Before the Caves of the Pointed Hills the fires of the tribe burned brightly. Within the caves reigned plenty and an unheard-of security; for since the conquest of fire those monstrous beasts and gigantic carnivorous, running birds, which had been Man's ceaseless menace ever since he swung down out of the tree-tops to walk the earth erect, had been held at a distance through awe of the licking flames. Though the great battle which had hurled back the invading hosts of the Bow-legs had cost the tribe more than half its warriors, the Caves were swarming with vigorous children. To Bawr, the Chief, and to Grom, his Right Hand and Councilor, the future of the tribe looked secure. So sharp had been the lessons lately administered to the prowling beasts--the terrible saber-tooth, the giant red bear of the caves, the proud black lion, and the bone-crushing cave hyena--that even the stretch of bumpy plain outside the circle of the fires, to a distance of several hundred paces, was considered a safe playground for the children of the tribe. On the outermost skirts of this playground, to be sure, just where the reedy pools and the dense bamboo thickets began, there was a fire kept burning. But this was more as a reminder than as an actual defense. When a bear or a saber-tooth had once had a blazing brand thrust in his face, he acquired a measure of discretion. Moreover, the activities of the tribe had driven all the game animals to some distance up the valley; and it was seldom that anything more formidable than a jackal or a civet-cat cared to come within a half-mile of the fires. It was now two years since the rescue of A-ya from her captivity among the Bow-legs. Her child by Grom was a straight-limbed, fair-skinned lad of somewhere between four and five years. She sat cross-legged near the sentinel fire, some fifty yards or so from the edge of the thickets, and played with the lad, whose eyes were alight with eager intelligence. Behind her sprawled, playing contentedly with its toes and sucking a banana, a fat brown flat-nosed baby of some fourteen or fifteen months. Both A-ya and the boy were interested in a new toy. It was, perhaps, the first whip. The boy had succeeded in tying a thin strip of green hide, something over three feet in length, to one end of a stick which was several inches longer. The uses of a whip came to him by unerring insight, and he began applying it to his mother's shoulders. The novelty of it delighted them both. A-ya, moreover, chuckled slyly at the thought that the procedure might, on some future occasion, be reversed, not without advantage to the cause of discipline.