Page:The Cave Girl - Edgar Rice Burroughs.pdf/32

 He turned to meet it, and below saw a number of the cave men placing another ladder in lieu of that which had fallen. In a moment they were resuming the ascent after him.

On the narrow ledge above them the young man stood, chattering and grinning like a madman. His pitiful cries were not punctuated with the hollow coughing which his violent exercise had induced.

Tears rolled down his begrimed face, leaving crooked, muddy streaks in their wake. His knees smote together so violently that he could barely stand, and it was into the face of this apparition of cowardice that the first of the cave men looked as he scrambled above the ledge on which Waldo stood.

And then, of a sudden, there rose within the breast of Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones a spark that generations of overrefinement and emasculating culture had all but extinguished—the instinct of self-preservation by force. Heretofore it had been purely by flight.

With the frenzy of the fear of death upon him, he raised his cudgel, and, swinging it high above his head, brought it down full upon the unprotected skull of his enemy.

Another took the fallen man’s place—he, too, went down with a broken head. Waldo was fighting now like a cornered rat, and through it all