"If it must be, it must be," remarked Pŭl-Yūn without enthusiasm. "But, look you, my brothers and friends, I am but a night and a day from the snows of the pass;three (or was it not four?) days and as many nights did I sit in a snow-cave waiting for the fall to stop. I have travelled through drifts as deep as my chin, and this upon the top of a broken leg. Yes, I lay for nigh two moons in a cave with a broken leg. Hence Pŭl-Yūn, who was approved your war-chief two years ago, is not at his best this day. He has forgot his spear-throwing somewhat. It is four, nay, it is six, moons since he threw a spear."
A shiver of astonishment ran around the circle, for this was giving the contest away before it was begun. Spear-throwing is an art which calls for constant and unremitting practice: the assegai-thrower no more than the violinist can lay aside his instrument for weeks and months at a time and resume it at will with his old facility. The listening tribesmen covered their mouths with their hands and smiled behind them, each man's eyes rolled on his fellows' seeking and finding comprehension. The thing was as goodas settled. But Pŭl-Yūn had arisen to his feet and was still speaking,—
"I have brought back to camp no spears of our sort, for my arm is very fat and weak, much weaker than the arm of my wife here (who will throw presently)." A laugh broke out, but fell, for he was grave and was still speaking, he had none of the marks of a madman about him, he was just the Pŭl-Yūn whom they had all known and loved, gentle of speech exceedingly,—yet his words, or some of them were strange—ludicrous.
"So, I have made for myself little assegais, boys' assegais," whilst speaking he drew one from the long skin pouch which hung at his back and handed it to the old chief, who turned it end for end in his hand, and looked it over very critically and passed it on to the elder nearest to him with an impassive face but a very shaken heart. The absurd little thing went slowly around the circle, none above the age of an uninitiated boy had ever handled itslike, it reached Honk-Ah who disdained to touch it, smiling insolently, his game already won.
"Yet, it seems I must do what I can," said Pŭl-Yūn, sighing again, "and if, by good luck, I can make these little-boys' spears fly straighter and stick deeper than my cousin's, what will ye say?"
Said the grey chief, "My son's son, whilst thou hast been away we have had omens of change and of trouble. Our enemies, the White Wolves and the men of the Lynx Totem have begun to encroach yet more upon our hunting-grounds; they have taken game from our traps, they waylay and wound our young men hunting singly. We have given up lone hunting, we hunt in couples or threesomes. They, or we must move on. But, it needs fighting to clear the matter. And,—and—I am grown better at council than at the chase. Strong am I still, but I stiffen, and am slower of foot than my wont. The Sun-Men havealways had a war-chief who could lead them. The tribe,—the young men, are asking for one. Thy cousin claims the post. What can I say to thy question?"
To Pŭl-Yūn's thinking there was more than physical weakness in this appeal, he faced the old man silently but with a steady confidence in his eye which went some way to restore the senior's shaken courage, who took fresh breath and went on—
"The spear, my son, is the only weapon, and the farther it is cast and the deeper it is driven the better the warrior. Yonder is the mark. Get thee to thy spears. I have spoken."
The little dart was still travelling its round, exciting amazement, amusement and curiosity as it went. It returned to Pŭl-Yūn, he examined its point and feather (the absurd little feather, fingered by so many, understood by him alone), all with an exasperating deliberation and gentle cheerfulness as of a man regaining hisspirits. The tent-folds behind him shook and forth came the foreign woman, his wife, Dêh-Yān, as he had been heard to address her, bringing in hand—what?—surely not more spears, for there were others in the skin pouch upon his back, yet, she bore to him a staff stouter, heavier and longer than any assegai, and, whereas a well-made assegai is thickest three hands' breadths behind the head and thence tapers both ways, this clumsy shaft was thickest in the middle. An impossible, headless weapon, thought the tribe craning to see.
Pŭl-Yūn took the staff, tossed and caught it, shook it a little, whilst the Little Moon woman unwound a stout cord of twisted sinew looped at either end. Watched intently by the tribe the man threaded both loops upon the staff, fitted the last to a notch at one end of it, which end he turned under and set his left foot upon; then, holding the staff erect and close to his left side, he, gripping its upper end with hisright, swiftly and strongly bent it over his knee and hip whilst with his left hand sliding the second loop to its resting-place in the second notch which was now close beside his chin.
'Twas done in a moment, and the thing stood confessed no weapon at all, but just a drilling-bow, an out-sized, clumsy tool. Honk-Ah led the laugh.
But Pŭl-Yūn unmoved and passively grave, was emptying at his feet the skin pouch aforesaid, and lo! there lay more boys' assegais, weak, light and decked with feathers where no feathers should be. The laughter did not cease when the man chose three and approached the scratch thus armed, for the bow-drill which he carried his critics regarded as a mere encumbrance, a thing as foreign to the business in hand as a fishing-line. Taking his stand upon the crease itself, and making no preparation for the usual run before throwing, the young chief gripped the bent bow-drill left-handedly byits midmost stoutest part, laid a dart across the wood, and his left forefinger over that dart, then, fitting a hitherto unnoticed notch in the end of that dart to the string, he gripped both dart and sinew and drew both away from the bending wood whilst raising the whole apparatus with his extended left hand. Back and back went his right hand, stiffly and more stiffly extended his left arm, until the chert head of the dart stuck out beyond the left thumb, whilst the notched and feathered tail, still fast against the sinew-cord, was level with the man's ear. Thus he stood poised, tense and silent for a breath, the last cackle of derisive laughter died; what did all this mean?Twang!—something hummed like the wings of the great fawn-coloured mountain swift when he sweeps a beetle from a grass-blade close to one's knee and is a hundred strides away before one knows what he had done. Pŭl-Yūn was standing exactly as he had stood before the sound, save that the string hadescaped from his hand and the bow-drill had gone straight again. What had become of the dart? 'Twas gone, yet none had seen it go. At such close range, and from such a powerful bow, an arrow travels nearly level and exceedingly fast. The eyes of the tribe, fixed upon the man, and awaiting the vehement action of the spear-thrower, had failed altogether to pursue the flight of the missile.
"Wah! when is he going to throw?" "Where has it gone?" "When did he cast?" "How came it there?" for lo! in the target beside the best spear of Honk-Ah stood the dart of Pŭl-Yūn, quite as well-centred and more deeply fixed.
A buzz of subdued clamour arose and was instantly hushed, for the marksman's second dart was in his hand, and again that queer, clumsy domestic implement, hitherto reserved for the girl who made fire, or the eye of a needle, was bending again.Twang!—again that new, keen sound andall eyes jumped, and again failed to follow that unnaturally low, swift flight. They looked above it, looked where a spear would have been, and whilst they stared—thuck!—a second dart was standing in the target, not a hand's-breadth away from the first, and as deeply imbedded.
Honk-Ah crammed his mouth full of his own fingers and bit them, but no one spoke. All edged a step nearer, and when the string hummed for the third time, and the final dart, driven straight and hard, stood between the other two, there was a deep gasp of half incredulous surprise.
Savages are deeply and religiously conservative, and easily persuade themselves that their own way, though demonstrably the worse, is the right way. Did the land-owners of England effusively fold Stephenson to their noble bosoms? His trains would interfere with their fox-hunting, so much they could see. Later they saw money in the thing and came into it with a rush.
Now the Sun-Men were almost as conservative as the House of Peers in the day when the Rocket was the last New Thing; and there was nothing of lucre with which to commend this invention to their unwilling admiration.
Alack, our race has moved with a pitiful slowness, and still moves locally and by jerks, and with much intermediate marking of time and retrogressions elsewhere.
Hence it is not to be supposed that the Sun-Men acclaimed the first performances of the New Thing with shouts of joy. To the braves of the tribe it signified the success of a piece of woman's gear. Their first impulse was to have none of it, to shout it down as foreign magic, certainly novel, probably impious, and no doubt offensive to their deity. Even the old chief, with all to gain by his grandson's victory, was unenthusiastic.
Were they more stupid than their descendants of a later day? I trow not. Letthe reader judge. Once during England's struggle with Napoleon was the chance offered to each antagonist to end the matter at a stroke. How did they take it? Joseph Manton laid his designs for rifled artillery before the Master of the Ordnance and was refused leave to manufacture guns capable of demolishing the ships, forts and forces of France at long range. A few years later young Fulton explained to Bonaparte his plans for towing the wind-bound Boulogne fleet across the Channel by steam. The hard, shallow grey eyes of the Corsican stared him down, "Idéalist!" and England was safe for another century.
Pŭl-Yūn had won, but the successful competitor's three astonishing shots aroused suspicion in some, anger and jealousy in others. There were men present capable of surlily or passionately repudiating the fact. Honk-Ah did. He arose from his heels, flung out his hands, strutted, laughedderisively, indulged in gestures offensive and provocative and walked towards the target.
"Stop!" cried the old chief, "let no man draw those spears."
Himself detaching the skin he bore it around the circle of watching braves. There was no denying the evidence. Those three, small, bow-driven darts were in over their heads. A man so struck would hardly have lived out the day.
Pŭl-Yūn, without vaunts, took the fact of his victory for granted, and, noting his backer's reserve, came to the front.
"I have just one small thing to ask," said he, raising his hand, "a very little thing. It is that my cousin will now throw spears with my wife."
The listening tribe stared with open-mouthed amazement. The challenged man fairly bristled. To a brave such a proposal was an indelible insult. Yet Pŭl-Yūn's manner was not insulting; nothing could be less provocative than the gentle, unsmiling simplicity of his mien.
"A brave plays only with braves," said the old chief, interpreting the challenged man's rigid silence.
Then, at a nod from her husband, Dêh-Yān came from the curtained doorway of the wigwam. She was wearing the full spring-months' working dress of a woman of the tribe, to wit, her own supple beauty hidden only from the waist to the knee by an apron of skins.
There was nothing to remark in this, but, what drew a murmur of amazement from the circle, a murmur which presently turned to scoffs and incredulous laughter, was the bear-skin which she bore upon her arm, and the collar of teeth and claws which encircled the ruddy symmetry of her throat. Sedately she spread the skin and took her stand upon it. She knew, none better, that this hour would be the making or the breaking of her man and herself, but she bore herself superbly. If her heart fluttered within her breast her mouth was hard andher eye steady. Silently she fingered the necklace and looked a question to her husband who raised his hand.
"Do you ask why my wife stands upon that bear-skin whilst I stand upon bare earth? Do you ask why she, and not I, wears that necklace? Those are fair questions which I will answer presently. But, first I too have a question to ask of you—
"If two go to the woods to hunt and a bear is killed by one of the two, who shall wear the spoils—he who did the killing or he who looked on?
"That is our case, my wife's and mine. Whilst I lay with a broken leg-bone, that bear came like a lynx upon a wood-hen in a gin and thought to have made a meal of me. My wife was there, she might have run for it, but she took spear in hand and killed that bear,"—he stooped and lifted one of the enormous paws of the hide. "At one thrust she killed that bear. He was very near to me, nearer than my cousin is now;he was upreared for the stroke; he was not a young bear, nor a brown bear, but a Grizzly of the rocks; an Old Man Grizzly; so my chief says who knows more of bear than any of us; for myself I have never had much to do with bear of any sort, two, perchance, Brown Bears both—they fought well—did not they, Honk-Ah? But this was my first Grizzly (he came near to being my last). We were in a cave, the three of us. I was sitting, with my leg stiff and weak, so—" he was now upon the ground at Dêh-Yān's feet, acting the scene. "The Grizzly came thus—" he bounded from the earth, crawled, reared, pawed the air, impersonating the monster. "She—she here, my wife,—who was not attacked, who might have saved herself,—what did she?—What did she?—I ask!" his voice rose to a shout. "What wouldmy cousin have done?" it fell to a soft, penetrating tone, he spread his hands and bent towards Honk-Ah as though genuinely seeking an answer to hisquestion, a question put with an air of suave simplicity which it was impossible to effectively resent. "My cousin would have done what my wife did, yes, he would have killed that Grizzly, I see it in his eye!—Thou wouldst have done just that, Honk-Ah!"
A stifled titter ran around the circle, for this was a home thrust. Honk-Ah had indeed, as Pŭl-Yūn had reminded him, been present at the hunting of one of the two bears which had been slain by the Sun-Men during the past four years, but, by over-caution, or maladroitness, or sheer ill-luck, it had not fallen to him to distinguish himself in that fight. All braves cannot be at their best upon all occasions, and that had not been one of Honk-Ah's days. The emergency which had found his cousin wanting had been one which had set the seal to Pŭl-Yūn's courage and address. Rivals before, the cousins had been rivals since, Pŭl-Yūn leading. The elders present perceived that their young war-chief, not content with re-establishing his precedence, was bent upon inflicting a public humiliation upon his would-be supplanter; perceived too, that he was probably aware of the plot which his timely return to his tribe had barely forestalled, and were wondering how the Honk-Ah party were taking it.
These, as it happened, were taking the matter extremely well. They had fallen under the influence of Honk-Ah not for any love which they bore him, but because a leader of some sort was needful for the tribe at a critical juncture, and he, in default of Pŭl-Yūn, was the only possible man. Their former war-chief had dropped upon them from the skies, and albeit they had wavered in their allegiance, and some of them had talked big over-night, with the instability of the savage (who, like a boy, is merely a man in the making, fickle and easily moved to good or evil), they were ready to return to duty. The result of the spear-throwing had shaken them, but thisexhibition of Pŭl-Yūn's adroit eloquence had completed their reconversion, not to the new weapon but to the old comrade.
Honk-Ah was upon his feet, he had heard the titter of the women behind him, he had looked towards one and another of his chosen friends and followers, but had failed in finding an answering eye, he felt himself slipping, the situation called for instant action, he took it with a rush, there was no finesse about Honk-Ah. He struck his hardest at his opponent's weakest spot—this tale was too wonderful for belief. He appealed to the experience of the old chief and the half dozen elders, he claimed as a brave to know something, he and his contemporaries had seen a bear or two die, but they had died hard, had charged home a dozen times, had run, when it came to running, for a long way, had stood at bay under a storm of spears for half a day: it had taken every man of the hunting party all that he knew to finish the fight with a whole skin.Yet, this foreign woman, forsooth, had killed her bear, an Old Man Grizzly (there was no getting over that skin) with a casual poke with one—one—of her people's stupid little darts. Absurd! That the bear had died was evident—even bears cannot live forever; but, how had he died?—In a pit? or under a down-fall? or by a chance-fallen rock, perhaps? Such things did happen to bears as to men, he supposed. And doubtless this had befallen whilst Pŭl-Yūn lay sick, and—well—it was only too plain that his cousin had been very sick indeed, both in his feet and in his head, for in a word, this foreign woman had fooled him.
Pŭl-Yūn heard him to an end with grave patience, then turning to Dêh-Yān, who was now quivering with hard-pent excitement, he nodded. The girl retired to the wigwam and was presently back again no longer wearing the bear's trophies, but re-arrayed in a triple necklace of human teeth which encircled her brown throat in shining rows,whilst three scalps swung and dangled from her waist-band.
A low cry of utter wonder broke from the circle of spectators, and rose louder as, in obedience to her husband's eye, she made the circuit of the ring, exhibiting these undreamed-of wonders to the astonished braves with a sort of shy bravado. Scalps?—these were not the scalps of old men, or of women, but of top-knotted braves. The teeth, too, were not milk-teeth, but the unworn, fully-fanged grinders of men. She returned to her place upon the bear-skin pursued by admiring glances. All kept silence, not even Honk-Ah had any remarks to offer or explanations to suggest. Pŭl-Yūn arose again.
"My cousin is hard to satisfy. A brave who has killed his bear in single fight is still unworthy to meet my cousin. I ask my chief, I ask myself and you—nay, I will ask my cousin—Who is worthy to meet so great a warrior as Honk-Ah?—
"And, here is my answer!" he turnedto his wife, "Behold my squaw, Dêh-Yān is her name, she is wearing the scalps of three braves, they were strong braves and great runners, a winter war-party (Gow-Loo, Pongu and Low-Mah were their names). They were well-armed, behold their axes and knives! They ambushed my wife, set upon her as she bent over a trap; so much did I see of the fight with these eyes, looking from the cave where I lay foot-fast. Did she fly screaming to me?—No, she thought for me; she led them away from our cave, a long chase, oh, a hard chase! one whole day. But this I cannot speak of particularly for I did not see it. Late that night she returned to me with these scalps. They were fresh then, new-stripped. Does my cousin, who speaks of down-falls and pits, think that my squaw took all three braves in a pit at one running? In ahopo, say, like a drove of horse? Does he think in his heart that these young warriors gave their hair and their teeth to a girl forlove?" The speaker laughed merrily at the idea, and save Honk-Ah, everyone within hearing laughed with him; he stilled the merriment with upraised hand and turned to his antagonist.
"Once again I ask him whether he will play at the spear-throwing with this brave, my squaw?"
The speaker paused for a reply, and in the silence which followed braves and women alike craned for a better view of the face of the man whom he challenged, who was squatting upon his heels glowering upon his rival, the fingers of his throwing-hand tightening, slackening and again tightening around the shaft of his assegai.
An answer of some sort he must make, but, what answer would pass?
Whilst he debated the foreign woman stooped, took her husband's bow from the ground, chose her a single dart and approached the crease. She turned and scrutinised the mark, the creel now denudedof the badger's skin. The stake upon which it hung protruded through the wicker for the length of half an arm. Watched by all she stood serenely at gaze, then, threw up her chin and called to a woman at the other end of the lists.
"O woman, there!—thou with the papoose!—I want a mark. Wilt hang something small, say a moccasin, upon the top of that stake? I thank thee, sister!"
A gust of astonished laughter arose, what foolery, what bravado was this?—There hung a child's mitten, an impossible mark, such as no brave had ever set for himself or for his rival. Again arose the clear, mellow woman's voice, using their own tongue with just a touch or two of foreignness in its intonations—
"O my father and chief, may I throw at this mark?—I will throw but once."
The old chief turned first to Honk-Ah, but the man sate mute and glum as though the business was no concern of his. Thento the woman he turned and nodded assent: doubting as did the rest, Pŭl-Yūn excepted.
DREW SWIFTLY, AND AS SWIFTLY LOOSED
Dêh-Yān fitted arrow to string and half bent the great bow, still keeping her eye upon the tiny mark, then with a small sweet laugh she tripped back from the throwing-crease five full strides, drew swiftly and to the ear and as swiftly loosed. Twang! the cord sang shrill in the morning air, the arrow sped, and a whoop of sheer delight broke from the watching tribe, for the shaft had struck the mitten full, had pierced and transfixed it. The archer had watched the flight of her shaft with a hard bright eye, now she turned and tripped back to her husband's side without a side-glance, as if such marksmanship was all in her day's work, a thing of nought. Doubt not that her little heart was high within her bosom, but no vaunting word escaped her lips. Dêh-Yān was great.
The old chief was upon his feet. Would his nephew throw? 'Twas a fair challenge.
"On some other day—perhaps," muttered Honk-Ah, confusedly.
"To-day, and now, my cousin,—or not at all, and never!" retorted Pŭl-Yūn. "And, bethink thee, it is not now for the war-chieftaincy that thou art bidden to throw—that is lost to thee—but for its reversion. Wilt thou stand third in the tribe by out-throwing my wife?—No!—then thou art nought, just a brave among my braves, no more, whilst she leads the war-parties in my absence."
"That is so,—I say it," said the old chief, stilling the clamour that was arising among the braves. "Here stands my daughter, no foreign woman, but a full member of the tribe; no squaw but a brave, and a very great spearman."
"Witch!" screamed the cousin bounding to his feet and whirling back his spear. In the twinkling of an eye he had quivered and had hurled it at the shapely bosom of Dêh-Yān. But the grey chief stepped before herwith upraised hands and lips opening in rebuke that was never to be uttered. Straight betwixt those upraised hands sped the spear, and drove its keen chert head deep through the neck-cordage and into the great throat artery of the father of the tribe.
The bright life-blood spouted high and wide. The stricken man staggered, but kept his feet, composedly folded his arms and stood awaiting his death.
A bitter cry of horror burst from the circle of braves, a shriller wail from the outer ring of women, and as the uproar grew the tall figure of the ancient leader was seen to totter, sway and fall.
Pŭl-Yūn had leaped to his feet snatching right and left for axe and knife in the blind impulse of wrath. Honk-Ah, horror-struck at his impiety, stood for some breaths covering his wide open mouth with his hand, a petrifaction of remorse, whilst his friends fell away from him as from an infected thing;then, seeing his enemy and master, the new chief, in whose hand lay his life and his limbs to torture at his will, bounding across the open circle towards him, he turned and fled with winged feet.
He had yet a chance, not only for life alone, but for far more than life, for the chieftaincy of the tribe! If he could reach covert and maintain himself alive for ten days and ten nights the Headship of the Sun-Men was his.
Such was the Custom of the Tribe. Such was the rule of succession of the Priests of Nemi (Kings of the Grove) down to the times of the Antonines; such, within living memory, was the law of the Red-skins of the Middle States.
The timber was near; with such a start and on so short a course escape seemed possible. Save those of the head-wife, bent in agony upon the resolutely-composed face of her dying lord, the eyes of all were upon the runners, who had reached ahundred strides from the lists and were nearing the edge of the scrub. The avenger of blood carried nought but an axe, he ran desperately, but haltingly, for his leg failed him, suddenly he stopped, threw, and missed! Honk-Ah drew away, and then,—all was momentary, whence came it?—What was happening?—it was done! A cry "Moon, help me!" had shrilled,—a tense string had hummed behind the backs of the gazing crowd, a light fledged assegai had sped its curve over their heads, had dipped and was sticking between the working shoulder-blades of the murderer. A throw prodigious and incredible!—The stricken man ran staggering for a few paces, then his head went forward and he pitched upon his face, struggled to his knees and strove to rise. But Pŭl-Yūn was after him with the long leaping strides of the master-wolf when he hurls himself at the flank of the sinking buck. He was upon him, a knife rose and fell, all was over. Why did he not take his scalp?—For what was he waiting? To whom beckoning? Round wheeled the tribe to see more of the thrower of that amazing cast, and met Dêh-Yān, last night the foreign woman, and now the just-admitted brave, her black eyes burning, her white teeth a-glitter in the glory of victory. Bow in hand she broke through the throng, her light limbs twinkled as she raced to her husband's side. Her bow she cast down, her knife was out, an avenging fury she knelt upon her fallen foe and tore away his scalp as the falcon strips the breast-bone of a partridge.
Her shriek of triumph ended in a peal of elvish laughter. Shall we blame her? No, nor praise. Why should we? Here stands a primitive human document. This was no product of nursery, High School and drawing-room, nor was she an unsexed termagant of the slum, neither super-civilised nor residual. No, nor an abnormality, but something above a typicalwoman of the Old Stone Age, a fine specimen, if you will, of woman as we know her in the shaping, half-way up from the ridge-browed, spidery-armed, dog-toothed Forerunner, who, some hundred thousand years or so earlier, had dropped from her tree at the cry of her fallen piccaninny, and, greatly daring, had beaten off a hyena with a club. There, indeed stood the First Parent whom we need recognise, for, past gainsaying the crucial moment was that which found us upon firm ground instead of clinging to a branch, which saw us upon two feet instead of four, and with a tool in hand.
The difference betwixt that far-away, hirsute, anthropoid heroine who discovered the club, and her distant descendant who invented the bow, was great, but was chiefly physical. The lengthening of the lower limbs and the shortening of the upper, changes in the forms of the extremities, a progressive opening of the facial angle,and modifications in eye, ear, and spinal column had obliterated the ape and brought to the birth a stalwart savage, ingenious, artistic, and in many ways distinctively human, without sensibly raising the moral standard. Yet another hundred thousand years, more or less, would have to elapse ere a Voice should cry "Love your enemies!"
The Master-Girl had already once in her life gone as far in that direction as could be expected of her. There were no tribal or religious sanctions for sparing the life of a ruffian who had shed the blood of the father of his people in a treacherous attempt upon the wife of his cousin.
Leaving the corpse to the care of whom it might concern, and her weapons to her husband, Dêh-Yān strode back to the lists swinging the dripping scalp around her head, singing her chant of triumph, transfigured, her six feet of supple bronze seeming to o'ertop the tallest brave of her tribe. They drew away from her cowering, deprecatingher incantation and the magical potencies of her glance and hand; a priestess confessed.
Meanwhile the widowed head-wife rent the air with her wailing; to her the victor addressed herself, a woman to a woman. The mourner had seen nothing, knew nothing, nor understood what had befallen, until in answer to her passionate appeals for vengeance upon the slayer of her lord, the newcome foreign woman laid in her hands the wet scalp of the murderer.
The braves returning from stepping-out the full distance of that still only just credible cast, found the head-wife of their dead chief grovelling at the feet of the New Leader.
"Dêh-Yān," said her husband tremulously, himself half afraid of this prodigy to whom he found himself mated, "will it please thee to draw thy shaft?—they—we—do not seem to care to lay hand to it. It is still fast in his heart. Its head was small enough topass between his back-ribs. Thou wilt remember the arrow—the last of thy making."
"The white ptarmigan's feather? Yes, I prayed to my Totem for its luck when I made it; and again as I loosed. What are they saying?"
"They are hailing thee chieftainess—Yes, and I, too, hail thee!" He came near, very near, to prostrating himself, but something in her eye, some movement of her lip deprecated, forbade.
From that hour the Master-Girl's influence was paramount.
That shot converted the braves of the Sun Totem from spear-throwers to bowmen. In time, and as it seemed, but just in time, an archer-force, equipped and trained by their chieftainess, encountered the long anticipated raid of the Lynx-Men. The rout of the invaders was signal and complete. Timely warning of their presence was givenby the young Good Wolves which the Master-Girl had taught her people to domesticate: these warders of the dimness before the dawn held up the advance guard of the foe with bristling backs and shining teeth until Dêh-Yān had set her battle in array. A born general, one of the first, she had silently thought out her strategy—piously attributing its inspiration and success to her Totem—the horned moon, whose very form she imitated in the marshalling of her little force.
This naked woman-savage had evolved from her own clear brain the most consistently successful tactic of all subsequent warfare, that deceptive movement which consists in refusing battle by the attacked centre whilst delivering counterstrokes from the converging flanks.
"The Lynx-Men are very stout-hearted," she said. "They have carried matters their own way for many years, you tell me. It is well, O Pŭl-Yūn, for I would have themcharge us as an old boar charges, without thought of turning or looking to left or right," she laughed low in her throat, but her eye was hard and bright, her braves watched her as growing boys watch a man. "Now we have them," she cried, as battle was joined, "remember, if one of them falls by aspearof ours I shall want to know whose spear it was that transgressed!"
A minute later and the Sun-Men's centre, a special force of spearmen, trained to practice the ruse, after wasting their assegais at idle range, were in full retreat upon the stockade—and their bows!—whilst ambuscaded archery was closing in upon both flanks. The enemy, stubborn, haughty and with an unbeaten record, saw nothing, knew nothing, until, clambering one upon another at the stockade like bees that swarm, their backs felt the dreadfully-piercing small javelins of their despised foes, whilst the bowmen behind thestockade struck them down faster than they could climb.
They died there to a man; not one escaped. It was a war-party of Sun-Men disguised in Lynx trappings which took the news of the defeat to the Quarry-camp. This was the Master-Girl's counterstroke; she led it—as the song that was sung for many generations told—led it in the weed of a captive woman, one of a crowd of women, and of braves decked out as women, who marched with dishevelled hair and down-cast heads and with hoppled hands!—but with their bows borne for them by their (supposed) captors, ready at need. The surprise was absolute and final. The Lynx Totem was blotted out, only the young unproved girls and the smallest of the toddling boys were reserved to be incorporated in the Sun-and-Moon Clan, the first of many similar acts of adoption.
CHAPTER XI
THE PASSING OF THE MASTER-GIRL
Andof the rest of the deeds of the Master-Girl, and of her extreme wisdom, foresight and daring, what shall I say? Time would fail me to tell of her dealings with the White Wolves and the Beaver Totem, the Elks and the Red Clouds, and twenty tribes more; yea, and how she, moved thereto by memories of early humiliations, crossed the ranges in force and wiped out her old people the Little Moons; as to which grim deed I desire to express no opinion. Human nature, even nowadays, is queer, nor was it less queer in the Days of Ignorance. Let us admit that a warfare begun in self-defence was carried on for conquest. Her new weapon, her generalship carried all before her, and in her daythe Sun-and-Moon Totem waxed great, throve and multiplied, became a dominant clan, pushing back the hunting and war parties of all other names for a month's journey and more. Nor was it a brief episode, for this woman, the Great Chieftainess, as men called her during her life, and for long after, ruled her tribe for so many seasons that if a man were asked to tell how long, that man must hold up his two full hands six times, and yet show three fingers beyond ("threewhole menand threetoes" by Eskimo count). So many times did the black-cock go a-lekking during the reign of the Master-Girl.
In her day every man of her tribe had not less than two wives. Yea, even her husband; for being childless herself, she, loving her Pŭl-Yūn with an exigeant and emulous love, was minded to see him with a larger family of young braves and girls to his name than any other man of the Totem, and to this end supplied him with wiveswhom she picked and trained: conjugal arrangements distressing to us moderns, but still existing among the Primitives of the Aurès Mountains in Southern Algeria, and which in the case of Pŭl-Yūn and Dêh-Yān in no wise lessened the reverence which the husband paid to the wife of his youth, nor the more exacting and jealous love with which she returned his affection.
Moreover, did she not arm and train an especial force of women archers?—women who hunted by moonlight?—These, and the Good Wolves of their training, were the camp-guard, both of the home stockade at the quarries whither the tribe removed, and of the flying camps in war-time. Sorely dreaded were they by the foemen of other Totems, as well for their close and accurate shooting as for their midnight raids, for the men of the Old Stone Are dreaded to go among dark woods for good and sufficient reasons, and having this fear engrained in their beings, had imagined and come tobelieve in a-many strange and dismal Things which haunted the dark beside those upon which an axe could bite, which beliefs are held, or at least acted upon, by not a few of their descendants to this hour (albeit by daylight they will in nowise allow that they feel any nervousness at all, nor will admit that Anything whatsoever exists to warrant it).
This Amazon force was recruited from among the fleetest and hardiest of the unmarried girls. Admission to its ranks was jealously restricted and hedged about according to the manner of savages by secret and severe initiatory ceremonies celebrated by virgin priestesses under the light of the New Moon, in forest retreats, to which no man was ever admitted.
And to this, Pŭl-Yūn, war-chief and arch-priest of the rival Sun-Disc cult, was brought to consent, an admission of the moral ascendency of the Master-Girl which will not be lost upon the discerning reader.
She would seem to have had a great timeof it, but of her many campaigns (as of those of Kai Khosroo and of Genghis Khan and other conquerors whose exploits were too complete to be recorded) no faintest hollow whisper has come down to us. The chronicles of the First Woman-Chief (what a wealth of richly-embroidered incident is lost to mankind!) were writ in that earliest cuneiform script, the arrow-head, upon that most perishable of materials, the bodies of her foemen.
It may be surmised that the movements of the tribes whom her conquests dispossessed may account for some of the otherwise inexplicable migrations and settlements of peoples ignorant of the bow, the Australian to wit, and the still lower Tasmanian.
Proudly she lived, ruling her household vigorously and strictly, nor did her masterfulness decrease with advancing age.
And what of the end? what of the final scene which closes in and rounds off the longest and most eventful of lives?
To them it came suddenly. Pŭl-Yūn, grey, hale, unbent, had grown somewhat silent, husbanding breath and powers which he had private reasons to suspect were failing, albeit no man of his body-guard had yet seen his doubt reflected in the silent side-glancing face of a fellow.
The summer heats were upon the land, a great drought, the tall and stalwart elder had overtaxed himself in the noon-day sun at a game-driving. When the evening meal was cooked, he did not eat. Dêh-Yān urged uselessly. All that night he was restless, dreaming, speaking in his sleep, but not of enemies, no, for this the keenly-solicitous wife, holding her breath, listened in vain. To whom might she lay this sickness?—a bewitching, obéah-work doubtless, but, for ten days' march in any direction was there a man who dared think in hisinmost heart evil of the great chief? No, there was none in all that region that peeped or moved the wing.
Who in her household then? She brooded, vainly pondering. All the next day her man lay silent, refusing the various foods which she prepared with her own hands. At sunset she summoned the clan; her subject wives, their handmaidens, daughters and slaves sate around the silent hut: beyond the royal enclosure in a wider ring squatted the body-guard, his sons and grandsons, and the staunchest of the braves of the tribe, grizzled ring-men upon whose scarred, brown chests shifted and glittered the trophies of forty battles. They squatted mute, hand over mouth, knowing well what was a-doing inside, jealous, remorseful, anxious; someone should die for this!—yes, to the fire with her, though she were the beauty of the tribe, or with him, if he were the best archer of them all!
Dêh-Yān came forth and perambulatedthe concourse, a V-shaped sprig of the witch-hazel in her hands; seven times she went through them and about them, but the twig turned to none. Rhabdomancy had failed her. Silently she had come, silently she went, still an-hungered for vengeance, and still unsatisfied re-entered the dark hut.
"It is none of our people," she said, but there was no reply from the sick man. Her breath came short, she approached, touched, felt him. He was dead—dead of the broken heart which kills silently and swiftly so many gallant savages when stricken with one of the mysterious sicknesses for which they know no remedies and for which they cannot account.
Going forth she dismissed the assembly, bade the women of the royal household still their tongues and their children, and returning to the dark wigwam squatted all night beside her dead, revolving many things. Once her courage wavered and her faith in herself. "Husband! Chief!Is this my doing?"
But, for the main of her vigil the heart within the woman was insurgent. She had ruled too long without the physical or spiritual touch of restraint to brook an injury even from Death himself. Too proud to weep, and too self-contained to give vent to the passion of pent wrath which burnt her bosom, she crouched dumb and suffering whilst the constellations wheeled across the black vault overhead—her whole nature yearning desperately for her lost mate....Give me back my man!
Just before the dawn-streak she must have slept, for a voice and a presence were in the hut, her husband's; but not as she had hoped to see and to hear him, with a clear doom-word as to whom she was to hold to account for his death; no, nor as she had known him these many years, a grey, massive familiar figure. He returned to her smiling and bland, youthful, exquisitely beautiful and young, the happy bridegroom of her youth, who had been the first to hail her aschieftainess of the tribe. She exclaimed with rapture, spread her arms for him, and—he was gone. She was alone with the corpse.... "He needs me!" she said. "Wait for me, Pŭl-Yūn. I will not be long!"
In one moment her resolve was taken. All her life had been a series of swiftly-taken intuitive decisions, this was the last. The drowsing watchers without found her standing in the rift of the hanging skins before the doorway. "Wood," was her word. "Bring wood—much wood, let every man, woman and child bring a faggot, dry and fit. Your lord is a-cold and I am minded to warm him."
There was something terrible in the calmness and intensity of her face, although the words were wild enough, for, what shall a man need with a stack of dry kindling at midsummer?
"This will surely be a very great and sore burning," muttered this one and that as theywent their ways to the forest. Hardly dared man or woman look one upon another, so heavily lay upon all the dread of an accusation of witchcraft, of having commerced with the Unseen Powers of Darkness to the hurt of their chief.
This is the canker of savage life, the haunting, still-impending secret terror that walketh in darkness, from which few uncivilised communities are long free.
Of this the Sun-and-Moon-Men had known little or nothing for the space of four generations. The dominant personality of the Master-Girl had brooked no interference from self-chosen mystery-mongers; sixty years of splendid health, unshaken by wound or accident, had afforded scant openings for the medicine-man. As High-Priestess of the Moon-rite she had been a law unto herself and to her people, nor had her unbroken sequence of success in war provided occasions for witch-smellings or human sacrifices. Yet, as in the southern Europe of our daythe habit of delation has survived the Inquisition, so among the people of her tribe oral tradition of the dread ritual persisted, the rusted and long-disused machinery for exorcism and inquest for necromancy lay ready to hand, and might be put together and set a-working at any juncture, should authority but crook its little finger in signal. Yes, now was the time, and before night a score of their best warriors and handsomest women might be expiating the crime of "overlooking" the dying chief.
Deep-rooted indeed must be this antique belief, since it died out in our England only within human memory (if it be truly dead) and still survives in the Celtic Fringe. The sensitive, impressionable poetical Welshman is a thousand years nearer to his past than his fellow-subject of King Edward across Offa's Dyke. In broad daylight, nay, by gas-and-candle-light, the man is as we, and in one or two of the arts is more than we; he professes, and trulybelieves, some evangelical creed, and glances askance at the superstitious mummeries of the detested Establishment; but, let sickness, sorrow or misfortune strike him, and, in the deep overhung country lanes, or by the hearth whilst mountain winds rumble in the stone chimney, he begins to doubt. The Old Faith, the doggerel charms, the scraps of nurse-lore, may there not be something in them after all? He can whisper his misgivings to his brother Celt in their native speech, it seems natural, possible, probable, but, to a question put to him in the English he stiffens, or more probably puts on that impenetrable air of simplicity which has baffled the keenest seeker for folk-lore.
As for his cousin across St George's Channel, is it yet ten years since a poor epileptic woman was held down and burned to death upon her own hearthstone by her husband, family and neighbours with atrocious circumstances, and according to some immemorial rite which might havebeen lifted straight from Mashonaland or the days of the Cave Men?
Heavy of heart the wood-collectors departed upon their quests, heavy of heart, but light of heel. Woe to the laggard who hung back, to the woman whose bundle was small, or who seemed to fear, and to avoid the eye of the great chieftainess. Before mid-day every faggot was ready—where should the pile be built?—where were the stakes?
Dêh-Yān, hollow-eyed and of an ominous mien, paced the circle, took note of the burdens, then, whilst all throats grew tight and dry, and all breaths thickened, their ruler with regal wave of arm bade bear the wood to the inner stockade and pile it round the royal wigwam. There was a general movement to carry out her orders, this was no time for questioning. Whilst this black mood of their chieftainess held, and whilst her mate lay silent within (sick?—possessed?—overlooked?—forespoken?—notdead, oh,surely not dead!) at such a juncture, with the air thick with doubt and suspicion, prompt, blind, implicit obedience was safest. What this last order meant who could guess? Many were guessing. What might come next, who dare surmise?—yet all were surmising.
Dêh-Yān had withdrawn within the wigwam: crouched there in the gloom she heard the crackle and snap of piled brush. The small place was dominated by the presence of mortality in dissolution. Her mind was divided, half with her dead, half turned jealously towards the workers without. She felt that they were listening—knew their minds and the workings of them, knew that hopes of respite were dawning, glancings forward, previsions of a possible sequel other than the one which each feared. One event was coming home to them, the super-sensitive faculties of the savage at full strain could get no tidings of the chief who had withdrawn himself from his braves for twodays. This absence, this silence spoke but one word—Death!
Then, as she mused, something moved in the darkness behind her with the quiet, unbreathing, soft sinuosity of a snake. Turning swiftly she pounced and caught—a slim ankle! Her captive lay mute, panting thickly, shuddering strongly. Dêh-Yān without speaking ran an open hand over the features, followed out the limbs, and beside the relaxed hand lay something which she had not handled for many a year, reminiscent of her far-away youth, her own personal fire-sticks, long disused.
"This is little Fallow-Doe," she said softly and without anger, naming her dead lord's favourite grand-daughter, "but, what does young Fallow-Doe here? unbidden in the place of death?"
"O mother," whimpered the girl, "I knew—I could not help it—I thought—yes, I have eyes too—thou art leaving us! Oh, do not forsake thy children! What shallwe do?—To whom shall we look? Yes,Hethere is dead—we know; but, how we know not. All must die. Our times come. Maybe his time came. I do not think that any of the tribe bore a black heart towards him. But, O my mother, if it is Obi (and thou knowest best), charge whom thou wilt. Chargeme! I will die for him, though my heart is as white as a full moon; but, oh, do not leave us!"
The mourning widow withheld her answer, and when the word came, it was breathed softly and motherly. "Little girl, thy heart is white, I know it; but no whiter than the hearts of the rest. Get thee gone now by the way thou camest, and say nothing of thy coming hither until the third day at evening."
The child slipped eel-like under the tent-skirts and into the loosely-piled faggots. Dêh-Yān patted the space left vacant and smiled, for the fire-sticks were gone too. She arose, gravely smiling, and took froma skin wallet that hung high a pair of round stones, dense and very heavy, and struck them softly one against the other, and lo! the darkness was lightened with pale green sparks, for these were nodules of pyrites, her latest discovery, and one which would die with her to be rediscovered in later times. "You will not fail me, I think," she murmured, and began to arrange the tinder, crooning the first notes of her death-song to herself as she worked.
Wave after wave of memory flowed in upon her out of the long-forgotten past, and with each some trait of her dead husband travelled towards her, towered and subsided. Battle touches, his shield before her, himself exposed, his shout of triumph rang in her ears as her shaft went home. Or a hot, breath-catching moment in the life of a big-game huntress, a lioness with ears laid to her skull, and with head, neck, back and tail in one level tawny line, broke covert and made for her snarling, and again it wasPŭl-Yūn who had stridden between her and the wrinkled black lips. She saw him leap the fence of the enclosure and throw himself in the path of the stampeding herd of buck, when the leaders of the driven mob swerved in the very jaws of thehopoand were breaking back. What a man he had been! yes, they had lived, they two!
And about the time that the heat of the day began to wane, the watching tribe heard her voice raised in song within the royal wigwam, and certain duller sounds as of soft stones pounded, and, whilst all strained eye and ear, fearing the approach of the unknown with hearts high in their throats, the afternoon sunshine was dimmed by a thin smoke, and above the ridge of the wigwam, where the poles crossed, the air grew glassy like troubled water. Then, whilst the dry sticks crackled, and here and there a green one spat, the pale flame that is invisible in the sunlight turned the wood grey and shrivelled the skin hangings. The death-chant pealed intermittently from within, interrupted by coughing, but ever resumed. Soon the whole pile was alight, and on every side the crowd, though pressed upon from outside, was driven back by the heat.
"And, oh, Ididsteal these—And Ididpray her not to leave us!" wept Fallow-Doe.
Strong shudders shook the throng of watchers. Wild men, whose grandsires this woman (think—a woman!) had brought to heel, whose fathers she had trained to the bow and schooled in her battle tactics, wept, actually wept!
For the chieftainess whose death-song arose fitfully and faintly above the roar of the flame, had been more than a great warrior; the dead chief had been that, a giant in fight, terrible at the axe, with a rush and a shout like the charge and the roar of a rutting stag. But, she! how put it?—at once desperate and cautious, patient as a waiting heron, sudden in attack as the same bird when its uncoiled neck drives home thedagger-beak! Other leaders were pricked to hot decisions by the approach of unsuspected peril, she, for so long their pride and marvel, had planned her battle ere the tassels hung upon the hazel and won it after the nuts were ripe—yea, and ever upon ground of her own choice. Did the Lynxes pounce at dawn, or the Sitting Bulls await her coming, 'twas all one, the event fell as she had foretold. (Wail, ye women!) Other tribes swarmed disorderly to the onset and closed with clamour and confusion; she had taught her braves the true method of advancing silently and in line; she too, had drilled them (at what pains and with what sternness!) to a battle formation already described (subsequently re-invented by a later savage genius—Tchaka), compelling her centre to mark time until her convergent horns had enveloped the headlong foe and the killing began to a general shout of "O Moon!" Each of her battles had been an antedated Cannæ. Tribe aftertribe (names now to the young draft), scornful of woman-led warriors, had charged cheering into her traps and perished, for no quarter was given in the Stone Age, nor had the Master-Girl a use for a living enemy. (Groan, ye men, nor spare your tears for once, though the children and women see that your cheeks are wet!)
The groaning of the braves deepened, the keening of the women grew shrill, but from the core of the heat where the naked wigwam-poles, stripped now of their gear, were blazing above the pyre like torches, came never a sound.
All through that afternoon the tribe watched and waited. The sun sank to her couch blood-red, and laying her broad face upon a hill-shoulder, forbore, as minded to see the last of her priest. The fire was burning itself out, but was still too hot to approach. A circular rampart of glistering whiteness lay there with the air shuddering above it. Some of the ash retained the shapeof bavin and faggot, more was flaky and formless as snow, but pulsing through it came rosy flushes from the glowing heart within. But, ah, in the centre-space where the wigwam had stood, the Great Father and the Great Mother of their people, they, who but two days since had stood for Authority, Strength, Courage and Wisdom, were now white calcined bones!
It was then that a wonder and a portent appeared, for the tribe raising scorched faces from the dreary place of burning, beheld one half of the sky steeped as it were with blood, and the Sun, their Goddess, wading therein, whilst near to her, and within that ensanguined field stood the first presence of the young Moon, a bow of palest green.
Then did the eldest son of the dead arise, and with solemnly-uplifted hands salute the Twin Totems. "Ye are there," he cried. "We hail ye both, Heavenly Watchers over your children!"
EPILOGUE
Darknessenwrapped him, comfortably soft, thick and warm. He neither knew nor cared how long he had lain in it, nor if at any time he had ever known other conditions. He was just a motionless atom, or congeries of atoms, without ambitions, cares or resentments; yet withal, a modicum of self-knowledge.
For instance, certain black marks outstanding from a dull luminosity over against him connoted definite ideas of origin and locality. IGHTHAM FISSURES, such were the marks, thick, heavy, distinct lettering in brownish black, output of a small hand-press used for printing museum labels. (Oh, it was all known to him, the oddness consisted in his knowing so much and no more, nor feeling any especial curiosity for information unexpressed by these symbols.)
Then, by gradual but sensible degrees, the intensity of the darkness yielded; and, as layer after layer was lifted from him, or washed off, he recognised himself more fully. He was a Calcareous Accretion—(more black typing showed)—He was being treated with weak acid baths. There were hopes entertained of the result. (He overheard Someone say so.) He began to be interested in his own case; these accretions were little granular nodules found among the old dead earth of the clefts and fissures of the Ightham chalk; dead earth which had slipped down these rifts in the dead-and-gone long-ago when they were natural pitfalls in the surface of an Arctic tundra. In winter their dangers would have been hidden by the sheet of drifted snow through which an unwary reindeer calf had fallen to its doom. (He remembered that reindeer calf, also the Arctic fox which was tempted down by the meat; and the lemming which was chaseddown by the stoat, and how neither fox, lemming nor stoat ever got out again). In summer insects fell in, and his own case filled him with mild speculative hopes. The acid was fining him down, his chalky envelopes were leaving him, coat after coat. Oh, there was something inside—a something which was probably interesting—possibly a New Fact! (Here anticipation awoke in him.) Suppose, now, the chitinous core of him when washed clean and dissolved out should be recognisablyBombus hyperboreus, the big bumble-bee of the Arctic, the one so rare in collections, the insect which seems almost immune to frost, and goes booming from one little frozen flower-bell to another during the brief northern summer whilst snowflakes eddy round it! Such a find would be valuable, and New! Confirmatory as to climatic conditions, too.
"M'yess!" Someone was speaking above him, someone's finger pressed his wrist;he distinguished the ticking of a watch. He opened his eyes.
"W-What is all this?" and behold that underbred, uninteresting young doctor was looking down upon him with the subdued pride with which a medical man regards a case which will do him credit. (He had put a solid fortnight of holiday into it, for which, as he knew well, he could not legally recover a sou).
The Professor—(he was now the Professor again, and all the black marks, labels and Ightham-Fissure-Business were gone)—found himself bursting with a huge, novel experience, which it behoved him to get into writing if he died for it.
"P-pencil and paper—please."
And, eventually, he was allowed to have his way.
COLSTONS LIMITED, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH