The day passed into the night, one of us awake at all times and feeding the raging furnace as it needed. Morning came, and then Hammer, who had been sleeping last, arose and looked at me and beckoned. Together we neared the white-hot mass of coals and embers and, taking hold of the long handle very carefully, withdrew the pot from where it rested in the eye-blistering furnace. We took it away from the fire and rested it a moment on the ground, while, with a long stick in hand, Hammer lifted off the still red cover. Then rose such a yell of triumph as had not been heard since we found the copper in the forest. The metal had melted! We did not speak. Carefully as men had ever performed an action, and holding the ungainly handle firmly, we poured the molten stuff into the hole in the awaiting mold. It filled and overflowed and ran upon the ground, but we cared not. What was left we poured into a hollow in the soil and then threw ourselves upon the ground to wait again. It was noon when we broke away the clay, and later, when the mould had cooled enough to be handled, the two parts separated easily and there came forth a copper axe! The great thing was accomplished! It was not a perfect axe, but it would be so after a little grinding and polishing. Henceforth the making of copper things would be done in a new and easier way. Furthermore, one man, two men indeed, would die something more content. The tribe--the whole world--had a part in what had come that day! And now for a time there were life and labour and clamour in the old village again, because of the tree furnace and the convenient clay, but later we learned to build a better furnace and to provide at the forest village all things required for easier casting. With the training to the labour from the getting of the copper to the time when it was made into weapons or other things, there came, too, a new orderliness and sense of what was best among us, and we established what was something like a government; in a council of the older men, and less like the ways of the barbarian, we sometimes met who had no law save that of might. We feared them not, though once the ever-dreaded westward drift from we know not where brought to our doors a small horde of barbarians who thought to overrun us easily, but who fell in windrows at our barricades before such archery as ours, or died beneath our copper spears and axes and fled, a remnant, to seek somewhere an easier conquest. There were not too many left for such adventure, and the tribe next to us, a strong and warlike one, received them fiercely and finished them completely.