“He did it!” Dorita said softly.

“Yes, he did it.  My father was a brave man,” Bo-Bo replied.  “We are safe, now.”

Varnis, shocked by the explosion, turned and stared at him, and then she laughed happily.  “Why, there you are, Dard!” she exclaimed.  “I was wondering where you’d gone.  What did you do, after we left?”

“What do you mean?” The boy was puzzled, not knowing how much he looked like his father, when his father had been an officer of the Frontier Guards, twenty years before.

His puzzlement worried Varnis vaguely.  “You....  You are Dard, aren’t you?” she asked.  “But that’s silly; of course you’re Dard!  Who else could you be?”

“Yes.  I am Dard,” the boy said, remembering that it was the rule for everybody to be kind to Varnis and to pretend to agree with her.  Then another thought struck him.  His shoulders straightened.  “Yes.  I am Dard, son of Dard,” he told them all.  “I lead, now.  Does anybody say no?”

He shifted his axe and spear to his left hand and laid his right hand on the butt of his pistol, looking sternly at Dorita.  If any of them tried to dispute his claim, it would be she.  But instead, she gave him the nearest thing to a real smile that had crossed her face in years.

“You are Dard,” she told him; “you lead us, now.”

“But of course Dard leads!  Hasn’t he always led us?” Varnis wanted to know.  “Then what’s all the argument about?  And tomorrow he’s going to take us to Tareesh, and we’ll have houses and ground-cars and aircraft and gardens and lights, and all the lovely things we want.  Aren’t you, Dard?”

“Yes, Varnis; I will take you all to Tareesh, to all the wonderful things,” Dard, son of Dard, promised, for such was the rule about Varnis.

Then he looked down from the pass into the country beyond.  There were lower mountains, below, and foothills, and a wide blue valley, and, beyond that, distant peaks reared jaggedly against the sky.  He pointed with his father’s axe.

“We go down that way,” he said.

* * * * *

So they went, down, and on, and on, and on.  The last cartridge was fired; the last sliver of Doorshan metal wore out or rusted away.  By then, however, they had learned to make chipped stone, and bone, and reindeer-horn, serve their needs.  Century after century, millennium after millennium, they followed the game-herds from birth to death, and birth replenished their numbers faster than death depleted.  Bands grew in numbers and split; young men rebelled against the rule of the old and took their women and children elsewhere.

They hunted down the hairy Neanderthalers, and exterminated them ruthlessly, the origin of their implacable hatred lost in legend.  All that they remembered, in the misty, confused, way that one remembers a dream, was that there had once been a time of happiness and plenty, and that there was a goal to which they would some day attain.  They left the mountains—­were they the Caucasus?  The Alps?  The Pamirs?—­and spread outward, conquering as they went.