In leaving the direct path she
would but lose ground. To reach soon enough by straight, clean running the
towering wooded hill in which was her father's cave seemed the only hope
of the half-unwilling fugitive.
There were descents and ascents in the long chase and plateaus where the
running was on level ground. Straining forward, gaining little, but
confident of overtaking the girl, Ab, deep-chested and physically
untroubled, pressed onward, when he noted that the girl made a sudden
spurt and bounded forward with a speed not shown before, while, at the
same time, she swerved from the right of the path.
It was not Ab who had made her swerve. Some new alarm had come to her. She
was about to reach and, as Ab supposed, pass one of the inletting paths
entering almost at right angles from the left. She did not pass it. She
leaped into it in evident terror and then, breaking out from the wood on
the right, came another form and one surely in swift following. Ab knew
the figure well. Oak was the new pursuer!
The awful rage which rose in the heart of Ab as he saw what was happening
is what can no more be described than one can tell what a tiger in the
jungle thinks. He saw another--the other his friend--pursuing and
intending to take what he wanted to be his and what had become to him more
than all else in the world; more than much eating and the skins of things
to keep him warm, more than a mammoth's tooth to carve, more than the
glorious skin of the great cave tiger, the possession of which made a rude
nobility, more than anything and all else! He leaped aside from the path.
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