is cast to the wind.
Rifle in hand, I ran at the top of my speed upon the trail of the
monster.

I had seen that the creature was swift. Now I was to find out to my
cost that it was also very cunning. I had imagined that it was in
panic flight, and that I had only to pursue it. The idea that it might
turn upon me never entered my excited brain. I have already explained
that the passage down which I was racing opened into a great central
cave. Into this I rushed, fearful lest I should lose all trace of the
beast. But he had turned upon his own traces, and in a moment we were
face to face.

That picture, seen in the brilliant white light of the lantern, is
etched for ever upon my brain. He had reared up on his hind legs as a
bear would do, and stood above me, enormous, menacing--such a creature
as no nightmare had ever brought to my imagination. I have said that he
reared like a bear, and there was something bear-like--if one could
conceive a bear which was ten-fold the bulk of any bear seen upon
earth--in his whole pose and attitude, in his great crooked forelegs
with their ivory-white claws, in his rugged skin, and in his red,
gaping mouth, fringed with monstrous fangs. Only in one point did he
differ from the bear, or from any other creature which walks the earth,
and even at that supreme moment a shudder of horror passed over me as I
observed that the eyes which glistened in the glow of my lantern were
huge, projecting bulbs, white and sightless. For a moment his great
paws swung over my head. The next he fell forward upon me, I and my
broken lantern crashed to the earth, and I remember no more.

When I came to myself I was back in the farm-house of the Allertons.
Two days had passed since my terrible adventure in the Blue John Gap.
It seems that I had lain all night in the cave insensible from
concussion of the brain, with my left arm and two ribs badly fractured.
In the morning my note had been found, a search party of a dozen
farmers assembled, and I had been tracked down and carried back to my
bedroom, where I had lain in high delirium ever since. There was, it
seems, no sign of the creature, and no bloodstain which would show that
my bullet had found him as he passed. Save for my own plight and the
marks upon the mud, there was nothing to prove that what I said was
true.

Six weeks have now elapsed, and I am able to sit out once more in the
sunshine. Just opposite me is the steep hillside, gre