oat crash miraculously upright into
the sea. He slung the rifle about his neck with a rope end--there were
cartridges in his pocket--and he went down the dangling lines and cast
off in a frenzy of haste.

What could he do? He hardly dared form the question. Only this stood
clear and unanswerable in his mind: The yacht was in the monster's
grip, and Ruth Allaire was there on board. Ruth Allaire, so smiling,
so friendly, so lovable! Food for that horror from the depths.... He
rowed with super-human strength to drive the heavy boat across the
wave-swept distance that separated them.

Between gasping breaths he turned at times to glance over his shoulder
and correct his course. And now, as he drew near, he saw though
indistinct the unmistakable, snakelike weaving of horrible tenuous
fingers, rolling and groping about the yacht.

They were plain as he drew alongside. The trim ship rose and fell with
the water, while over her side where Thorpe approached swung a long,
white monstrous rope of flesh. It retreated like the lash of a whip,
and the horrified watcher saw as it went the struggling figure of a
man in the grasp of flabby lips. And above them a single eye glared
wickedly.

Another vile, twisting arm rose from the afterdeck with a screaming
figure in its grasp and vanished into the water beyond the yacht.
There were others writhing about the decks. Thorpe saw them as he made
his boat fast and clambered aboard.

* * * * *

A wave of reeking air enveloped him as he reached the deck; the
nauseous stench from the monster's tentacles was horrible beyond
endurance. He gagged and choked as the stifling breath entered his
lungs.

A huge rope of slippery, throbbing flesh stretched its twisted length
toward the stern. It contracted as he watched into bulging muscular
rings and withdrew from the afterdeck. The deadly end of it stopped in
mid-air not twenty feet from where he stood. The jawlike pincers on it
held the limp form of an officer in its sucking grip, while above, in
a protuberance like a gnarled horn, a great eye glared into Thorpe's
with devilish hatred.

The beak opened sharply to drop its unconscious burden upon the deck,
and the watching man, petrified with horror, saw within the gaping maw
great sucking discs and beyond them a brilliant glow. The whole
cavernous pit was aflame with phosphorescent light. Dimly he knew that
this light explained the ability of the beastly arms