lutched at her robe. The
garment, still in his hand, unwound easily, peeling her very much like
an apple.

"I beg your pardon," Colonel Glinka said, scrambling after her upon his
hands and knees, groping for her with outstretched arms. "I beg--" His
hand touched something which might have been her ankle. He seized it,
held it for a moment, and then, shuddering, let it go, drawing back his
hand as if it had been stabbed. By now the night was quite dark.

Colonel Glinka scrambled to his feet, half instinctively raised the
deadly Malacca cane.

"Don't do it, Joe!" cried Abdul, coming up from behind him and shoving
him hard.

The shot went wild, but the sound of it, echoing up and down the ravine,
started an ominous, new sound, the growing, staccato murmur of many
voices, a rattling of stones, a hundred different movements in the
blackness.

Colonel Glinka fired the last bullet more wildly still, hurled the
Malacca cane at them, and ran.

* * * * *

Abdul Hakkim ben Salazar, who had been many leaps ahead of him, arrived
breathless at the front gate of the villa, opened it, dived through,
locked it behind him, and threw himself upon the grass to catch his
breath.

There was a cheerful glow in the darkness. The slight, grotesque figure
of Dr. Stefanik and his pipe emerged from the shadows.

"Ah," Abdul breathed, "where were you, Sidi, when I was out there dying
for you?"

"Hiding up the tallest cinnamon tree, like a monkey," Dr. Stefanik said.

They sat there upon the grass for a long while in companionable silence,
heeding the sounds of the night, which was balmy and infinitely
peaceful.

There came a high-pitched, long-drawn-out scream from somewhere on the
ridge.

"They got him," Abdul said.

"And now they will pluck him, I suppose," said Dr. Stefanik. "There, by
the way, is a thing that even _I_ have never completely understood about
them. Their insatiable curiosity, of course, is a vestigial trait that
will pass, but this other drive, I fear, this rather alarming passion
that they have shown for the up-breeding of the species may be some
universal of life itself that no man may touch or alter."

Down the path from the ridge, a small, white-robed figure came running,
far ahead of the others, bent upon her own schemes of evolution.

Abdul crouched lower in the shadows. "That one makes even the heart of a
man swell within his breast," he whispered, "for she does not ever