ight Grom frowned anxiously, thinking how helpless he and the
girl would be against such foes, now that they no longer had the
Shining One to protect them.

Squealing to split the ears, the pig-tapirs came galloping past the
tree, making for a piece of water some furlongs further on, where
doubtless they hoped to evade both the lion and the rhinoceros. But
they had yet another adversary to reckon with.

Just past the tree, at a thicket of immense scarlet poinsettias, the
trail curved sharply. From behind the poinsettias arose a gigantic
shape unlike anything that Grom had ever dreamed of. And he knew that
the maker of the mysterious trail and those tremendous footprints was
before him.

With a trumpeting bray of indignation the monster sat upright on
hind-quarters far more ponderous than those of a mammoth. Its tail, as
thick at the base as the body of a bear, helped to support it, while
its clumsy frame towered to a height of eighteen or twenty feet. Its
hind legs were very short, thick like tree-trunks, grotesquely bowed;
and its thighs like buttresses. Its fore legs were more arms than
legs, of startling length and massive strength, draped in long, stiff
hair, and terminated by colossal hands with immense hooked claws for
fingers. The whole body was clothed with rusty hair of an amazing
coarseness, like matting fiber. The vast head, flat on top and
prolonged to a snout that was almost a proboscis, had the look of
being deformed by reason of its fantastically exaggerated jowl, or
lower jaw. This terrifying monster thrust out a narrow pink tongue,
some three or four feet in length, stooped and turned, and gave a
hurried look at something crouching behind its mighty thighs.

"Its baby!" muttered the girl, with a little indrawn breath of
sympathy.

Then the strange being sat up again to meet and ward off the rush of
the maddened pig-tapirs.

For a moment it beat off the assault, seizing the frantic beasts and
hurling them this way and that as if they had been so many rabbits.
Then it was completely surrounded by the reeking squealing bleeding
horde, which paid no more personal attention to it than if it had been
a mass of rock. They rolled over the little one, unheeding, and trod
it flat. Its death cry split the air; and at that sound the mother
seemed to sink down into her haunches. In her agony of rage and grief
she literally tore some of her assailants in halves, throwing the
awful fragments impatiently from h