The eternal savage
is to me. It is not as other dreams, but instead I really see him—the satin texture of his smooth, bronzed skin; the lordly poise of his perfect head; the tousled shock of coal black hair that I have learned to love and through which I know I have run my fingers as he stooped to kiss me.

"He carries a great spear, stone-tipped—I should know it the moment that I saw it—and a knife and hatchet of the same flinty material, and in his left hand he bears the severed head of a mighty beast.

"He is a noble figure, but of another world or of another age; and somewhere he wanders so lonely and alone that my heart weeps at the thought of him. Oh, Barney, either he is true and I shall find him, or I am gone mad. Tell me Barney, for the love of heaven! you believe that I am sane."

Barney Custer drew his sister's face close to his and kissed her tenderly.

"Of course you're sane, Vic," he reassured her. "You've just allowed that old dream of yours to become a sort of obsession with you, and now it's gotten on your nerves until you are commencing to believe it even against your better judgment. Take a good grip on yourself, get up and join Curtiss in a long ride. Have it out with him. Tell him just what you have told me, and then tell him you'll marry him, and I'll warrant that you'll be dreaming about him instead of that young giant that you have stolen out of some fairy tale."

"I'll get up and take a ride, Barney," replied the girl; "but as for marrying Mr. Curtiss—well, I'll have to think it over."

But after all she did not join the party that was riding toward the hills that morning, for the thought of seeing the torn and twisted strata of a bygone age that lifted its scarred head above the surface of the plain at the base of the mountains was more than she felt equal to. They did not urge her, and as she insisted that Mr. Curtiss accompany the other men she was left alone at the bungalow with Lady Greystoke, the baby and the servants.

As the party trotted across the rolling land that stretched before them to the foothills they sighted a herd of zebras coming toward them in mad stampede.

"Something is hunting ahead of us," remarked one of the men.

"We may get a shot at a lion from the looks of it," replied another.

A short distance further on they came upon the carcass of a zebra stallion. 
 Prev. P 20/154 next 
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