l. He was cursing the unwanted publicity which
prying reporters had given his work in Detroit, and which had led him
to lease the lonely island and build a laboratory in the wilderness.
Had it not been for that publicity, he would never have needed an
assistant, and the vision of fame would never have come to delude
Hagendorff and turn his thoughts towards murder.

His position seemed a horrible delirium from which he must presently
awake. Naked, dwarfed by each ordinary forest weed, unarmed, and
trembling from the wind-sharpened night, he hardly knew which way to
turn. His body was blotched with blood and mud, and under it the
ragged gashes made by glass and bush stung painfully; he was hungry
and stiff and tired and miserable. He remembered Hagendorff's threat
of capturing him in ten minutes, and forced a smile to his face.

"Looks kind of bad," he muttered, using his voice in an attempt to
dispel some of the lonely grip of the night, "but we'll keep moving,
anyway! He's coming back soon. Let's see: I'd better make for the
stream. It'll be hard for him to follow my tracks through that. And
then...."

Then--what? The island was small. He realized he could not stand many
hours of exposure. Inevitably--But he turned his mind from the future
and its seeming hopelessness, and concentrated on the immediate need,
which was to hide himself. Forcing the pace, he struck off on a
shambling trot down the dim trail, on into the deepening, sinister
shadows towards the island's lone stream.

* * * * *

Obstacles that normally he would not have noticed made his path
tortuous. His great weight sank his feet ankle-high in the moist,
uneven ground. Time and time again he stumbled over some imbedded rock
that, potato-sized, was like a boulder to him. Time and time again he
fell, and when he rose his legs were plastered with soggy earth that
did not dry; and the damp, fallen leaves and twigs he pitched into
clung to his coating of mud. Each broken limb and branch, dropped from
the whispering gloom of the trees above, drained the energy from his
tiring muscles. Soon he was conscious of a vague numbness creeping
over him, a deceptive, drowsy warmth into which he longed to sink, but
which he drove back by working his arms and legs as vigorously as he
could.

On he went, with teeth clenched and eyes fixed on the half-seen trail
ahead--a fantastic, tiny creature hunted like a wild animal by a giant
of his