And the years pa.s.sed. One still afternoon in autumn a gray, hairy man, a man approaching old age, but without weakness of arm or stiffness of joint, as yet, sat on the height overlooking the village. He looked in tranquil comfort, now down into the little valley, and now across it into the wood beyond, where the sun was approaching the treetops. He had come to the hill with the mere instinct of the old hunter seeking to be completely out of doors, but he had brought work with him and was engaged, when not looking thoughtfully far away, in finishing a huge bow, the spring of which he occasionally tested. Every motion showed the retained possession of tremendous strength as well as the knowledge of its use to most advantage. A very hale old man was Ab, the great hunter and head of the people of the Fire Valley.
A few yards away from Ab, leaning against the trunk of a beech, stood Lightfoot, her quick glance roving from place to place and as keen, seemingly, as ever. These two were still most content when together, and it was well for each that they had in the same degree withstood what the years bring. The woman had, perhaps, changed less than the man. Her hair was still dark and her step had not grown heavy. She had changed in face and expression rather than in form. There had grown in her eyes and about her mouth the indefinable lines and tokens, pathetic and sweet, of care, of sorrow, of suffering and of quiet gladness, in short, of motherhood.
As twilight came on the woods rang with the shouts and laughter of a party of young men who were coming home from some forest trip. Ab, looking down the valley, over the flashing flame, into the forest hills, in whose deep shade lay Little Mok, old Hilltop and Ab"s mother, could see the l.u.s.ty youths in the village, running, leaping, wrestling and throwing spears, axes and stones in compet.i.tion. A strange oppression came upon him and he thought of Oak lying in the ground alone on the hillside, miles away. Ab felt, even now, the strong, helpful arm of his friend around him, just as it was in the evening journey from the Feast of the Mammoth homeward, when he had been rescued from almost certain death by Oak. A lump rose in the throat of the man of many battles and many trials. He shook himself, as if to shake off the memory that plagued him. Oak came not often to trouble Ab"s peace now, and when he came it was always at night. Morning never found him near the Fire Village.
The young hunters, rioting like the young men in the valley, were pa.s.sing 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 Nors.e.m.e.n, the Eskimo of to-day, but not so the people of the great Fire Valley or their stern and st.u.r.dy va.s.sals 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.
Upon the beach the other day, watching the waves lap toward her, sat a woman, cultured, very beautiful and wise in woman"s way and among the fairest and the best of all earth can produce. There are many such as she. Barely longer ago than the other day, as time is counted, a rugged man, gentle as resolute and n.o.ble, became the enshrined hero of a vast republic, when he struck from slave limbs the shackles of four million people. In an insular home across the sea, interested still in the world"s affairs, is an old man vigorous in his octogenarianism, a power, though out of power, a figure to be a monument in personal history, a great man. But a few years ago the whole world stood with bowed head while into the soil he loved was lowered the coffin of one who has bound the nations together in sympathy for _Les Miserables_ of the earth. In a home on the continent broods watchfully a bald-headed giant in cavalry boots, one who has dictated arbitrarily, as premier, the policy of the empire he has largely made. The woman upon the sands, the great liberator, the man wonderful even in old age, the heart-stirring writer, the man of giant personality physical and mental, have had reason to boast alike a strain of the blood of Ab and Lightfoot. In the veins of each has danced the transmitted product of the identical corpuscles which coursed in the veins of those two who first found a home in the Fire Valley. Strong was primitive man; adroit, patient and faithful was primitive woman; he, the strongest, she, the fairest and cleverest of the time, could protect their offspring, breed and care for great children of similar powers and so insure a lasting race. Thus has the good blue blood come down. This is not romance, this is not fancy; this is but faithful history.
THE END