rds his master, perhaps ten paces.
His legs were swathed and encumbered with grey; he made ineffectual
movements with his sword. Grey streamers waved from him; there was
a thin veil of grey across his face. With his left hand he beat at
something on his body, and suddenly he stumbled and fell. He struggled
to rise, and fell again, and suddenly, horribly, began to howl,
"Oh--ohoo, ohooh!"

The master could see the great spiders upon him, and others upon the
ground.

As he strove to force his horse nearer to this gesticulating, screaming
grey object that struggled up and down, there came a clatter of hoofs,
and the little man, in act of mounting, swordless, balanced on his belly
athwart the white horse, and clutching its mane, whirled past. And again
a clinging thread of grey gossamer swept across the master's face.
All about him, and over him, it seemed this drifting, noiseless cobweb
circled and drew nearer him....

To the day of his death he never knew just how the event of that moment
happened. Did he, indeed, turn his horse, or did it really of its own
accord stampede after its fellow? Suffice it that in another second
he was galloping full tilt down the valley with his sword whirling
furiously overhead. And all about him on the quickening breeze, the
spiders' airships, their air bundles and air sheets, seemed to him to
hurry in a conscious pursuit.

Clatter, clatter, thud, thud--the man with the silver bridle rode,
heedless of his direction, with his fearful face looking up now right,
now left, and his sword arm ready to slash. And a few hundred yards
ahead of him, with a tail of torn cobweb trailing behind him, rode the
little man on the white horse, still but imperfectly in the saddle.
The reeds bent before them, the wind blew fresh and strong, over his
shoulder the master could see the webs hurrying to overtake....

He was so intent to escape the spiders' webs that only as his horse
gathered together for a leap did he realise the ravine ahead. And then
he realised it only to misunderstand and interfere. He was leaning
forward on his horse's neck and sat up and back all too late.

But if in his excitement he had failed to leap, at any rate he had not
forgotten how to fall. He was horseman again in mid-air. He came off
clear with a mere bruise upon his shoulder, and his horse rolled,
kicking spasmodic legs, and lay still. But the master's sword drove its
point into the hard soil, and snapped clean across, as