“Father!” breathed the girl, ashamed of her parent's tactlessness. “How can you say that!”
“I want to know,” said Crooked Nose, as sternly as a man can who is masticating mullet, “whether your intentions are serious and honourable.”
“Oh, father!” said Parrot Feathers again. And putting her hands in front of her face to hide her blushes she ran off. Nevertheless, she paused when a dozen feet away and threw a piece of drift-wood at Probably Arboreal. It hit him on the shin, and as he rubbed the spot, watching her disappear into the forest, he murmured aloud, “Now, I wonder what she means by that!”
“Means,” said Crooked Nose. “Don't be an ass, Probably! Don't pretend to me you don't know what the child means. You made her love you. You have exercised your arts of fascination on an innocent young girl, and now you have the nerve to wonder what she means. What'll you give me for her?”
“See here, Crooked Nose,” said Probably, “don't bluster with me.” His finer sensibilities were outraged. He did not intend to be coerced into matrimony by any father, even though he were pleased with that father's daughter. “I'm not buying any wives to-day, Crooked Nose.”
“You have hurt her market value,” said Crooked Nose, dropping his domineering air, and affecting a willingness to reason. “Those marks on her arms will not come off for weeks. And what man wants to marry a scarred-up woman unless he has made the scars himself?”
“Crooked Nose,” said Probably Arboreal, angry at the whole world because what might have been a youthful romance had been given such a sordid turn by this disgusting father, “if you don't go away I will scar every daughter you've got in your part of the woods. Do you get me?”
“I wish you'd look them over,” said Crooked Nose. “You might do worse than marry all of them.”
“I'll marry none of them!” cried Probably, in a rage, and turned to go into the sea again.
A heavy boulder hurtled past his head. He whirled about and discovered Crooked Nose in the act of recovering his balance after having flung it. He caught the old man half way between the beach and the edge of the forest. The clan, including Crooked Nose's four daughters, gathered round in a ring to watch the fight.
It was not much of a combat. When it was over, and the girls took hold of what remained of their late parent to drag him into the woods, Probably Arboreal stepped up to Parrot Feathers and laid his hand upon her arm.
“Feathers,” he said, “now that there can be no question of coercion, will you and your sisters marry me?”
She turned toward him with a sobered face. Grief had turned her from a girl into a woman.
“Probably,” she said, “you are only making this offer out of generosity. It is not love that prompts it. I cannot accept. As for my sisters, they must speak for themselves.”
“You are angry with me, Feathers?”
The girl turned sadly away. Probably watched the funeral cortège winding into the woods, and then went moodily back to the ocean. Now that she had refused him, he desired her above all things. But how to win her? He saw clearly that it could be no question of brute force. It had gone beyond that. If he used force with her, it must infallibly remind her of the unfortunate affair with her father. Some heroic action might attract her to him again. Probably resolved to be a hero at the very earliest opportunity.
In the meantime he would breakfast. Breakfast had already been long delayed; and it was as true then, far back in the dim dawn of time, as it is now, that he who does not breakfast at some time during the day must go hungry to bed at night. Once more Probably Arboreal stepped into the ocean—stepped in without any premonition that he was to be a hero indeed; that he was chosen by Fate, by Destiny, by the Presiding Genius of this planet, by whatever force or intelligence you will, to champion the cause of all Mankind in a crucial struggle for human supremacy.
He waded into the water up to his waist, and bent forward with his arms beneath the surface, patiently waiting. It was thus that our remote ancestors fished. Fish ran larger in those days, as a rule. In the deeper waters they were monstrous. The smaller fish therefore sought the shallows where the big ones, greedy cannibals, could not follow them. A man seldom stood in the sea as Probably Arboreal was doing more than ten minutes without a fish brushing against him either accidentally or because the fish thought the man was something good to eat. As soon as a fish touched him, the man would grab for it. If he were clumsy and missed too many fish, he starved to death. Experts survived because they were expert; by a natural process of weeding out the awkward it had come about that men were marvellously adept. A bear who stands by the edge of a river watching for salmon at the time of the year when they rim up stream to spawn, and scoops them from the water with a deft twitch of his paw, was not more quick or skillful than Probably Arboreal.
Suddenly he pitched forward, struggling; he gave a gurgling shout, and his head disappeared beneath the water.
When it came up again, he twisted toward the shore, with lashing arms and something like panic on his face, and shouted:
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” he cried. “Something has me by the foot!”
Twenty or thirty men and women who heard the cry stopped fishing and straightened up to look at him.
“Help! Help!” he shouted again. “It is pulling me out to sea!”
A knock-kneed old veteran, with long intelligent-looking mobile toes, broke from the surf and scurried to the safety of the beach, raising the cry:
“A god! A god! A water-god has caught Probably Arboreal!”
“More likely a devil!” cried Slightly Simian, who had followed Probably to the water.
And all his neighbours plunged to land and left Probably Arboreal to his fate, whatever his fate was to be. But since spectacles are always interesting, they sat down comfortably on the beach to see how long it would be before Probably Arboreal disappeared. Gods and devils, sharks and octopi, were forever grabbing one of their number and making off to deep water with him to devour him at their leisure. If the thing that dragged the man were seen, if it showed itself to be a shark or an octopus, a shark or an octopus it was; if it were unseen, it got the credit of being a god or a devil.
“Help me!” begged Probably Arboreal, who was now holding his own, although he was not able to pull himself into shallower water. “It is not a god or a devil. It doesn't feel like one. And it isn't a shark, because it hasn't any teeth. It is an animal like a cleft stick, and my foot is in the cleft.”
But they did not help him. Instead, Big Mouth, a seer and vers libre poet of the day, smitten suddenly with an idea, raised a chant, and presently all the others joined in. The chant went like this:
“Probably, he killed Crooked Nose,
He killed him with his fists.
And Crooked Nose, he sent his ghost to sea
To catch his slayer by the foot!
The ghost of Crooked Nose will drown his
slayer,
Drown, drown, drown his slayer,
The ghost of Crooked Nose will drown his
slayer,
Drown his slayer in the seal”
“You are a liar, Big Mouth!” spluttered Probably Arboreal, hopping on one foot and thrashing the water with his arms. “It is not a ghost; it is an animal.”
But the chant kept up, growing louder and louder:
“The ghost of Crooked Nose will drown his
slayer!
Drown, drown, drown his slayer,
Drown his slayer in the sea!”
Out