few broken utensils remaining as indication that it had ever constituted human habitation.

Waldo was utterly confounded. He had not the remotest idea in which direction to search. During the balance of the afternoon he wandered along the various ledges, entering first one cave and then another.

He wondered which had been Nadara's. He tried to imagine her life among these crude, primitive surroundings; among the beast-like men and women who were her people. She did not seem to harmonize with either. He was convinced that she was more out of place here than Flatfoot would have been in a Back Bay drawing-room.

The more his mind dwelt upon her the sadder he became. He tried to convince himself that it was[Pg 87] purely disappointment in being thwarted in his desire to thank her for her kindness to him, and demonstrate that her confidence in his prowess had not been misplaced; but always he discovered that his thoughts returned to Nadara rather than to the ostensible object of his adventure.

[Pg 87]

In short he began to realize, rather vaguely it is true, that he had come because he wanted to see the girl again; but why he wanted to see her he did not know.

That night he slept in one of the deserted caves, and the next morning set forth upon his quest for Nadara. For three days he searched the little valley, but without results. There was no sign of any other village within it.

Then he passed over into another valley to the north. For weeks he wandered hither and thither without being rewarded by even a sight of a human being.

Early one afternoon as he was topping a barrier in search of other valleys he came suddenly face to face with a great, hairy man. Both stopped—the hairy one glaring with his nasty little eyes.

"I can kill you," growled the savage.

Waldo had no desire to fight—it was information he was searching. But he almost smiled at the ready greeting of the man. It was the same that Sag the Killer had accorded him that day he had[Pg 88] gone down to the sea for the last time.

[Pg 88]

It came as readily and as glibly from these primitive men as "good morning" falls from the lips of the civilized races, yet among the latter he realized that it had its counterpart in the stony 

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