Cave Girl | Page 2

the forest, and then he sat huddled up gazing out upon the
ocean; but the tears which rolled down his cheeks so blurred his eyes
that he saw nothing.
Finally he could endure it no longer, and with a sudden gasp of horror
he wheeled toward the wood. There was nothing visible, yet he broke
down and sobbed like a child, for loneliness and terror.
When he was able to control his tears for a moment he took the
opportunity to scan the deepening shadows once more. The first glance
brought a piercing shriek from his white lips.
The thing was there!
The young man did not fall groveling to the sand this time--instead, he
stood staring with protruding eyes at the vague form, while shriek after

shriek broke from his grinning lips.
Reason was tottering.
The thing, whatever it was, halted at the first blood-curdling cry, and
then when the cries continued it slunk back toward the wood.
With what remained of his ebbing mentality Waldo Emerson realized
that it were better to die at once than face the awful fears of the black
night. He would rush to meet his fate, and thus end this awful agony of
suspense.
With the thought came action, so that, still shrieking, he rushed
headlong toward the thing at the wood's rim. As he ran it turned and
fled into the forest, and after it went Waldo Emerson, his long, skinny
legs carrying his emaciated body in great leaps and bounds through the
tearing underbrush.
He emitted shriek after shriek--ear-piercing shrieks that ended in long
drawn out wails, more wolfish than human. And the thing that fled
through the night before him was shrieking, too, now.
Time and again the young man stumbled and fell. Thorns and brambles
tore his clothing and his soft flesh. Blood smeared him from head to
feet. Yet on and on he rushed through the semi-darkness of the now
moonlit forest.
At first impelled by the mad desire to embrace death and wrest the
peace of oblivion from its cruel clutch, Waldo Emerson had come to
pursue the screaming shadow before him from an entirely different
motive. Now it was for companionship. He screamed now because of a
fear that the thing would elude him and that he should be left alone in
the depth of this weird wood. Slowly but surely it was drawing away
from him, and as Waldo Emerson realized the fact he redoubled his
efforts to overtake it. He had stopped screaming now, for the strain of
his physical exertion found his weak lungs barely adequate to the needs
of his gasping respiration.

Suddenly the pursuit emerged from the forest to cross a little moonlit
clearing, at the opposite side of which towered a high and rocky cliff.
Toward this the fleeing creature sped, and in an instant more was
swallowed, apparently, by the face of the cliff.
Its disappearance was as mysterious and awesome as its identity had
been, and left the young man in blank despair. With the object of
pursuit gone, the reaction came, and Waldo Emerson sank trembling
and exhausted at the foot of the cliff. A paroxysm of coughing seized
him, and thus he lay in an agony of apprehension, fright, and misery
until from very weakness he sank into a deep sleep.
It was daylight when he awoke--stiff, lame, sore, hungry, and
miserable--but, withal, refreshed and sane. His first consideration was
prompted by the craving of a starved stomach; yet it was with the
utmost difficulty that he urged his cowardly brain to direct his steps
toward the forest, where hung fruit in abundance.
At every little noise he halted in tense silence, poised to flee. His knees
trembled so violently that they knocked together; but at length he
entered the dim shadows, and presently was gorging himself with ripe
fruits.
To reach some of the more luscious viands he had picked from the
ground a piece of fallen limb, which tapered from a diameter of four
inches at one end to a trifle over an inch at the other. It was the first
practical thing that Waldo Emerson had done since he had been cast
upon the shore of his new home--in fact, it was, in all likelihood, the
nearest approximation to a practical thing which he had ever done in all
his life.
Waldo had never been allowed to read fiction, nor had he ever cared to
so waste his time or impoverish his brain, and nowhere in the fund of
deep erudition which he had accumulated could he recall any condition
analogous to those which now confronted him.
Waldo, of course, knew that there were such things as step-ladders, and
had he had one he would have used it as a means to reach the fruit

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