With a wife of his own he
must have a cave of his own. Compared with his first impulses toward the
girl, this was a new train of thought, and, as we recognize it to-day, a
nobler one. He wanted to care for his own. He wanted a cave fit for the
reception of such a woman as this, to him, the sweetest and proudest of
all beings, Lightfoot, daughter of old Hilltop, of the wooded highlands.
Far up the river, far beyond the home of Oak's father and beyond the
shining marshlands and the purple heather reaches which made the foothills
pleasant, extended to the river's bank a promontory, bold and picturesque
and clad heavily with the best of trees. It was a great stretch of land,
where, in some of nature's grim work, the earth had been up-heaved and
there had been raised good soil for giant forests, and at the same time
been made broad caverns to become future habitations of the creature known
as man. But the trees bore nuts and fruits, and such creatures as found
food in nuts and fruits, and, later, such as loved rich herbage, came to
the forest in great numbers, and then followed such as fed upon these
again, all the flesh eaters, to whom man was, as any other living thing,
to be seized upon and devoured. The promontory, so rich in game and nuts
and fruits, was, at the same time, the most dangerous in all the region
for human habitation.
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