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Story of Ab

<h3>A LESSON IN SWIMMING.</h3> Ab and Oak, ranging far in their hunting expeditions, had, long since, formed the acquaintance of the Shell People, and had even partaken of their hospitality, though there was not much to attract a guest in the abodes of the creek-haunters. Their homes were but small caves, not much more than deep burrows, dug here and there in the banks, above high water mark, and protected from wild beasts by the usual heaped rocks, leaving only a narrow passage. This insured warmth and comparative safety, but the homes lacked the spaciousness of the caves and caverns of the hills, and the food of fish and clams and periwinkles, with flesh and fruit but seldom gained, had little attraction for the occasional cave visitor. Ab and Oak would sometimes traffic with the Shell People, exchanging some creature of the land for a product of the water, but they made brief stay in a locality where the food and odors were not quite to their accustomed taste. Yet the settlement had a slight degree of interest to them. They had noted the buxom quality of some of the Shell maidens, and the two had now attained an age when a bright-eyed young person of the other sex was agreeable to look upon. But there had been no love passages. Neither of the youths was yet so badly stricken. There came an autumn morning when Ab and Oak, who had met at daybreak, determined to visit the Shell People and go with them upon a fishing expedition. The Shell People often fished from boats, and the boats were excellent. Each consisted of four or five short logs of the most buoyant wood, bound firmly together with tough withes, but the contrivance was more than a simple raft, because, at the bow, it had been hewed to a point, and the logs had been so chosen that each curved upward there. It had been learned that the waves sometimes encountered could so more easily be cleft or overridden. None of these boats could sink, and the man of the time was quite at home in the water. It was fun for the young men whose tale is told here to go with the Shell People and assist in spearing fish or drawing them from the river's depths upon rude hooks, and the Shell People did not object, but were rather proud of the attendance of representatives of the hillside aristocracy. The morning was one to make men far older than these two most confident and full of life. The season was late, though the river's waters were not yet cold. The mast had already begun to fall and the nuts lay thickly among the leaves. Every morning, and more regularly than it comes now, there was a spread of glistening hoar frost upon the lowlands and the little open lands in the forest and upon every spot not tree-protected. At such times there appeared to the eyes of the cave people the splendor of nature such as we now can hardly comprehend. It came most strikingly in spring and autumn, and was something wonderful. The cave men, probably, did not appreciate it. They were accustomed to it, for it was part of the record of every year. Doubtless there came a greater vigor to them in the keen air of the hoar frost time, doubtless the step of each was made more springy and each man's valor more defined in this choice atmosphere. Temperate, with a wonderful keenness to it, was the climate of the cave region in the valley of the present Thames. Even in the days of the cave men, the Gulf Stream, swinging from the equator in the great warm current already formed, laved the then peninsula as it now laves the British Isles. The climate, as has been told, was almost as equable then as now, but with a certain crispness which was a heritage from the glacial epoch. It was a time to live in, and the two were merry on their journey in the glittering morning. The young men idled on their way and wasted an hour or two in vain attempts to approach a feeding deer nearly enough for effective spear-throwing. They were late when, after swimming the creek, they reached the Shell village and there learned that the party had already gone. They decided that they might, perhaps, overtake the fishermen, and so, with the hunter's easy lope, started briskly down the river bank. They were not destined to fish that day. Three or four miles had been passed and a straight stretch of the river had been attained, at the end of which, a mile away, could be seen the boats of the Shell People, to be lost to sight a moment later as they swept around a bend. But there was something else in sight. Perched comfortably upon a rock, the sides of which were so precipitous that they afforded a foothold only for human beings, was a young woman of the Shell People who had before attracted Ab's attention and something of his admiration. She was fishing diligently. She had been left by the fishing party, to be taken up on their return, because, in the rush of waters about the base of the rock, was a haunt of a small fish esteemed particularly, and because the girl was one of the little tribe's adepts with hook and line She raised her eyes as she heard the patter of footsteps upon the shore, but did not exhibit any alarm when she saw the two young men. The ordinary young woman of the Shell People did not worry when away from land. She could swim like an otter and dive like a loon, and of wild beasts she had no fear when she was thus safely bestowed away from the death-harboring forest. The maiden on the rock was most serene. <ANTIMG src="images/illp144_th.jpg" alt="THE YOUNG MEN CALLED TO HER BUT SHE MADE NO ANSWER. SHE BUT FISHED AWAY DEMURELY"> The young men called to her, but she made no answer. She but fished away demurely, from time to time hauling up a flashing finny thing, which she calmly bumped on the rock and then tossed upon the silvery heap, which had already assumed fair dimensions, close behind her. As Ab looked upon the young fisherwoman his interest in her grew rapidly and he was silent, though Oak called out taunting words and asked her if she could not talk. It was not this young woman, but another, who had most pleased Oak among the girls of the Shell People. It was not love yet with Ab, but the maiden interested him. He held no defined wish to carry her away to a new home with him, but there arose a feeling that he wanted to know her better. There might,--he didn't know--be as good wives among the Shell maidens as among the well-running girls of the hills. "I'll swim to the rock!" he said to his companion, and Oak laughed loudly. Short time elapsed between decision and action in those days, and hardly had Ab spoken when he flung his fur covering into the hands of Oak, and, clad only in the clout about his hips, dropped, with a splash, into the water. All this time the girl had been eyeing every motion closely. As the little waves rose laughingly about the man, she descended lightly from her perch and slid into the stream as easily and silently as a beaver might have done. And then began a chase. The girl, finding mid-current swiftly, was a full hundred yards ahead as Ab came fairly in her wake. A splendid swimmer was the stalwart young man of the hills. He had been in and out of water almost daily since early childhood, and, though there had never been a test, was confident that, among all the Shell People, there was none he could not overtake, despite what he had heard and knew of their wonderful cleverness in the water. Were not his arms and legs longer and stronger than theirs and his chest deeper? He felt that he could outswim easily any bold fisherman among them, and as for this girl, he would overtake her very quickly and draw her to the bank, and then there would be an interview of much enjoyment, at least to him. His strong arm swept the water back, and his strong legs, working with them, drove his body forward swiftly toward the brown object not very far ahead. Along the bank ran the laughing and shouting Oak. Yard by yard, Ab's mighty strokes brought him nearer the object of his pursuit. She was swimming breast forward, as was he--for that was his only way--she with a dog-like paddling stroke, and often she turned her head to look backward at the man. She did not, even yet, appear affrighted, and this Ab wondered at, for it was seldom that a girl of the time, thus hunted, was not, and with reason, terrified. She, possibly, understood that the chase did not involve a real abduction, for she and her pursuer had often met, but there was, at least, reason enough for avoiding too close contact on this day. She swam on steadily, and, as steadily, Ab gained upon her. Down the long stretch of tumbling river, sweeping eastward between hill and slope and plain and woodland, went the chase, while the panting and cheering Oak, strong-legged and enduring as he was, barely kept pace with the two heads he could see bobbing, not far apart now, in the tossing waters. Ab had long since forgotten Oak. He had forgotten how it was that he came to be thus swimming in the river. His thought was only what now made up an overmastering aim. He must reach and seize upon the girl before him! Closer and closer, though she as much as he was aided by the swift current, the young man approached the girl. The hundred yards had lessened into tens and he could plainly see now the wake about her and the occasional up-flip of her brown heels as she went high in her stroke. He now felt easily assured of her and laughed to himself as he swept his arms backward in a fiercer stroke and came so close that he could discern her outline through the water. It was but a matter of endurance, he chuckled to himself. How could a woman outswim a man like him? It was just at the time when this thought came that Ab saw the Shell girl lift her head and turn it toward him and laugh--laugh recklessly, almost in his very face, so close together were they now. And then she taught him something! There was a dip such as the otter makes when he seeks the depths and there was no longer a girl in sight! But this was only a demonstration, made in sheer audacity and blithesome insolence, for the brown head soon appeared again some yards ahead and there was another twist of it and another merry laugh. Then the neat body turned upon its side, and with quick outdriving legstrokes and the overhand and underhand pulling-forward which modern swimmers partly know, the girl shot ahead through the tiny white-capped waves and away from the swimmer so close behind her, as to-day the cutter leaves the scow. From the river bank came a wild yelp, the significance of which, if analyzed, might have included astonishment and great delight and brotherly derision. Oak was having a great day of it! He was the sole witness of a swimming-match the like of which was rare, and he was getting even with his friend for various assumptions of superiority in various doings. Unexhausted and sturdy and stubborn, Ab was not the one to abandon his long chase because of this new phase of things. He inhaled a great breath and made the water foam with his swift strokes, but as well might a wild goose chase a swallow on the wing as he seek to overtake that brown streak on the water. It was wonderful, the manner in which that Shell girl swam! She was like the birds which swim and dive and dip, and know of nothing which they fear if only they are in the water far enough away from where there is the need of stalking over soil and stone. It was not that the Shell girl was other than at home on land. She was quite at home there and reasonably fleet, but the creek and river had so been her element from babyhood that the chase of the hill man had been, from the start, a sheer absurdity. Ab lifted himself in the waters and gazed upon the dark spot far away, and, piqued and maddened, put forth all the swimming strength there was left in his brawny body. It seemed for a brief time that he was almost equal to the task of gaining upon what was little more than a dot upon the surface far ahead. But his scant prospect of success was only momentary. The trifling spot in the distant drifts of the river seemed to have certain ideas of its own. The speed of its course in the water did not abate and, in a moment, it was carried around the bend, and lost to sight. Ab drifted to the turn and saw, below, a girl clambering into safety among the rafts of the fishing Shell People. What she would tell them he did not know. That was not a matter to be much considered. There was but one thing to be done and that was to reach the land and return to a life more strictly earthly and more comfortable. There is nothing like water for overcoming a young man's fancy for many things. Ab swam now with a somewhat tired and languid stroke to the shore, where Oak awaited him hilariously. They almost came to blows that afternoon, and blows between such as they might have easily meant sudden death. But they were not rivals yet and there was much to talk of good-naturedly, after some slight outflamings of passion on the part of Ab, and the two men were good friends again. The sum of all the day was that there had been much exercise and fun, for Oak at least. Ab had not caught the Shell girl, manfully as he had striven. Had he caught her and talked with her upon the river bank it might have changed the current of his life. With a man so young and sturdy and so full of life the laughing fancy of a moment might have changed into a stronger feeling and the swimming girl might have become a woman of the cave people, one not quite so equal by heritage to the task of breeding good climbing and running and fighting and progressive beings as some girl of the hills. It matters little what might have happened had the outcome of the day's effort been the reverse of what it was. This is but the account of the race and what the sequel was when Ab swam so far and furiously and well. It was his first flirtation. It was yet to come to him that he should be really in love in the cave man's way. <h2>CHAPTER XV.</h2> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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