time to check my impressions, or even properly verify
them, I made an involuntary movement, catching the tight rope in my hand
so that it twanged like a banjo string, and in that instant the creature
turned the corner of Sangree's tent and was gone into the darkness.

Then, of course, my senses in some measure returned to me, and I
realised only one thing: it had been inside his tent!

I dashed out, reached the door in half a dozen strides, and looked in.
The Canadian, thank God! lay upon his bed of branches. His arm was
stretched outside, across the blankets, the fist tightly clenched, and
the body had an appearance of unusual rigidity that was alarming. On his
face there was an expression of effort, almost of painful effort, so far
as the uncertain light permitted me to see, and his sleep seemed to be
very profound. He looked, I thought, so stiff, so unnaturally stiff, and
in some indefinable way, too, he looked smaller--shrunken.

I called to him to wake, but called many times in vain. Then I decided
to shake him, and had already moved forward to do so vigorously when
there came a sound of footsteps padding softly behind me, and I felt a
stream of hot breath burn my neck as I stooped. I turned sharply. The
tent door was darkened and something silently swept in. I felt a rough
and shaggy body push past me, and knew that the animal had returned. It
seemed to leap forward between me and Sangree--in fact, to leap upon
Sangree, for its dark body hid him momentarily from view, and in that
moment my soul turned sick and coward with a horror that rose from the
very dregs and depths of life, and gripped my existence at its central
source.

The creature seemed somehow to melt away into him, almost as though it
belonged to him and were a part of himself, but in the same
instant--that instant of extraordinary confusion and terror in my
mind--it seemed to pass over and behind him, and, in some utterly
unaccountable fashion, it was gone. And the Canadian woke and sat up
with a start.

"Quick! You fool!" I cried, in my excitement, "the beast has been in
your tent, here at your very throat while you sleep like the dead. Up,
man! Get your gun! Only this second it disappeared over there behind
your head. Quick! or Joan--!"

And somehow the fact that he was there, wide-awake now, to corroborate
me, brought the additional conviction to my own mind that this was no
animal, but some perplexing and dreadful form of life that drew up