The young hunters, rioting like the young men in the valley, were passing now. Ab looked upon them thoughtfully. He felt dimly a desire to speak to them, to tell them something about the hurts they might avoid, and how hard it was to have a great, heavy load on one's chest at times--all one's life--but the cave man was, as to the emotions, inarticulate. Ab could no more have spoken his half defined feelings than the tree could cry out at the blow of the ax. The woman left the beech tree and approached the man and touched his arm. His eyes turned upon her kindly and after she had seated herself beside him, there was laughing talk, for Lightfoot was declaring her desperate condition of hunger and demanding that he return to the valley with her. She examined his bow critically and had an opinion to express, for so fine a shot as she might surely talk a little about so manful a thing as the making of the weapon. And as the sun sank lower and the valley fell into shadow, the two descended together, a pair who, after all, had reason to be glad that they had lived. And the children these two left were bold and strong and dominant by nature, and maintained the family leadership as the village grew. With later generations came trouble vast and dire to the people of the land, but it was not the part of this proud and seasoned and well-weaponed group to flee like wild beasts when came drifting to the Westward the first feeble vanguard of the Aryan overflow. The vanguard was overthrown; its men made serfs and its women mothers. Other cave men in other regions might escape to the Northward as the wave increased, there to become frost-bitten Lapps or the "Skrallings" of the Norsemen, the Eskimo of to-day, but not so the people of the great Fire Valley or their stern and sturdy vassals for half a hundred miles about. No child's play was it for those of another and still rude civilization to meet them in their fastnesses, and the end of the struggle--for this region at least--was, not a conquest, but a blending, a blending good for each of the two forces. And as the face of Nature changed with the ages, as the later glacial cold wavered and fluctuated and forced back and forth migrations of man and beast, still the first-formed group retained coherence, retained it beyond great natural cataclysms, retained it to historic ages, to wield long the smoothed stone weapons, and, afterward, the bronze axes, and to diverge in many branches of contentious defenders and invaders, to become Iberian and Gaul and Celt and Saxon, to fight family against family, and to commingle again in these later times.