"There's something about him--don't
think me fanciful, but it gives me a nasty little sensation,
a tightening of my muscles, when he comes near me. It's a touch--of
the diabolical, in fact."

Montgomery had stopped eating while I told him this. "Rum!" he said.
"I can't see it." He resumed his meal. "I had no idea of it,"
he said, and masticated. "The crew of the schooner must have
felt it the same. Made a dead set at the poor devil. You saw
the captain?"

Suddenly the puma howled again, this time more painfully.
Montgomery swore under his breath. I had half a mind to attack him
about the men on the beach. Then the poor brute within gave vent
to a series of short, sharp cries.

"Your men on the beach," said I; "what race are they?"

"Excellent fellows, aren't they?" said he, absentmindedly,
knitting his brows as the animal yelled out sharply.

I said no more. There was another outcry worse than the former.
He looked at me with his dull grey eyes, and then took some
more whiskey. He tried to draw me into a discussion about alcohol,
professing to have saved my life with it. He seemed anxious
to lay stress on the fact that I owed my life to him. I answered
him distractedly.

Presently our meal came to an end; the misshapen monster with
the pointed ears cleared the remains away, and Montgomery left
me alone in the room again. All the time he had been in a state
of ill-concealed irritation at the noise of the vivisected puma.
He had spoken of his odd want of nerve, and left me to the
obvious application.

I found myself that the cries were singularly irritating,
and they grew in depth and intensity as the afternoon wore on.
They were painful at first, but their constant resurgence at last
altogether upset my balance. I flung aside a crib of Horace I
had been reading, and began to clench my fists, to bite my lips,
and to pace the room. Presently I got to stopping my ears with
my fingers.

The emotional appeal of those yells grew upon me steadily,
grew at last to such an exquisite expression of suffering that I
could stand it in that confined room no longer. I stepped
out of the door into the slumberous heat of the late afternoon,
and walking past the main entrance--locked again, I noticed--turned
the corner of the wall.

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain
in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in
the next room, and had it been dumb,