to all our suspicions
concerning Leith, yet we had been unable to hold our own against him.

One end of the slab remained stationary after it had risen a few inches
from its bed, but the other end, which was nearest us, went up and up,
pushed by some screwjack arrangement that lifted it with slow, jerky
movements till it was nearly upright. The moonlight fell upon the under
surface that was turned toward us, and we understood the manner in which
Leith's friends had arranged for us to make our exit from this world.
The bottom of the stone slab had been carved into a perfect
representation of a centipede, and as the slab remained stationary just
before it reached the perpendicular, I began to dive into my mental
reticule for the scraps of prayers that had been caught and held through
a rather checkered career in places where the efficacy of prayer was
looked upon with a cold eye.

The prostrate savage rose slowly when the movements of the slab had
ceased, and very tenderly he rolled Holman and me over the bed from
which the stone had been lifted. He pushed our bodies against the wooden
post that, fitting into a sliding groove on the body of the stone
centipede, had lifted the thing upright, and to make certain that we
would be in the exact centre of the depression when the stone came back
to its proper resting place, he strapped us carefully to the support
with pieces of ramie fibre, so that we could not move an inch. With
faces turned upward we stared at the carved figure above us, and the
insecure tenure we had upon life at that moment was impressed upon our
minds by the extreme caution which the officiating wizard exercised in
keeping his own body clear of the slab lest his brethren, who were
evidently operating the clumsy mechanism from some place nearby, should
let the stone centipede return to his home without giving him proper
warning.

At last he finished the business to his satisfaction and stepped
backward. My imagination made the thing above me tremble as I looked at
it with eyes of fear. The part of my body that spanned the depression
became numb, and I breathed with difficulty.

Holman broke the silence. "Good-bye, Verslun," he said cheerfully. "It's
mighty tough to go out like this, but it's the fortune of war."

I endeavoured to answer him, but the words, as if afraid of the horror
that loomed above me, refused to come out of my throat. The fiendish
manner in which we were to be killed unmanned me. Th