The bow was about Ab's shoulders instantly, and then this preposterous young gentleman of the period turned to the woman and laughed, and caught her in one of his arms a little closer, and drew her up against him and laid his cheek against her own for a moment and drew it away and laughed again. The kiss, it is believed, had not fully developed itself in the cave man's time, but there were substitutes. Then, releasing her, he said gleefully and chucklingly, "follow me;" and they clambered down the bole of the beech together until they reached the biggest and very lowest limb of all. It was perhaps twenty feet above the ground. A little below their dangling feet the hungry bears, hitherto more patient, now, with their expected prey so close at hand, becoming desperately excited, ran about, frothing and foaming and red-eyed, uprearing themselves in awful nearness, at times, in their eagerness to reach the prey which they had so awaited and which, to their intelligence, seemed about falling into their jaws. They had so driven into trees before, and finally consumed exhausted cave men and women. As bears went, they were doubtless logical animals. They could not know that there had come into possession of this particular pair of creatures of the sort they had occasionally eaten, a trifling thing of wood and sinew string and flint point, which was destined henceforth to make a decided change in the relative condition of the biped and quadruped hunters of the time. How could they know that something small and sharp would fly down and sting them more deeply than they had ever been stung before, that it would sting so deeply that their arteries might be cut, or their hearts pierced and that then they must lie down and die? The well-thrown spear had been, in other ages, a vast surprise to the carnivora of the period, but there was something yet to learn.