"Yet again, good fellow," I queried, "even this happy chance only gives us a weapon, sharp, no doubt, and cal-culated to do a hundred services for any ten the original pebble could have done, but still unhandled, small in force, imperfect--now tell me, which of your amiable ancestors first put a handle to the fashioned flint, and how he thought of it?"The workman had done his flake by now, and wrapping it in a bit of skin, put it carefully in his belt before turning to answer my question.
"Who made the first handle for the first flint, you of the many questions? She did--she, the Mother," he suddenly cried, patting the earth with his brown hand, and working himself up as he spoke, "made it in her heart for us her first-born. See, here is such as the first handled weapon that ever came out of darkness," and he snatched from the ground, where it had lain hidden under his fox-skin cloak, a heavy club. I saw in an instant how it was. The club had been a sapling, and the sapling's roots had grown about and circled with a splendid grip a lump of native flint.
A woodman had pulled the sapling, found the flint, and fashioned the two in a moment of happy inspiration, the one to an axe-head and the other to a handle, as they lay Nature-welded!
"This, I say, is the first--the first!" screamed the old fellow as though I were contradicting him, thumping the ground with his weapon, and working himself up to a fury as its black magic entered his being. "This is the first: with this I slew Hetter and Gur, and those who plundered my hiding-places in the woods; with this I have killed a score of others, bursting their heads, and cracking their bones like dry sticks.
With this--with this--" but here his rage rendered him in-articulate; he stammered and stuttered for a minute, and then as the killing fury settled on him his yellow teeth shut with a sudden snap, while through them his breath rattled like wind through dead pine branches in December, the sinews sat up on his hands as his fingers tightened upon the axe-heft like the roots of the same pines from the ground when winter rain has washed the soil from beneath them;his small eyes gleamed like baleful planets; every hair upon his shaggy back grew stiff and erect--another minute and my span were ended.
With a leap from where I sat I flew at that hairy beast, and sinking my fists deep in his throttle, shook him till his eyes blazed with delirious fires. We waltzed across the short green-sward, and in and about the tree-trunks, shaking, pulling, and hitting as we went, till at last I felt the man's vigour dy-ing within him; a little more shaking, a sudden twist, and he was lying on the ground before me, senseless and civil!
That is the worst of some orators, I thought to myself, as I gloomily gathered up the scattered fragments of my lunch;they never know when they have said enough, and are too apt to be carried away by their own arguments.
That inhospitable village was left behind in full belief the mountain looming in the south could be reached before nightfall, while the road to its left would serve as a sure guide to food and shelter for the evening. But, as it turned out, the morning's haze developed a strong mist ere the afternoon was half gone, through which it was impossible to see more than twenty yards. My hill loomed gigantic for a time with a tantalising appearance of being only a mile or two ahead, then wavered, became visionary, and finally disap-peared as completely as though the forest mist had drunk it up bodily.
There was still the road to guide me, a fairly well-beaten track twining through the glades; but even the best of highways are difficult in fog, and this one was compli-cated by various side paths, made probably by hunters or bark-cutters, and without compass or guide marks it was necessary to advance with extreme caution, or get helplessly mazed.
An hour's steady tramping brought me nowhere in particu-lar, and stopping for a minute to consider, I picked a few wild fruit, such as my wood-cutter friend had eaten, from an overhanging bush, and in so doing slipped, the soil having now become damp, and in falling broke a branch off. The incident was only important from what follows. Picking myself up, perhaps a little shaken by the jolt, I set off again upon what seemed the plain road, and being by this time displeased by my surroundings, determined to make a push for "civilization" before the rapidly gathering darkness set-tled down.
