The two young men confronted each other with menace in their looks. In years, had they reckoned so, they were still in their teens. Both were fair, with beards of a downy growth. Hawkon was slightly the bigger of the two—a brawny fellow well matched with this woman Flint. But Ogo was as tall as a man needs be, and had a quickness denied to the other; the habitual expression of his face was that of an innocent animal, gravely intent. It was in his mind now that he must kill Hawkon, or himself be killed; and the fact that this idea did not at once issue in action—for in the tumult of his jealousy he had forgotten fear of Koor’s law—marks him off as something of a freak in his community. He hesitated; he faltered; he shrugged his shoulders.
‘So be it,’ he said. A sick and weary grin troubled his features for a moment. ‘She is your woman, and it is you that will call her.’
The others—they numbered six, all told—grunted with excitement, with approval, with disappointment. Or it may be they grunted only from habit. And after a long silence the boy called Stare said suddenly: ‘Koor the Old One quivers. His voice is a frog’s voice.’
‘He is a falling tree,’ said another.
‘Worms are eating him. He lives too long.’
They growled like dogs, these young men. They laughed and uttered contemptuous obscenities about their oppressor. But Hawkon, in the midst of the uproar, struck a note of warning. ‘The Old One has many ears, many eyes, many hands. The Wise One sits at his side and the gods are his gods.’
Ogo was gazing thoughtfully at a young sapling. He said: ‘This is a tree. This is not Koor. But——’ He struggled with an idea beyond expression. He had no language for his thought, and therefore his thought was not complete. He wanted to say: ‘But if it
By this incident two seeds had been sown, without his knowledge, in Ogo’s mind: doubt of Koor’s invincibility and the resolve to possess a woman. Neither doubt nor resolve was clearly articulated. Nor was Ogo aware of the unrest within him. He was restless, but the restlessness was not accentuated by knowledge of it, as it would have been in a man who had learned the trick of considering himself as a person, a centre of events. Without thought he felt an itch to go adventuring. And without plan, being driven by a motive that made no mark on his consciousness, he went. He went swiftly, unhesitatingly, with a simple directness that intelligence could not have achieved, would indeed have thwarted. He went in quest of a strange people. And he went stooping, with nostrils quivering for scent and ears intent for sound. The pelt of a wolf that he had himself slain covered his loins and one shoulder; and a strip of raw hide, fastened round his middle with a wooden peg, held his one weapon, a short-handled flint axe that had a sharp edge for cutting and cleaving and a blunt round head for use in close fighting.