The People of the Caves were beginning to dread their good fortune. Plenty was being showered upon them with so lavish and sudden a hand that they looked at it askance, distrustful of the unsought-for largess. For a week or more their hunting-grounds had been swarming with game, in amazing and daily increasing numbers, till there was little more of chance or of excitement in the hunt than in plucking a ripe mango from its branch. It was game of the choicest kinds, too--deer of many varieties, and antelope, and the little wild horse whose flesh they accounted such a delicacy. They slew, and slew, and their cooking-fires were busy night and day, and the flesh they could not devour was dried in the sun in long strips or smoked in the reek of green-wood fires. They feasted greedily, but there was something sinister in the whole matter, something ominous; and they would stop at times to wonder anxiously what stroke of fate could be hanging over the Caves. During the past day or two, moreover, there had been a disquieting influx of those great and fierce beasts which the Cave Men were by no means anxious to hunt. The giant white and the woolly rhinoceros had arrived by the score in the dense thickets of the steaming savannah which unrolled its green-and-yellow breadths along the southward base of the downs. These half-blind brutes appeared to be waging a dreadful and doubtful war with the red herds of those monstrous, cone-horned survivals from an earlier age, the Arsinotheria, who had ruled the reeking savannah for countless cycles. The roar and trampling of the struggle came up from time to time to the dwellers in the Caves, when the hot breeze came up from the southward. What concerned the Cave Folk far more than any near-sighted and blundering rhinoceros, however malignant, was the sudden arrival of the great red bears, the black lions, the grinning and implacable saber-tooth tigers, and giant black-gray wolves which hunted in small, handy packs of six or seven in number. All these, the dread foes of Man for as long as tradition could remember, had been mercifully few and scattered. Now, in a night, they had become as common as conies; and not a child could be allowed to play beyond shelter of the cave-mouth fires, not a woman durst venture to the spring without a brightly blazing fire-brand in her hand. Yet--and this seemed to the Tribe the most portentous sign of all--these blood-thirsty beasts appeared to have lost much of their ancient hostility to Man. They were all well fed, of course, their accustomed prey being now so abundant that they had little more to do than put forth an armed paw and seize it. But they all seemed uneasy and half-cowed, as if weighed down by a menace which they did not know how to face. When a man confronted them, the fiercest of them made way with a deprecating air, as if to say that they had troubles enough on their minds. * * * * *