cils and you'll have something of the
same sensation as I had. Holding it thus, I could feel its head jerking
this way and that, violently, and its tail, long and lithe, lashing at
my wrist. The little claws were trying to tear, but they were evidently
softish. I could hear, or thought I could, the snap of its little jaws.
It was about the nastiest sensation that I ever experienced. I don't
know why I thought that it was venomous, but I did. I tried to smash the
thing in my hand--tried again and again, and I have a good grip--but
might just as well have tried to crush a piece of wire. There was no
give to it. It tried to wriggle backwards but I had it under its jaws.
So there we were: it wriggling, writhing and lashing and me laying there
holding it at arms length. I felt the sweat start on me and the hair at
the nap of my neck raise up, and I did some quick and complicated
thinking. Of course, I dared not throw it away, but I got to my feet and
as I did so, tried to bend its head backwards against the stone floor.
But the head slipped sideways. I called on Somerfield for a light then,
and he struck one hurriedly and it went out immediately. All that I saw
was that the thing was white and had a triangular shaped head.

"Somehow I ran against Somerfield before he got another match struck and
he swore at me, saying that I had cut him. I knew that I had touched him
with my outstretched hand that held the beast. I drew back my hand a
little and remembered afterwards that I then felt a slight, elastic
resistance as if the thing that I held had caught on to something, as it
had before to my blanket. Afterwards I found that the thing had gotten
Somerfield's neck. As he struck another match, I saw the low place in
the wall and flung the thing away with a quick jerk. You know the kind
of a motion you'd make getting rid of some unseen noxious thing like
that. That's how I never really saw the beast and can only conjecture
what it was like from the feel of it.

"On Somerfield's neck, just below the angle of the jaw, was a clean-cut
little oval place about half an inch in length. It did not bleed much,
but it seemed to pain him a lot. He maintained that the thing was some
kind of rodent. Anyway we put a little chewed tobacco on the place and,
after awhile, tried to sleep again. We didn't do much good at it,
neither of us. He was tossing and grumbling like a man with the
toothache.

"Next morning the bitten place had swollen up to