y on its side, with its body
slightly bent. Its rodent teeth overhanging its receding lower jaw gave
its face a look of colossal feebleness, of weak avidity. It seemed not
in the least ferocious or terrible. Its fore-paws reminded him of lank
emaciated hands. Except for one neat round hole with a scorched rim on
either side of its neck, the creature was absolutely intact. He
meditated over this fact for some time. "There must have been two rats,"
he said at last, turning away.

"Yes. And the one that everybody hit--got away."

"I am certain that my own shot--"

A canary-creeper leaf tendril, engaged in that mysterious search for a
holdfast which constitutes a tendril's career, bent itself engagingly
towards his neck and made him step aside hastily.

"Whoo-z-z z-z-z-z-Z-Z-Z," from the distant wasps' nest, "whoo oo
zoo-oo."

V.

This incident left the party alert but not unstrung.

They got their stores into the house, which had evidently been ransacked
by the rats after the flight of Mrs. Skinner, and four of the men took
the two horses back to Hickleybrow. They dragged the dead rat through
the hedge and into a position commanded by the windows of the house, and
incidentally came upon a cluster of giant earwigs in the ditch. These
creatures dispersed hastily, but Cossar reached out incalculable limbs
and managed to kill several with his boots and gun-butt. Then two of the
men hacked through several of the main stems of the canary creeper--huge
cylinders they were, a couple of feet in diameter, that came out by the
sink at the back; and while Cossar set the house in order for the night,
Bensington, Redwood, and one of the assistant electricians went
cautiously round by the fowl runs in search of the rat-holes.

They skirted the giant nettles widely, for these huge weeds threatened
them with poison-thorns a good inch long. Then round beyond the gnawed,
dismantled stile they came abruptly on the huge cavernous throat of the
most westerly of the giant rat-holes, an evil-smelling profundity, that
drew them up into a line together.

"I _hope_ they'll come out," said Redwood, with a glance at the
pent-house of the well.

"If they don't--" reflected Bensington.

"They will," said Redwood.

They meditated.

"We shall have to rig up some sort of flare if we _do_ go in," said
Redwood.

They went up a little path of white sand through the pine-wood and
halted presently within sight of the wasp-holes.

The sun