ky eyes had noted him in
time. His feelers bunched suddenly tight and straight, and he shot
backwards, at the same moment spouting a jet of black fluid from
beneath his beaked mouth. The black jet spread instantly in a thick
cloud, staining the clear, green water so deeply that Little Sword
could not see through it at all. Instead of the soft flesh he had
expected it to pierce, his sword met nothing but a mass of sticky
anemones, shearing them from their base.

"In a fury, Little Sword dashed this way and that, trusting to luck
that he would strike his elusive enemy in the darkness. But that
enemy's eyes, with their enormous bulging surface and the jetty
background to their lenses, could see clearly where the jewel-like eyes
of the young swordfish could make out nothing. Little Sword, emerging
into the half light at the edge of the cloud, was just about to give up
the idle search, when something small but firm fastened itself upon his
side, so sharply that it seemed to bite into the flesh.

"Little Sword's tense muscles quivered at the shock, and he gave a
mighty leap which should, by all his customary reckoning, have carried
him fifty feet from the spot. To his horrified amazement he did not go
as many inches, nor the half of it! And then another something, small
but terrible, fastened itself upon his shoulder.

"Then the black, murky cloud thinned quite away; and Little Sword saw
what had happened. The pale creature, having reached a rock to which
he could anchor himself with a couple of his feelers, had turned
savagely upon his rash assailant. Little Sword was the prisoner of
those two longer tentacles. They were trying to drag him down within
reach of the other feelers, which writhed up at him like a lot of
hideous snakes."

"Ugh!" cried the Babe with a shudder. "But how did they hold on to
him?"

"You see," said Uncle Andy, "every feeler, long or short, had a row of
saucer-shaped suckers along its underside, like the heads of those
rubber-tipped arrows which I've seen you shooting at the wall, and
which stick where they strike. Only _these_ suckers could _hold on_, I
can tell you, so fast that _you_ could never have pulled off even the
littlest of them.

"Little Sword looked down into the awful eyes of the Inkmaker, and
realized that he had made a great mistake. But he was game all
through. It was not for a swordfish, however young, to give in to any
odds. Besides, just below those two great