He even arose as she paused there, uncertainly. She noted his
listening attitude, the alertness of his pose. Then he sat once more
upon the stone at his threshold, where she knew his club lay ready to
his hand.
A sense of security, despite her bitterness of feeling, came slowly
stealing upon her. She went back to her couch and slept.
Sidney, for his part, sat there alone, while hour after hour went
silently by, and the constellations hung in higher arches. A thousand
ramifications of thought he pursued in his active brain. But through
them all, like an ever recurrent _motif_, stole a troubled reminder of
the tiger, twice encountered in the day.
To slay this contemptuous, savage beast that already drooled about the
jaws at thoughts of a human morsel, was the one imperative business to
be promptly executed. Elaine and himself could live on fruits, and
neglect all else, without serious results, for a week, or even a month,
but this affair was not to be delayed.
He thought of pitfalls, giant traps, and automatic engines of
destruction by the score, each deadly device absurdly impracticable and
beyond all power of his achievement. His mind, accustomed to civilized
ways, ran in higher ingenuities that were absolutely useless in this
primal state of their existence.
When at length he leaned back against his wall and began to wonder if,
in the end, he must arm himself with primitive man's crude bow and
arrow, and thus engage the master prowler of the jungle, he was ready
for Nature's claims. He slept there, too utterly exhausted to drag
himself in to his bed. And there Elaine found him in the morning.
That day was a long one, of varied and wearying employments. The wall
was finished across the trail, Elaine's too widely opened cavern was
partially blocked up with stone, and, at length, in addition to
searching the jungle for something particularly downy and inflammable
for tinder, to use in making fire, Grenville went with his basket down
to the clay pit and fetched sufficient of this moist and plastic
material to mould a number of vessels.
This last useful art was not, however, immediately attempted. Unfired
jugs and basins were absolutely useless--and as yet they had no fire.
The search for tinder had resulted only in producing a silken, fluffy
material that grew in a fat green pod. It was moist, when found, with
the natural juices of the plant.
While it dried in the sun, under Elaine's supervision, Grenville worked
at a stout, elastic tree-branch to taper out a bow. His stub of a
knife-blade served indifferently against the close-grained wood, which,
nevertheless, was obliged to yield to his persevering efforts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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