at he would agree and obey. In some
measure, too, it was a sort of relief to get up and make an excursion
into the darkness for more wood. We kept close together, almost
touching, groping among the bushes and along the bank. The humming
overhead never ceased, but seemed to me to grow louder as we increased
our distance from the fire. It was shivery work!

We were grubbing away in the middle of a thickish clump of willows where
some driftwood from a former flood had caught high among the branches,
when my body was seized in a grip that made me half drop upon the sand.
It was the Swede. He had fallen against me, and was clutching me for
support. I heard his breath coming and going in short gasps.

"Look! By my soul!" he whispered, and for the first time in my
experience I knew what it was to hear tears of terror in a human voice.
He was pointing to the fire, some fifty feet away. I followed the
direction of his finger, and I swear my heart missed a beat.

There, in front of the dim glow, _something was moving_.

I saw it through a veil that hung before my eyes like the gauze
drop-curtain used at the back of a theater--hazily a little. It was
neither a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange
impression of being as large as several animals grouped together, like
horses, two or three, moving slowly. The Swede, too, got a similar
result, though expressing it differently, for he thought it was shaped
and sized like a clump of willow bushes, rounded at the top, and moving
all over upon its surface--"coiling upon itself like smoke," he said
afterwards.

"I watched it settle downwards through the bushes," he sobbed at me.
"Look, by God! It's coming this way! Oh, oh!"--he gave a kind of
whistling cry. "_They've found us_."

I gave one terrified glance, which just enabled me to see that the
shadowy form was swinging towards us through the bushes, and then I
collapsed backwards with a crash into the branches. These failed, of
course, to support my weight, so that with the Swede on the top of me we
fell in a struggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew what was
happening. I was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy
fear that plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them
this way and that, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly
shut; something in my throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness
was expanding, extending out into space, swiftly gave way to anot