Page:The Cave Girl - Edgar Rice Burroughs.pdf/16

 Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones was not overly courageous. He had been reared among surroundings of culture plus and ultra-intellectuality in the exclusive Back Bay home of his ancestors.

He had been taught to look with contempt upon all that savored of muscular superiority—such things were gross, brutal, primitive.

It had been a giant intellect only that he had craved—he and a fond mother—and their wishes had been fulfilled. At twenty-one Waldo was an animated encyclopedia—and about as muscular as a real one.

Now he slunk shivering with fright at the very edge of the beach, as far from the grim forest as he could get.

Cold sweat broke from every pore of his long, lank, six-foot-two body. His skinny arms and legs trembled as with palsy. Occasionally he coughed—it had been the cough that had banished him upon this ill-starred sea voyage.

As he crouched in the sand, staring with wide, horror-dilated eyes into the black night, great tears rolled down his thin, white cheeks.

It was with difficulty that he restrained an overpowering desire to shriek. His mind was filled with forlorn regrets that he had not remained at home to meet the wasting death that the doctor had predicted—a peaceful death at least—not the brutal