For two hours he trotted doggedly along the trail, which for the most part was well defined. There were places, of course, which taxed his trailing ability, but by circling widely from these points he always was able to pick up the tracks again. He had come down from the hills and entered an open forest, where the trail was entirely lost in the mossy carpet that lay beneath the trees, when he was startled by a scream—a woman's scream—and the hoarse gutturals of two men, deep and angry. Hastening toward the sound, Waldo came upon the authors of the commotion in a little glade half hidden by surrounding bushes. There were three actors in the hideous tragedy—a hairy brute dragging a protesting girl by her long, black hair and an old man, who followed, protesting futilely against the outrage that threatened the young woman. None of them saw Waldo as he ran toward them until he was almost upon them, and then the beast who grasped the girl looked up, and Waldo recognized him as the same who had sent him toward the west earlier in the day. At the same instant he saw the girl was Nadara. [Pg 94] [Pg 94] In the brief interval that the recognition required there sloughed from the heart and mind and soul of Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones every particle of the civilization and culture and refinement that had required countless ages in the building, stripping him naked, age on age, down to the primordial beast that had begot his first human progenitor. He saw red through blood as he leaped for the throat of the man-beast whose ruthless hands were upon Nadara. His lip curled in the fighting snarl that exposed his long-unused canine fangs. He forgot sword and shield and spear. He was no longer a man, but a terrible beast; and the hairy brute that witnessed the metamorphosis blanched and shrank back in fear. But he could not escape the fury of that mad charge or the raging creature that sought his throat. For a moment they struggled in a surging, swaying embrace, and then toppled to the ground—the hairy one beneath. Rolling, tearing, and biting, they battled—each seeking a death hold upon the other.
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