Tharn looked up to find him standing there. "She slept here for several hours," he said. On hands and knees he began to move in a straight line across the ground, swerved to one side near the former location of the fires, then on again across the wide ribbon of open ground between the heaps of ashes and the forest's edge. At the base of a large tree, he stood up and beckoned to Trakor. "Sadu chased her to this tree," he explained, his voice as confident as though he had witnessed the entire proceedings instead of reconstructing them through the mediums of sight and smell. "He did not get her. Come." Lightly Tharn swung himself into the branches, Trakor close behind him. To the cave lord this was an engaging sport--a sport made more interesting because happiness for him depended on his ability to follow a cold trail. Here a bit of lint from Dylara's tunic had caught beneath a segment of bark; there a newly budded shoot had been crushed by a naked foot. A speck of green moisture on an adjoining branch marked where that same foot had come to rest a little later; and further on a scuffed section of bark, almost too small to be detected, showed where a foot had slipped slightly. To Tharn, guided by uncanny powers of perception and a woodlore second not even to the beasts themselves, all these marks were as evident and recognizable as words on a printed page to a scholar. Dylara's progress had been snail-like that night as she worked her way through impenetrable darkness; Tharn moved along her pathway speedily and without faltering, Trakor following. In ten minutes the cave lord covered the distance Dylara had required an hour to travel. Abruptly he altered his course upward toward the forest top, until, high among the smaller branches, he stopped and looked to his nose for information. Almost at once Trakor noticed a troubled expression carve itself on Tharn's handsome face. "What is it, Tharn?" His companion's lips set in a narrow line. "I do not know. Some strange manlike creature with long hairy arms and legs surprised her here and carried her away." Moving slowly now, with many pauses, Tharn set out on the arboreal pathway accompanied by the bewildered Trakor. * * * * * For nearly three full hours Tharn continued on through the middle terraces. It took him a good part of that time to get some sort of accurate picture of how that strange, hairy creature had regulated its progress. The distance between marks left by its hands and grasping feet seemed far too great for anything other than the most agile of monkeys. So intent was Tharn on following the spoor, and so intent on Tharn was his companion, that the first indication either had of danger was when fully a score of spider-like forms engulfed them from the depths of as many hiding places among the foliage.