OUR VERY GREAT GRANDFATHER.
And the years passed. One still afternoon in autumn a gray, hairy man, a
man approaching old age, but without weakness of arm or stiffness of
joint, as yet, sat on the height overlooking the village. He looked in
tranquil comfort, now down into the little valley, and now across it into
the wood beyond, where the sun was approaching the treetops. He had come
to the hill with the mere instinct of the old hunter seeking to be
completely out of doors, but he had brought work with him and was
engaged, when not looking thoughtfully far away, in finishing a huge bow,
the spring of which he occasionally tested. Every motion showed the
retained possession of tremendous strength as well as the knowledge of
its use to most advantage. A very hale old man was Ab, the great hunter
and head of the people of the Fire Valley.
A few yards away from Ab, leaning against the trunk of a beech, stood
Lightfoot, her quick glance roving from place to place and as keen,
seemingly, as ever. These two were still most content when together, and
it was well for each that they had in the same degree withstood what the
years bring. The woman had, perhaps, changed less than the man. Her hair
was still dark and her step had not grown heavy. She had changed in face
and expression rather than in form. There had grown in her eyes and about
her mouth the indefinable lines and tokens, pathetic and sweet, of care,
of sorrow, of suffering and of quiet gladness, in short, of motherhood.
As twilight came on the woods rang with the shouts and laughter of a
party of young men who were coming home from some forest trip. Ab,
looking down the valley, over the flashing flame, into the forest hills,
in whose deep shade lay Little Mok, old Hilltop and Ab's mother, could
see the lusty youths in the village, running, leaping, wrestling and
throwing spears, axes and stones in competition. A strange oppression
came upon him and he thought of Oak lying in the ground alone on the
hillside, miles away. Ab felt, even now, the strong, helpful arm of his
friend around him, just as it was in the evening journey from the Feast
of the Mammoth homeward, when he had been rescued from almost certain
death by Oak. A lump rose in the throat of the man of many battles and
many trials. He shook himself, as if to shake off the memory that plagued
him. Oak came not often to trouble Ab's peace now, and when he came it
was always at night. Morning never found him near the Fire Village.
The young hunters, rioting like the young men in the valley, were passing
now. Ab looked upon them thoughtfully. He felt dimly a desire to speak to
them, to tell them something about the hurts they might avoid, and how
hard it was to have a great, heavy load on one's chest at times--all
one's life--but the cave man was, as to the emotions, inarticulate. Ab
could no more have spoken his half defined feelings than the tree could
cry out at the blow of the ax.
The woman left the beech tree and approached the man and touched his arm.
His eyes turned upon her kindly and after she had seated herself beside
him, there was laughing talk, for Lightfoot was declaring her desperate
condition of hunger and demanding that he return to the valley with her.
She examined his bow critically and had an opinion to express, for so
fine a shot as she might surely talk a little about so manful a thing as
the making of the weapon. And as the sun sank lower and the valley fell
into shadow, the two descended together, a pair who, after all, had
reason to be glad that they had lived.
And the children these two left were bold and strong and dominant by
nature, and maintained the family leadership as the village grew. With
later generations came trouble vast and dire to the people of the land,
but it was not the part of this proud and seasoned and well-weaponed
group to flee like wild beasts when came drifting to the Westward the
first feeble vanguard of the Aryan overflow. The vanguard was overthrown;
its men made serfs and its women mothers. Other cave men in other regions
might escape to the Northward as the wave increased, there to become
frost-bitten Lapps or the "Skrallings" of the Norsemen, the Eskimo of
to-day, but not so the people of the great Fire Valley or their stern and
sturdy vassals for half a hundred miles about. No child's play was it for
those of another and still rude civilization to meet them in their
fastnesses, and the end of the struggle--for this region at least--was,
not a conquest, but a blending, a blending good for each of the two
forces.
And as the face of Nature changed with the ages, as the later glacial
cold wavered and fluctuated and forced back and forth migrations of man
and beast, still the first-formed group retained coherence, retained it
beyond great natural cataclysms, retained it to historic ages, to wield
long the smoothed stone weapons, and, afterward, the bronze axes, and to
diverge in many branches of contentious defenders and invaders, to become
Iberian and Gaul and Celt and Saxon, to fight family against family, and
to commingle again in these later times.
Upon the beach the other day, watching the waves lap toward her, sat a
woman, cultured, very beautiful and wise in woman's way and among the
fairest and the best of all earth can produce. There are many such as
she. Barely longer ago than the other day, as time is counted, a rugged
man, gentle as resolute and noble, became the enshrined hero of a vast
republic, when he struck from slave limbs the shackles of four million
people. In an insular home across the sea, interested still in the
world's affairs, is an old man vigorous in his octogenarianism, a power,
though out of power, a figure to be a monument in personal history, a
great man. But a few years ago the whole world stood with bowed head
while into the soil he loved was lowered the coffin of one who has bound
the nations together in sympathy for _Les Misérables_ of the earth. In a
home on the continent broods watchfully a bald-headed giant in cavalry
boots, one who has dictated arbitrarily, as premier, the policy of the
empire he has largely made. The woman upon the sands, the great
liberator, the man wonderful even in old age, the heart-stirring writer,
the man of giant personality physical and mental, have had reason to
boast alike a strain of the blood of Ab and Lightfoot. In the veins of
each has danced the transmitted product of the identical corpuscles which
coursed in the veins of those two who first found a home in the Fire
Valley. Strong was primitive man; adroit, patient and faithful was
primitive woman; he, the strongest, she, the fairest and cleverest of the
time, could protect their offspring, breed and care for great children of
similar powers and so insure a lasting race. Thus has the good blue blood
come down. This is not romance, this is not fancy; this is but faithful
history.
THE END