. The tremor of the ground grew more pronounced
as the vast pursuer pounded along with its tons and tons of weight.
Harley gazed into the blackness back along the way he had come, his eyes
sunk deep in the hollows fatigue had carved in his face, and waited for
the end. The dark night darkened still more with the approach of another
swift, inexorable dawn.

There was a terrific rending of tree trunks and webbed creepers. Dimly
in the darkness he could see something that towered on a level with the
tallest trees, something that moved as rapidly and steadily as though
driven by machinery. Fear so great that it nauseated him, swept over him
in waves; but he could not move.

The first grey smear of dawn appeared in the sky. In the ghostly
greyness he got a clearer and clearer sight of the monster. He groaned
and cowered there while it approached him--more slowly now, eyeing him
with staring, stony orbs in which there was no expression of any kind,
of rage or bate, of curiosity or triumph.

Great stumps of legs, with no joints in them, on which the colossus
stalked like a moving stone tower--a body resembling an enormous boulder
carved by an amateurish hand to portray the trunk of a human being--a
craggy sphere of rock for a head, set directly atop the deeply riven
shoulders--a face like the horrible mask of an embryonic gargoyle--a
mouth that was simply a lipless chasm that opened and closed with the
sound of rocks grinding together in a slow-moving glacier--the whole
veiled thinly by trailing lengths of snapped vines, great shattered tree
boughs, bushes, all uprooted in its stumping march through the forest!
Harley closed his eyes to shut out the sight. But in spite of himself
they flashed open again and stared on, as though hypnotized by the
spectacle they witnessed.

* * * * *

The grey of dawn lightened to the first rose tint of the rising sun. As
though stung to action by the breaking of day, the thing hastened its
ground-shaking pace. With one last stride, it came to Harley's side and
loomed far above, the unwinking eyes glaring down at him.

The three arms, hinged at equidistant points at the base of the horrible
head, slowly lowered toward his prostrate form. There was a grating
noise as the creature hinged in the middle and bent low, bringing its
enormous, staring eyes within two yards of his face.

One of its hands closed over his leg, tentatively, experimentally, as
though to