Page:The Cave Girl - Edgar Rice Burroughs.pdf/197

 It was Thandar’s plan to build a village partly of logs against the face of the cliff, burrowing inward behind the dwellings for such additional apartments as each family might require.

The caves alone would have proved sufficient shelter, but the man hoped by compelling his people to construct a portion of each dwelling of logs to engender within each family a certain feeling of ownership and pride in personal possession as would make it less easy for them to give up their abodes than in the past, when it had been necessary but to move to another cliff to find caves equally as comfortable as those which they so easily abandoned.

In other words he hoped to give them a word which their vocabulary had never held—home.

Whether or not he would have succeeded we may never know, for fate stepped in at the last moment to alter with a single stroke his every plan and aspiration.

As he returned to his people that afternoon filled with the enthusiasm of his hopes a burly, hairy figure crept warily after him. As Thandar emerged from the brush which reaches close to the cliffs where the temporary encampment had been made Nadara, watching for him, ran forward to meet him.

The creature upon Thandar’s trail halted at the edge of the bush. As his close-set eyes fell upon