green and brown, with splotches of something whitish, bluish.
There were splotches, too, upon the branches and upon the ground beneath. It was like blood, that whitish, bluish stuff, and, indeed, that is what it was. In the midst of that amorphous mass were two great eyes, but they never moved, were fixed and glassy. One of the higher branches had been broken, though not clean from the trunk, and, wound around this branch, the end of which had fallen upon those in which the monster rested, were what I at first took to be enormous serpents. They were, in fact, tentacula. There was a third tentacle; it hung straight down. And it was from this, the coils wrapped around the neck, that the body of the unfortunate man hung, white and lifeless, like a victim of the hangman's noose.
"A tree-octopus!" I cried.
"I suppose one might call it that, only it seems to have but three tentacles. And that scream we heard last night—we know now what it was."
I shuddered.
"No wonder we thought that the sound was unhuman—in the grip of that thing, the coils around his neck! So near, and we never stirred to his help!"
"Because we never dreamed. And, had we known, Bill, we could not have saved him. Life would have been extinct, crushed out of him, before we could have got here and cut him down."
"I thought of some dreadful things," said I, "but never of a monster like that."
"A queer place, a horrible place, Bill," said Milton Rhodes, glancing a little nervously about him. "But come."
He started forward. The Dromans hung back, but I moved along after him, whereupon the others followed, though with great apparent reluctance and horror.
"What I don't understand, Bill, is this: what happened?"
"Why, the poor fellow was passing beneath the branches, the octopus thrust down its tentacle, wound it around the victim's neck and started to pull him up."
"All that is very clear. But then what happened—to the octopus?"
"The limb to which the monster had attached itself broke under the added weight, and down it came crashing into those branches in which we see it."
"That too is clear," said Rhodes. "But what killed the thing? The fall itself, it seems to me, could not have done so."
The next moment we halted, a few yards from the spot where hung the still, white body of the Droman.
"I see it now," said Rhodes, pointing. "As the monster came down, it was impaled upon that swordlike stub of a branch. See it protruding upward from the horrible body."
This, there could be no doubt, was what had happened. And that Gorgonic horror, in the shock of the fall and its impalement, even in its death throes, had never loosed the grip on its victim.
"We can't leave the poor devil hanging like that," I said.
"Of course not. And to give him burial will mean the loss of time probably more precious even than we think. This is a wood horrible as any that Dante ever found himself in!"
"We must risk it. We can't leave him like that, or the body lying on the ground for the beasts to devour."
Rhodes and I still had our icepicks, and we at once divested ourselves of the packs and started the grave. And, as we worked, try as I would I could not shake it from me—
