in! When he did, it was to the accompaniment of varied and
assorted howls, and at about the biggest thing in the speed line he had
ever evolved. He was no end glad to get out, and the distant haze
swallowed him wonderfully quickly, still howling every yard of the
way--for, mark you, that polecat's teeth, once felt, wore nothing to
laugh at or forget.

These things he accomplished as the night was beginning to fall, and
the solemn eye of the setting sun--such an eye of such a setting sun as
the estuary alone knows; bloodshot, and in a sky asmoke as of cities
burning--regarded him as he finished and stood back outside as one who
considers. He was a grim figure of outlawry and rapine, alone there in
that lonely place, amidst the gathering, dank gray of the marsh mists,
the red rays touching his coat and turning it to deep purple, and his
eyes to dull ruby flame; a beast, once seen, you would not forget, and
could never mistake.

But his work was not yet done. He was hungry again, but for him there
could be no more food yet, and he turned with the same immutable and
dumbly dogged air that characterized so many of his actions, and made
off down the "sea-bank." Once he hid--vanished utterly would better
express it--to avoid the passage of an eel-spearer, an inhabitant of
the estuary almost as amphibious and mysterious as himself. Once he
very nearly caught a low-flying snipe as he leapt up at it while
cutting low over the top of the "bank"; and once--here he sprang aside
with a half-stifled snarl and every bristle erect--he was very nearly
caught by a horrible steel-toothed trap, set there to entertain that
same dog we have already met, by reason of the small matter of a late
lamb or two that had suddenly developed bites, obviously not
self-inflicted, in the night. Then he crossed the dike at the foot of
the sea-wall, shook himself, sat down to scratch, and straightway
hurled himself backwards and to one side, as something that resembled a
javelin whizzed out of six straggling, upright, faded, tawny reeds at
the water's edge, by which he had sat down. The javelin struck deep
into the little circle of lightly-pressed-down grass where his haunches
had rested, and he caught a glimpse, or only a half-glimpse, of weird
onyx eyes, and heard strange and shuddery reptilian hissings. Eyes and
noises might have belonged to a crocodile, or some huge lizard thing,
or snapping turtle, but the javelin was clearly the property of n