Part 7 (2/2)

”Grue!” I cried. ”What's the matter with you?”

”What is _he_ doing?” screamed Grue, quivering from head to foot, but not turning around.

”Who?” I cried.

”The man behind me!”

”Professor Kemper? He's setting up the folding cage--”

With a screech that raised my hair, Grue whipped out his murderous knife and _hurled himself backward_ at Kemper, but the latter shrank aside behind the partly erected cage, and Grue whirled around, snarling, hacking, and even biting at the wood frame and steel bars.

And then occurred a thing so horrid that it sickened me to the pit of my stomach; for the man's sagging straw hat had fallen off, and there, in the back of his head, through the coa.r.s.e, black, ratty hair, I saw a gla.s.sy eye glaring at me.

”Kemper!” I shouted. ”He's got a third eye! He's one of them! Knock him flat with your riflestock!” And I seized a shot-gun from the top of the baggage bundle on the ground beside me, and leaped at Grue, aiming a terrific blow at him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”'Kemper!' I shouted.... 'He is one of them! Knock him flat with your riflestock!'”]

But the gla.s.sy eye in the back of his head was watching me between the clotted strands of hair, and he dodged both Kemper and me, swinging his heavy knife in circles and glaring at us both out of the front and back of his head.

Kemper seized him by his arm, but Grue's s.h.i.+rt came off, and I saw his entire body was as furry as an ape's. And all the while he was snapping at us and leaping hither and thither to avoid our blows; and from the corners of his puffed cheeks he whined and whimpered and mewed through the saliva foam.

”Keep him from the water!” I panted, following him with clubbed shot-gun; and as I advanced I almost stepped on a soiled heap of foulness--the dead buzzard which he had caught and worried to death with his teeth.

Suddenly he threw his knife at my head, hurling it backward; dodged, screeched, and bounded by me toward the sh.o.r.e of the lagoon, where the pretty waitress was standing, petrified.

For one moment I thought he had her, but she picked up her skirts, ran for the nearest boat, and seized a harpoon; and in his fierce eagerness to catch her he leaped clear over the boat and fell with a splash into the lagoon.

As Kemper and I sprang aboard and looked over into the water, we could see him going down out of reach of a harpoon; and his body seemed to be silver-plated, flas.h.i.+ng and glittering like a burnished eel, so completely did the skin of air envelope him, held there by the fur that covered him.

And, as he rested for a moment on the bottom, deep down through the clear waters of the lagoon where he lay p.r.o.ne, I could see, as the current stirred his long, black hair, the third eye looking up at us, gla.s.sy, unwinking, horrible.

A bubble or two, like globules of quicksilver, were detached from the burnished skin of air that clothed him, and came glittering upward.

Suddenly there was a flash; a flurrying cloud of blue mud; and Grue was gone.

After a long while I turned around in the muteness of my despair. And slowly froze.

For the pretty waitress, becomingly pale, was gathered in Kemper's arms, her cheek against his shoulder. Neither seemed to be aware of me.

”Darling,” he said, in the imbecile voice of a man in love, ”why do you tremble so when I am here to protect you? Don't you love and trust me?”

”Oo--h--yes,” she sighed, pressing her cheek closer to his shoulder.

I shoved my hands into my pockets, pa.s.sed them without noticing them, and stepped ash.o.r.e.

And there I sat down under a tree, with my back toward them, all alone and face to face with the greatest grief of my life.

<script>