muck heap. The mare, fretting until the bells on the headstall rang a merry peal, pranced around the yard with the runners jarring over the roughened slush that had hardened to iron. The man in the pung pulled her back on her haunches with a sudden drop of the left wrist and reached a great, sinewy hand to Janice.

“Hurry! She won't stand in this cold,” he said.

And then she was in, half flung against him; and the mare spun down the white road sheer into the horizon, with the sense of swiftness and wide, dazzling spaces and air like champagne to quicken the senses of woman and man and make the blood boil in their veins. He looked straight ahead as the mare plunged and fought the bit, shying at each snow-shrouded bush of saskatoon or willow and wincing from the shadow of a crow flying over. His mangy bearskin coat and cap, his beaded moccasins, with the double socks and the hide thongs bound close round the strong ankles, marked him definitely for an outlaw from Janice's own class; and no man she had ever known on Broadway had ever had that leather-brown skin, with the fierce blood hot under it, or those rough, jutting features and deep-set, brooding eyes, which were more intensely quick and alive than the eyes of a wild bird.

On his wrists the corded muscles stood like steel, and once or twice, as the pung swayed and leaped, a smile touched his set lips. He was the mare's master, as he was Sallie's, as he seemed to suggest himself the master of the woman beside him, who was hastily reviewing that hour of last night in order to find out where she stood. Where he stood, she could not guess, but she was very sure that he knew. He was that kind.

A part of her, used to the handling of men, pulsed with excitement while the snake fences reeled past with their tally sticks of bare cottonwood or Balm of Gilead or pine, and beyond the white roll of the downs the dim blue of the Rockies merged into the deep turquoise of the sky. But part of her, an unexplored part, was afraid. He had not spoken, except to the mare, when each curt word seemed to shatter almost visible crystals of light and cold. He had not looked, except that one swift glance when he had helped her into the pung. But that had disquieted her. It had been compact of so much that was new and yet old; old as the stone age, when such things as the clubbing of a gently brought up maiden were too ordinary for remark.

Last night he had looked like that for a moment—last night when Sallie had been putting the babies to bed upstairs, and she had been homesick for that life from which the leagues upon leagues of white desolation without divided her as death might have done, and he had sat by the fire, smoking, silent, with glowing eyes. There was ever more than a hint of primal springs in him when he sat thus, and step by step, goaded on by recklessness and the lure of the unknown, she had played with him, knowing at the back of her heart that it was not all play, until she had jerked a question from him:

“We appear funny to you, then? You want to put us in a story to astonish the Gentiles with when you get back?”

“Not funny,” she had corrected softly. “But perhaps I will put you in a story, if——”

“Well?” He had been filling the stove with wood, and he stood now, a billet yet in his hand, stooping slightly and yet alert, as the primitive man might have stood when he threw to kill. Eyes and manner had been somewhat startling. They had said so much more than occasion warranted, and the barbaric skins and Indian beadwork on the wall seemed as much a part of him as Sallie's poor little rosebud chintzes and cushions seemed a part of the woman.

“If I can find a big enough plot for you,” she had ended.

“Big enough? Oh, sure. How big a plot does it take to carry the fact that I begged old newspaper down at Job's to paper the scullery? Or that Sallie has been using wood lye for soap this year past? Or that I never got my new fence staked before fall because I hired myself out to chop wood down at the crossing for the steamers? How big a plot is it going to take to carry all that?”

“They are the real things, anyway. I wanted to know——”

“You might have spared—us.”

The words had come with the driving force of a a blow, but the pain behind them had brought her quickly to him. There had been a lithe, warm youth about her every movement and a skill in every inflection of her voice.

“Dick—my dear Dick, don't you know that I admire you and dear old Sallie to the point of idiocy? I'm speaking the absolute truth. Little plots will do for the little people of the world. There's nothing little out here—not even the daily chores. Men—forces—beliefs—they're all bigger and more terrible—and more natural. I love them, and yet they frighten me a little—as you do.”

His arm had stiffened as her hand had fallen on it. His eyes had fastened on hers as if seeking, challenging something. Then he had jerked away with a laugh.

“You? What do you know about men and forces? You're a little girl, Janice. Oh, you're clever. Most women are clever. But what do they know? My sakes, what do they think they know about men—and forces!”

“Really—but really, my good Dick,” she had said, standing before him with long-lashed eyes down and every slim, graceful line of her calculatingly demure, “when a girl has refused to marry thirty-odd men and unhappily foresees the certainty of having to refuse more, she may lay claim to knowing just a little about them, mayn't she?”

He had stooped to thrust more wood into the stove, but at that he had wheeled with his face suddenly dangerous.

“Do you let men fool around you that much?”

“But how can I help it?” The tone had been girlishly plaintive. Uptilted chin and drooping eyelids and curved red mouth had been alike maddening. The lamplight had made of the white throat such a gleaming ivory as any man with lips must have been fired to kiss. She had seen him flush and had known that the thought had come to him, and she had not moved. Then the kiss had fallen, quick and hot, just under the chin, and he had gone, and out across the yard she had heard the ring of his hurrying feet.

She had dropped down on Sallie's pink chintz covers and cushions, thrusting away the wolverine skin hung over the end of the couch. The savage smell and touch of that pelt, with all its threats and suggestions, had been too much for her; for now she she knew that she was not playing with ordinary lighted paper and matches any more. Every throbbing pulse in her crouched body had told her that there were cosmic passions loosing here—passions of flame and storm and great winds. If she had made this man mad, as she had made so many others, she would suffer for it as the others had never been able to make her suffer.

She had lain awake all night, not daring to confess that she was suffering now. She had gone with him next day at his command; for, although her very fibers had rebelled, her heart would not. Before this she had played the game for sheer amusement and because every one else did. She was playing it now, blind, exultant, driven on by powers that she could not fathom.

The mare swung along. obediently now. The white road lay empty before them. Quickly and surely as he did all things, he took the lines into his right hand, flung his left arm around her, and brought his lips hot against hers. And then, as if the touch had whirled him the devil knew whither, in a tempest of realization, his kisses rained like hail on cheeks and forehead and eyelids, and his grip tightened until she struggled for breath. Used as she was to the prayers and the despairs of men, blunted through many triumphs to the delicate reserves that had once been hers, the quick, purposeful savagery of this frightened her more than she guessed. He loosed her at length, reluctantly.

“That was better than last night,” he said.

“Stop this instant and let me get down!”

“Not on your life! You knew I'd do it when you came. You meant me to do it. You meant to make me crazy—and so I am crazy.” His arm tightened around her again. His laugh was as big and wild as himself and as the land that bred him. “Just you and I, my girl, my beauty! Nothing else matters—does it? We'll be crazy together! We've waited for each other long enough. How many generations? Why did I never see you when I was down East?”

“You talked to me several times. But that's true—you never saw me.”

“No.” He pushed her head back where it lay on the rough fur at his breast. “No. White as hill snow, and red as a sugar maple in fall, and sweet! There was never anything so sweet and soft! I want to crush you! And that little devil in your eyes—— Good God, you woman!”

There was nothing in her to resist the strength that drew her close or the broken words whispered with hot breath against her face. The flying passage of the trees and the keen rush of air and the vital sense of utter being burned all other thought out in fierce flame. If they could ride so forever—lawless; damned, if the world so chose; mixed in those undying elements of love and fieriest pain whereof, through the passionate striving of centuries, the soul was an was quickened and born! It intoxication such as only death could culminate, and while the sleigh spun humming as if it were the world itself, tushing them into infinity, some intuition in the woman prayed for death.

Then the mare swung about, as by custom, and stopped at the gate that led him into the maple wood, shaking her head in puzzlement at feeling no check on the reins. The man's arm was about the woman still, and the very breath on their lips was frozen, but the eyes that looked each into each were flame. Her blood was racing still with the wild thoughts and the wild gallop.

“Did you make Sallie feel like this? Did you?” she cried to him, and there was all the passionate jealousy of her primitive sisters in the words.

“Sallie? I don't know.” His chest was heaving and his hands shaking as he looked at her. At the mare's head-stall the nickel bells that he had cleaned that morning rang a witch melody.

“Did she make you feel like this? Don't tell me she did! Don't—tell—me——”

“I don't know.” He turned her face up between his ungloved hands. “When that dimple goes away——”

“You must know! I must know!” She wrenched free. 'Dick, what are we going to do—about Sallie?”

“I don't know any more than that chipmunk.” He stooped and kissed her. “I don't care. You've driven me crazy. Was I yours in the beginning—or Sallie's? I don't know. I'm yours now.”

“Dick! Don't! You frighten me!” She pressed her hands over her heart. “How can you be mine when—when Sallie——”

“You'll find out.” He laughed, hurling himself from the pung with the clumsy litheness of a bear. “I'm going to take you right off to Job's Corner and we'll catch the noon train out of here. We'll go through to the coast and——”

“No! No!” She sprang up, casting the silky buffalo robes from her. “No!”

He unlatched the gate and shoved it open with his shoulder. Then, as he swung to lead the mare through, the woodsman instinct in him pulled him up short, staring with narrowed eyes into the scattered wood where, among the checkers of light and shade, deep animal pads showed like bruises.

“Wolves,” he said, as if to himself. Then again, “Wolves.” He looked back at Janice. “They said there were wolves about, but I didn't expect a pack so early. They're hunting food. You get right back home now, Janice, and I'll come as soon as I can. They'll likely be around after the pigs to-night.”

Womanlike, she was offended by this sudden change of front.

“I think I'll go to Job's Corner and take the train out all the same.”

“You! Without me? No, my girl. But we'll settle the wolves first. I”—he laughed a little, with his eyes glancing over her—“I'd like to see blood to-night, wouldn't you?”

A faint howl that might have been the wind sounded through the stiff and lifeless trees. It gave poignancy to that great skin-clad figure with the burning eyes and the Old Testament heart. With a half-hysterical laugh, Janice turned from him and ran down the little foot trail that led across lots back to the house. In the distance one thin fiber of smoke stained the vivid sky, and it brought back a vivid picture of Sallie bent above the washtub. Behind her the jingle of sleigh bells died, and between the two she ran alone through a wide and accusing world, which stared with unwinking eyes from every glittering facet of frozen snow.

She was exhausted beyond thought when she crept into the house and up the stair, unseen by Sallie, and it was out of a half sleep that the sleigh bells brought her later. She sat up with hands over her eyes. Then, unable to resist the impulse, she went to the window.

Sallie, dozing with the fretful child in her arms and the westing sun low through the window on her tired face, woke startled at the figure, terror incarnate, in the doorway. To the stammering words and gestures, she gave little heed. She laid the baby down and ran out. The mare, caked with foam, was nosing around the barn door, and behind her clanged the cracked shafts and the nickel front rail of the pung. The lines trailed, unbuckled, and there was a deep cut on the mare's flank as if she had been struck by a flying sliver.

Sallie went to the gate and looked down the road. She wheeled and looked across the level lots, now scarlet sheer away to the pure, pale green of the sky. The world was soundless, contracting already in the increasing grip of the frost. Janice leaned in the doorway, with that hysterical clutch at her throat again. She wanted to say:

“It is not you who have lost him. It is I. He is mine.”

Sallie walked over to the mare, called her by name, and led her into the barn. And Janice,unheeding the crying of the children, fled up the stair again and fell on her bed, face down. What Sallie would do she could not guess, any more than she could ask. What had happened she dared not think. He stood in her heart, the most potent, virile presence that had ever crossed her life. She could no more think of him dead—— And yet, up there in the swift-closing dusk, she saw him dead a thousand times, while her flesh grew cold and her spirit sick and she shuddered down on the bed and moaned.

There was a step on the stair and Sallie came in. She wore the fur coat brought her by the Cave Man from Alaska and her skirt was kilted high above her heavy snow boots. A Ian tern swung in her gloved hand, and beneath the furred hood her pale eyes gleamed out with a frosty light.

“Get on your thickest things and come along, Janice,” she said. “We're going to look for him.”

“Sallie! We can't! How can we? We don't know where he is! Hadn't we best get the Indians from the crossing?”

“The crossing is eight miles off across the muskeg, as you know. We're going to find him. Be quick. Take off that skirt. It's too long. We can't afford to hamper ourselves. Put on this.”

Dazedly the girl obeyed. There was electric force in the very quiet of that voice. But, fumbling with her coat but tons, she began to cry.

“What shall we do? Oh, what shall we do? There are wolves about——”

“I know. I've Dick's loaded gun. I heard them just now—in the woods. Come!”

“Sallie, I can't! I can't! I'm frightened! I can't go into the woods!”

“You will. You're big and strong. I couldn't move him if—if he's hurt.”

“But the children! Suppose the wolves get into the house. Sallie, think of the children!”

“I'm thinking of my man.” The words came like a sudden leap of flame. “I've barricaded the children in as best I can. I think they'll be all right.” For a moment the mother agony sounded in her voice. Then she stepped on to the stair. “I've got some hot coffee for you. Be quick!”

The white world into which Janice presently went was unearthly. Among the frozen stars, the northern lights blew up like tinted smoke to the zenith, held their witches' dance to right and left, passed noiseless, and came again. The earth below was full of queer shapes and shadows that seemed to heave and change as if a great breast rose and fell. The gleam on the barrel of Sallie's gun, the gleam on the mare's bit as Sallie led her, harnessed to a hand sled, seemed alike cruel and remote, tingling with a threat that would presently crystallize into words. Either side the trail Janice had taken that morning, the saskatoons and young cottonwoods stood like thin ghosts. The snake fence was no more than a livid scar; the blur that was the woods if a breath would blow it away.

Like some formless creeping animal, the three black figures went forward, with the hand sled waggling behind, while across the whole sky, in a devilish, mocking dance, the lights ran up and retreated and coquetted and came again, like a woman who plays with a man. But they left the sky a chill, changeless purple when they fled with flickering glances and soundless laughter and a swirl of billowing skirts—and that was not like a man with a woman. One woman down below knew it, as she followed the other until the maple wood took shape, with its dark caverns of shadow beneath the naked tops. Then fear surged upon her like a neap tide. She clutched at Sallie's arm.

“I can't go in there! I won't—not even for him! He wouldn't want me to. He wouldn't want me to be hurt, I tell you. You don't know. He'd not let——”

Through the glove, Sallie's fingers tightened over hers like hot wires.

“Poor Janice, you never did have any pluck, did you? Besides—he isn't yours, of course. But you'll have to come, Janice. I don't think the wolves will be hunting yet. It isn't dark enough, and I haven't heard them since we left. I must have you. I can't manage alone if he has to be lifted on the sled.”

“We'll never find him. How can we ever expect to find him in this——”

“Where have your eyes been all this time? Couldn't you see bits of the pung right along the trail? Don't you know yet that this gate is always shut, and now it's half off its hinges—and that black litter over there is part of the body of the pung.” She pressed forward eagerly. “It happened—what did happen—somewhere in here. Likely the mare bolted and ran into a tree and threw him out. Then she came home, kicking herself free as she went. We'll find him.”

Her voice flew back strained and thin, as she urged the trembling, snorting mare in among the shadows that blocked, ink black, on the snow. The damp, woody smell thickened about them; silence was more concrete than sound could have been; the spark of light on the gun barrel winked now and then out of absolute gloom as the red lantern gleam swung across it. The mare's hoofs and the sled runners jarred on the iron-bound snow, and little sticks snapped like glass, falling with a tinkling sound. Sallie had taken off the bells which had rung Janice into that mad ecstasy earlier in the day. Death and terror only breathed in the dank dimness now, and Janice, numbed bodily and mentally beyond feeling, trudged in the rear until Sallie suddenly stopped, thrusting the rein into her hand.

“Hold this! Quick!”

The voice told Janice. She peered into the gloom, seeing a darker heap at the foot of a tall white bole. The mare ran back on the rein, and Janice began to shriek:

“I can't hold it! Suppose it kicked or jumped on me! Sallie!”

Sallie snatched the rein from her and knotted it around a tree. Then Janice, sick to the core of her trembling heart, saw her run forward to that black huddle and drop on her knees beside it. There was a pause, during which Janice shut her eyes, remembering a story the Cave Man had told of a woman flung against a tree, and when they had found her, there was no face left.

“Janice, come!” Janice did not move, and Sallie's voice slid through the night like steel. “Come here, you everlasting coward! He's not dead.”

Janice tottered over and looked on the Cave Man's face in the lantern light. Except for the closed eyes and the bruise on the forehead, where blood had trickled and dried, the dark face was as vital set and strong in its set lines as she ever had seen it. Sleeve and skin were ripped from the left arm, and here again was blood. Sallie glanced up.

“I don't believe he's much hurt. Stunned and half frozen. Get the flask from the sled. Hurry!”

For five minutes they struggled to bring back consciousness. Then Sallie sprang to her feet. Far—very far—off, her quick ears had heard that menace which she dared defy no longer.

“We must get him on the sled and take him home. He'll come around when he's warmed. I'll bring the sled up.”

She brought it alongside the great, motionless body, and with straining muscles they rolled the Cave Man across it. Janice desisted more than once, sobbing and averring the impossibility of moving fifteen stone of inert flesh and bone. But Sallie pushed and clutched and wriggled like a wild cat, with her little thin face wet and scarlet, her eyes and ears fiercely alert against that nearing threat, her wits at high tension to keep the nervous mare still when she left its head. The burden was loaded at last and Sallie went forward to lead the mare.

“Watch him,” she commanded. “See that the robes don't fall off or his arms drop over the edge. And, above all, don't let him work down or he'll smother. Those ropes will give a little at the knots when they come into play.”

Through an unbelievable, hour-long nightmare, Janice trudged beside that sled. Her mind asserted that love and anxiety for this motionless thing should as utterly override the physical in her as it did in Sallie. All the weak, egotistical rest of her knew keenly that it did not—knew that she wanted this man merely for what he could give; that she resented the discomfort and fear which he had brought on her; that she would make him pay for it later—make Sallie pay—make life pay, because her every limb was a live ache, and her nose and chin were surely frostbitten, and her head reeled, and she was famishing with hunger. Tears froze with her breath on her eyelashes, and she cleared them with a trembling hand and stumbled on, while the lights reveled mysteriously in the sky and the red flare from the lantern traveled painfully below. Two-thirds of the way home, Sallie whipped the mare into a trot, forcing from Janice a loudly protesting run.

“Stay, then, and have the wolves on you!” flung Sallie over her shoulder, and Janice bit off her cries in a surge of terror.

The Cave Man's great arm slid from its moorings and trailed on the frozen snow. The knuckles were raw before Janice noticed and caught it up. Remembering how it had held her so short a time before, she was consumed with pity for herself and a blind fury against the universe and this helpless creature who had failed her need.

At this moment, Sallie swung around and fired, and Janice, turning, saw distant black shadows flicker and part, and heard a thin howl like wind in the telegraph wires. And then both women ran; the one urging the mare and leaping alongside it like an elf, the other stooping her stately limbs to gather up the dragging robes and thrust back the flaccid hands and feet, sobbing, moaning, wailing underbreath the while. They raced into the yard and up to the door. Janice sank down, giddy and sick, while Sallie cast off the traces and locked the mare into the barn. Then she flung open the house door and shook Janice by the shoulder.

“Quick! They may be here any minute! Quick! We must pull him in!”

“Oh—let me rest a little!” Janice raised a lovely, piteous face. “I'm so very, very tired——”

“The wolves won't wait! Get up before I make you!”

It was by sheer passionate power of will that the wife controlled those strong, tall, young limbs of the other, and between them the sled was pushed and pulled down the narrow passage and down into the living room. The babies till slept in their barricade of cushions and boxes on the floor, but Sallie never looked at them. Like a purposeful whirlwind, she was everywhere at once—locking the outer door, heating water, forcing brandy down the Cave Man's throat, filling the stove with fresh wood, rubbing the great hairy chest and limbs which were stiffened and ridged and cramped with the bitter cold.

Janice helped her feebly, feeling, with a curious distinctness, that as she and Sallie now fought for the Cave Man's body, so were they presently to fight for his soul. And with his triumphant, possessive words still clear in her ears, she was yet afraid. There was a force in Sallie—a savage vigor such as she had never believed lay in any woman. She tried to express it as “type,” but all classifications were meaningless now. Sallie and she were two women, and this was the one man for them both—this man who lay before the fire with huge half-naked limbs which she rubbed and rubbed until her soft palms felt scarified by their granite hardness.

Now and again she glanced at that grim little face and lit eyes beneath the sandy lashes and strained-back hair, and something clutched at her throat. Was there in truth a spark in Sallie that could call back the Cave Man yet? Sallie was as vital as a stinging wind off the sea. Janice's own half-deadened senses told her that. But the Cave Man had said—had looked——

Sallie ceased rubbing and sat back on her heels.

“He'll do now. See the blood coming up under the skin? I'll bind his arm, and then I must feed those babies. It breaks my heart to hear them crying. See, Janice, sit here where Dick can see you when he rouses, and be sure you don't startle him. He'll be all right if that blow hasn't affected his head.”

“Might it? Oh, Sallie!”

“Of course it might. Don't look like that. Being scared won't help. Get some knitting or something, and take this chair.”

“How can I knit? Look at my hands! All sore and trembling——”

“Pretend, then, can't you?” The little pale eyes flashed. “My sakes, Janice, what sort of a woman are you?”

That sting of contempt rang in her ears still when, after what seemed a warm and drowsy hiatus in all things, she opened her eyes and saw the Cave Man watching her. From the kitchen came Sallie's hushed crooning as she fed the babies. From the open stove came the cheery crackle of blazing logs. All else was numb except that live, dark look in the Cave Man's eyes.

“How very lovely you are, Janice!” he said. Then his hand went groping up to his bandaged head. “What happened? I remember the mare rearing at a squirrel. Did she bring me home and chuck me out against the house?”

“No. It was in the woods. We—found you under a tree.”

“We? Did you go right out there and bring me in?”

“I—yes.” Janice faltered. “Sallie helped.”

She loathed herself, but under that glowing look all the worst side of her leaped up. Sallie might fight tooth and claw, like the little wild cat she was, but if Janice got in first now——

“Come here,” he said.

And then Janice dropped on her knees and put her lips on his.

It was but a minute later that she first she heard it—that high, ferocious howl of a wolf pack close on the blood trail which was to haunt her through many nights to come. Sallie was in the room that same instant, with her babies in her arms and her eyes on her husband.

“They'll take the pigs first, Dick,” she said quietly. “That'll give us time if they mean attacking.”

The Cave Man rose to his feet, holding by Janice's arm. His grip was acutest pain, but for the first time in her life Janice did not cry out against hurt. She had won where every fiber of her told her that she should lawfully have lost, and because of this, there was nothing in her but vindictive triumph toward the other woman and a chaos of wild emotions which she chose to call love toward the man. Shaking his bandaged head as if to clear it, the Cave Man looked at the two. It was as if his instinct turned to the one while the other held him by the senses. Then he listened, speaking as his trained ear interpreted the nearing sweep of sound:

“It's a full pack. Timber wolves and hungry. They mean business, and we're in for it, all right. The roof is the weak place. They can tear up slates easy enough once they burrow under the snow. Otherwise, I guess—— Ah-h-h!”

It came like a curse as he heard the squeal of the first pig and the terrified whinny of the mare. Then the medley of devilish sounds—the yelping, snarling, fighting, screaming—turned Janice sick and faint. Sallie brought a steaming plate and a cup of tea, and the Cave Man ate ravenously, speaking not at all, but with glancing eyes that showed the rush of his thought. Smell of the food drove from Janice all sensations but hunger. She sought for herself in the kitchen, and when she returned, Sallie and the Cave Man were planning the defense as if no love,no fear, no anything but swift, hot war to the knife, had ever existed.

“You'd best keep the gun, Sallie. You can shoot near as well as I can, and it'll just be shooting into the brown, anyhow. I'll have the hatchets——”

“And the buckets of water. I have everything I can get on the stove full and boiling, and Janice can carry them in. I'll make up the fire again.”

She went out, and the Cave Man stood by the window, fingering his bandage and whistling softly. Jamie ran to him, trembling.

“Let me stay with you! Keep me safe! Don't let them get in! Don't them! Oh, I'm so afraid—so sick afraid!”

“Afraid?”

He brought his eyes on her, half puzzled. And then, as the first sniffing and scuffing of the pack at doors and windows drove the full meaning of all this home to her, Janice clung to him in absolute frenzy.

“I shall die! I shall die! Save me! Oh, if you love me, save me!”

The scent of her hair and breath, the soft warmth of her against him, unsteadied him for the moment. He held her close, muttering tender words. Then the battering-ram leap of a hairy body against the door made him lift her aside.

“Don't be scared, my girl. We'll down 'em all right, the devils! Lord, Janice, d'you think I never killed a wolf before?”

Beneath the bandage, the black depths of his eyes held a red glare. His nostrils twitched and his face seemed to change and exult as if in savage harmony with the savagery without. He balanced with a critical swiftness the two hatchets Sallie had put on the table, picked up the gun, examined the lock, and walked to the stair, reeling slightly.

“I'll give 'em a bit of peppering from above, first. You and Sallie must patrol below,” he said, and swung himself out of sight, leaving with the woman a vague suggestion of brute force and prowling ferocity such as did not much distinguish him from the brutes outside. He had not kissed her. Surely a man—any man—in such a case would have kissed her “I'd like to see blood to-night,” he had said out in the wood. She remembered that now, shuddering.

Thereafter, all the world was ordered confusion. Through scullery, kitchen, living room, and passage, she and Sallie keep their beat until Janice sank down among the cushions, on the pretext of quieting the children. Each time the report of the gun rang out, or the heavy footsteps shook the floor above, it seemed that the man who had climbed the stair went farther from her into those abysses of primal reality where she could not follow. Each time Sallie's little thin figure showed, in her untiring, noiseless patrol, Janice had a vision of some slinking, fierce lioness, silent about her business with her mate. The rising devil chorus outside which came on the heels of each gunshot set reeling through her head lurid pictures of that bloody orgy out on the snow, where brute ate wounded brute in ravaging haste, while the shrouded garden bushes looked on and the lights still played their wanton games with the sky.

Suddenly Sallie passed by like a flash, seized a hatchet from the table, and disappeared up the stair. And at that moment Janice realized that the pack was no longer yelling and sniffing around the house. It had swarmed up to the roof by way of the woodshed and the water tanks, and was at work with sharp, hungry noses, rooting in the snow even as the Cave Man had predicted. The sounds were overhead now—indescribable, terrific. That the brutes would be in the attic presently seemed certain. The Cave Man would have his fill of blood then—with Sallie to help him; Sallie, the demure little freshman who had sat on a flowery rug such a few years ago, counting out cotillion favors with the pride of a conqueror. It was hideous in some way. It was indecent.

Janice, hiding her eyes against little Joan's fat neck, tried not to realize the awful and intimate nature of that fight up there and of the bond that had drawn the woman to the side of her man at need. Again and again the gun barked above the yelling and snarling and screaming. The ceiling shook until flakes of whitewash fell on Janice's head, and, half fainting with dread, she ran out into the passage, looking up the stair.

Smoke from the many shots curled lazily down. The noises were louder, more diabolic, more keen with menace. But nothing showed, and this, to Janice's mind, put the crowning roof on the horror. No bribe of heaven or hell could have made her climb that ladder. She leaned against the wall and wrung her hands and listened—listened with every fiber of her. The fight was going forward now in her own room, and she thought with a physical sickness of her little white bed and the high-heeled pink slippers that stood beside it. A trickle of blood ran over the edge of the floor above and pattered warm on her hand. She sprang back against the wall and screamed and screamed in panic. But no one heard. No one answered. There was bigger business afoot for the Cave Man now, and again she wrung her hands in impotent terror.

The crack of the gun set the tears pouring down her face. One of them was still alive, then—one of them in that hellish din of chokings and yelpings and snarlings of fury. If she should go up and see! If she could! A bristle of gray hair came thrusting near along the floor above, and beside the ladder head another head looked down—a triangular head with pointed ears and glaring eyes and a white-fanged mouth that dripped froth and blood. Evil and old as sin itself, it looked at her with the wiseness of the brute and of death, until its eyes grew glazed and the red tongue lolled and the gray, ugly head jerked sideways in the last spasm of passing life. Janice was frozen beyond movement now. And then the Cave Man's voice rang out:

“Get back, Sallie! Down the stair! Go!”

That part of the roof had fallen in Janice guessed, even as Sallie came tumbling down the stair with the Cave Man behind. He held the gun, and halfway down he turned, resting the barrel on the top rung, which lay level with the upper floor.

“Fasten the living-room door, Sallie,” he said, and Sallie flew to it, with Janice stumbling after.

“Let me go in! Let me go in!” she cried. “I'm outside, Sallie! Sallie!” But Sallie's thin, nervous fingers had bolted and locked the door already. She did not hear the woman crying at her side. She went back to the Cave Man, touching his leg to attract his attention as he stood on the ladder. He glanced down.

“Got the kids fixed?”

“Yes. Unless the ceiling breaks through.”

“I don't think it will. Can you get me a drink?”

Sallie ran into the kitchen, and the Cave Man's eyes returned to his gun. Janice couched against the wall and watched. There had been neither speech nor thought of her. The Cave Man stood square and unmoving as a rock, although the bandage was gone from his head, and blood dripped from the point of his elbow, and below the left knee all the trouser was torn away and the flesh was mangled and ripped into wounds that brought a shuddering cry from Janice's lips.

Then Sallie came back. Her faded hair hung in short, untidy wisps about her shoulders, and her hands were blackened and blood-stained, and she wore that old checked apron still. Janice's cry mounted into hysterical laughter as the man drank and flung the mug aside, and Sallie wiped the blood off the hatchet handles with her apron and held them ready for his word.

Suddenly he lifted on his toes and fired to right and left swiftly. Then, as the brutes fell yelling on their horrid meal, he reloaded and fired again.

The end came sooner than Janice had expected. Again the Cave Man fired, and then he stepped down.

“I guess that's the lot. Those we haven't bagged have vamoosed,” he said; and as he spoke, a monstrous hairy body came tumbling, snarling clawing over the edge and down. He dropped his gun and wheeled, grasping at the sinewy throat. The force of his onslaught and the fact that the animal's right forepaw was broken helped him. But the wolf, gaunt and gray and iron of muscle, swung him from side to side and ripped him with steel claws as they fought up and down the narrow way. Sallie snatched the gun and thrust in a cartridge. Then, unseen by Janice, she chose her moment; and, before the echo had died or the smoke cleared away, the wolf had dropped, and across the writhing body Sallie and her Cave Man looked at each other and laughed. Bloody, torn, exhausted until their long-drawn breaths shook them on their feet, they laughed in each other's eyes, and by that laugh Janice knew them.

The Cave Man's instinct had not faltered when he had gone East on his search. Though glamour had deflected it for a space, that instinct had swung back, sure as the compass needle to the pole, under the eyes of his chosen mate. As the animal knows, as the more effete male of civilization does not know, the Cave Man had known the woman to whom he could trust his offspring. Janice's little day was past, as those of earth's butterflies do pass. Where deep called to deep between Sallie and her Cave Man, there was no more heed of lesser things. Janice saw it, felt it. Tremblingly she tottered across the room with hands out.

“Oh, I'm so sick! Oh, it's been so dreadful!” she wailed.

“Poor Janice!” Sallie's kind arms caught her, and as she fell into them, she saw the Cave Man come through the living-room door with his son chuckling in his arms.

“Look!” he said. “The little devil! He's been dabbling in the blood that ran under the door. A chip of the old block—of both old blocks, eh, Sallie, girl?”