Page:The Cave Girl - Edgar Rice Burroughs.pdf/283

 “What?” yelled Thandar.

“Yes, I saw the cliff sink, very slowly when it was a long way off, until only the smoke was coming out of the water.”

Thandar breathed a sigh of relief.

“Point,” he said, “to the place where the cliff sank beneath the water.”

Roof pointed almost due north.

“There,” he said.

For days Thandar puzzled over the possible identity of the ship and the men with whom Nadara had gone so willingly. Doubtless some kindly mariner, hearing her story, had taken her home, away from the terrors and the loneliness of this unhappy island. And now the man chafed to be after her, that he might search the world for his lost love.

To wait for a ship appeared quite impossible to the impatient Thandar, for he knew that a ship might never come. There was but one alternative, and had Waldo Emerson been a less impractical man in the world to which he had been born he would have cast aside that single alternative as entirely beyond the pale of possibility. But Waldo was only practical and wise in the savage ways of the primitive life to which circumstance had forced him to revert. And so he decided upon as foolhardy and hair-brained a venture as the mind of