When the slow mist cleared from before the eyes of Why-Why he found himself (he was doubtless the first hero of the many heroes who have occupied this romantic position) stretched on a grassy bed, and watched by the blue eyes of Verva.  Where were the sand, the stream, the hostile warrior, the crowds of friends and foes?  It was Verva’s part to explain.  The champion of the other tribe had never breathed after he received the club-thrust, and the chief medicine-man had declared that Why-Why was also dead.  He had suggested that both champions should be burned in the desolate spot where they lay, that their boilyas, or ghosts, might not harm the tribes.  The lookers-on had gone to their several and distant caves to fetch fire for the ceremony (they possessed no means of striking a light), and Verva, unnoticed, had lingered beside Why-Why, and laid his bleeding head in her lap.  Why-Why had uttered a groan, and the brave girl dragged him from the field into a safe retreat among the woods not far from the stream.  Why-Why had been principally beaten about the head, and his injuries, therefore, were slight.

After watching the return of the tribesmen, and hearing the chief medicine-man explain that Why-Why’s body had been carried away by “the bad black-fellow with a tail who lives under the earth,” Why-Why enjoyed the pleasure of seeing his kinsmen and his foes leave the place to its natural silence.  Then he found words, and poured forth his heart to Verva.  They must never be sundered—­they must be man and wife!  The girl leaned her golden head on Why-Why’s dark shoulder, and sniffed at him, for kissing was an institution not yet evolved.  She wept.  She had a dreadful thing to tell him,—­that she could never be his.  “Look at this mark,” she said, exposing the inner side of her arm.  Why-Why looked, shuddered, and turned pale.  On Verva’s arm he recognized, almost defaced, the same tattooed badge that wound its sinuous spirals across his own broad chest and round his manly legs. It was the mark of the Serpent!

Both were Serpents; both, unknown to Why-Why, though not to Verva, bore the same name, the same badge, and, if Why-Why had been a religious man, both would have worshipped the same reptile.  Marriage between them then was a thing accursed; man punished it by death.  Why-Why bent his head and thought.  He remembered all his youth—­the murder of his sister for no crime; the killing of the serpent, and how no evil came of it; the eating of the oysters, and how the earth had not opened and swallowed him.  His mind was made up.  It was absolutely certain that his tribe and Verva’s kin had never been within a thousand miles of each other.  In a few impassioned words he explained to Verva his faith, his simple creed that a thing was not necessarily wrong because the medicine-men said so, and the tribe believed them.  The girl’s own character was all trustfulness, and Why-Why was the person she trusted.  “Oh, Why-Why, dear,” she said blushing (for she had never before ventured to break the tribal rule which forbade calling any one by his name), “Oh, Why-Why, you are always right!”