of a funny spoor, as I made haste to find out. The thing
had five toes, like a man, which was a relief. But unlike nigger feet,
the thumb toe and the index weren't spread. The thumb bent sharply
inward, and mixed its pad mark with that of the index. Furthermore,
though the impress of the toes was very deep (down-slanting like a man
walking on tiptoe), the heel marks were also very deep, and between toe
and heel marks there were no other marks at all. In other words, the
thing's feet must have been arched like a croquet wicket. And It's heels
were not rounded; they were _perfectly_ round--absolute circles they
were, about the diameter of the smallest sized cans in which Capstan
tobacco is sold. If ever a wooden idol had stopped squatting and gone
out for a stroll on a beach, it would have left just such a track. Only
it might not have felt that it had to take such peculiarly long steps.

My knoll being near the south end of Prana Beach (pure patriotism I
assure you), my village hunts must be to the northward. I had one good
hunt, the first day, and I got near some sort of a village, a jungle
one built over a pool, as I found afterward. The reason I gave up
looking that day was because the god got between me and where I was
trying to get; burst out humming, you might say, right in my face,
though I couldn't see It, and directly I had turned and was tiptoeing
quietly away (I remember how the tree trunks looked like teeth in a
comb, or the nearest railroad ties from the window of an express train),
It set up the most passionate, vindictive, triumphant vocal fireworks
ever heard out of hell. It made black noises like Niagara Falls, and
white noises higher than Pike's Peak. It made leaps, lighting on tones
as a carpenter's hammer lights on nails. It ran up and down the major
and minor diatonics, up and down the chromatic, with the speed and fury
of a typhoon, and the attention to detail of Paderewski--at his best,
when he makes the women faint--and with the power and volume of a church
organ with all the stops pulled out. It shook and It trilled and It
quavered, and It gargled as if It had a barrel of glycothermoline in
It's mouth and had been exposed to diphtheria, and It finished--just as
I tripped on a snake and fell--with a round bar of high C sound, that
lasted a good minute (or until I was a quarter of a mile beyond where I
had fallen), and was the color of butter, and could have been cut with a
knife. And It stopped sh