Grom's wounds proved to be deep, but not fatal to one of these clean-blooded sons of the open and the wind. It was some days before it was clearly borne in upon him that A-ya had been carried off alive by the Bow-legs. Then, with a great cry, he sprang to his feet. The blood spouted afresh from his wounds, and he fell back in a swoon. When he came to himself again, for days he would speak to no one, and it looked as if he would die, not of his wounds so much as of the insufficient will to live. But a chance word of the captive Ook-ootsk, who was being nursed back to life beside him, reminded him that there was vengeance to be lived for, and he roused himself a little. Then Bawr, ever subtle in the reading of his people's hearts, suggested to him that even such a feat as the rescue of the girl A-ya might not be impossible to the subjugator of the fire and the slayer of a whole people. And from that moment Grom began climbing steadily back to life. CHAPTER VII THE RESCUE OF A-YA The clay-colored, ape-like, bow-legged men squatted in council. It was not long, as time went in the long, slow morning of the world--perhaps a half-score thousand years or so--since their ancestors, in the pride of their dawning intelligence, had swung down from their tree-tops, to walk upright on the solid earth and challenge the supremacy of the hunting beasts. Their arms were still of an unhuman and ungainly length, their short powerful legs were still so heavily bowed that they had no great speed in running; and they still had their homes high among the branches, where they could sleep secure from surprise. They were still tree dwellers; but they were men, intent upon asserting their lordship over all the other dwellers upon earth's surface. They were not beautiful to look upon. Their squat, powerful forms, varying in color from a dingy yellow-brown to blackish mud-color, were covered unevenly with a thin growth of dark hairs. On thigh and shoulder, down the backbone, and on the outer side of the long forearm, this growth was heavier and longer, forming a sort of irregular thatch; while the hair of their heads was jet black, and matted into a filthy tangle with grease and clay. Their faces were broad and flat, with powerful protruding jaws, low and very receding foreheads, and wide noses which seemed to have been punched in at the bridge so that the flaring red nostrils turned upwards hideously.