Like a huge cat he scrambled up the frail pole until his fingers clutched the ledge edge above him. Ape-like he drew himself to a squatting position there. Then he groped for the ladder that the cave folk had drawn up from below. This he erected to the next ledge above. Thereafter the way was easy, for the balance of the ledges were connected by steeply inclined trails cut into the cliff face. This had been an innovation of Thandar's who considered the rickety ladders not only a nuisance, but extremely dangerous to life and limb, for scarce a day passed that some child or woman did not receive a bad fall because of them. So Thurg, with Thandar's unintentional aid, came easily to the mouth of Nadara's cave. Great had been the temptation as he passed the cave below to enter and slay his enemy. Never had Thurg so hated any creature as he hated this smooth-skinned interloper--with all the venom of his mean soul he hated him. Now he stooped, listening, just beside the entrance to the cave. He could hear the regular breathing of the girl within. The hot blood surged through his brute veins. His huge paws opened and closed spasmodically. His breath sucked hot between his flabby lips. Just beneath him Thandar lay dreaming. He saw a wonderful vision of a beautiful nymph dancing in the firelight. In a circle about her sat the Smith-Joneses, the Percy Standishes, the Livingston-Brownes, the Quincy Adams-Cootses, and a hundred more equally aristocratic families of Boston. It did not seem strange to Thandar that there was not enough clothing among the entire assemblage to have recently draped the Laocoön. His father wore a becoming loin cloth, while the stately Mrs. John Alden Smith-Jones, his mother, was tastefully arrayed in a scant robe of the skins of small rodents sewn together with bits of gut. As the nymph danced the audience kept time to her steps with loudly clapping palms, and when she was done they approached her one by one, crawling upon their hands and knees, and kissed her hand. Suddenly he saw that the nymph was Nadara, and as he sprang forward to claim her a large man with a coarse matted beard, a slanted forehead, and close-set eyes, leaped out from among the others, seized Nadara and fled with her toward a waiting trolley car. He recognized the man as Thurg, and even in his dream it seemed rather incongruous that he should be clothed in well-fitting evening clothes. Nadara screamed once, and the scream roused Thandar from his dream. Raising upon one elbow he looked toward the entrance of his cave. The recollection of the dream swept back into his memory. With a little sigh of relief that it had been but a dream, he settled back once more upon his bed of grasses, and soon was wrapped in dreamless slumber. CHAPTER V THE ABDUCTION OF NADARA Cautiously Thurg crawled into the cave where Nadara slept upon her couch of soft grasses, wrapped in the glossy pelt of Nagoola, the black panther.