In the middle, under the opening, was a standard painted a dull, forbidding red, and on this, in a cage of twisted iron, lay a monstrous, coiled thing, hideously and brilliantly mottled, his blunt, flattened head lazily resting on his topmost ring, his malignant, weary eyes fixed in a listless stare, that drooped over the human mushrooms around him, over the seas he had travelled, back to the old gods and the beginnings of things. The inked diamonds along his great length gleamed in a dreadful, supple pattern; the eye, entranced in a seductive terror, followed the massive rounds of those murderous coils, longing, yet dreading, to trace them to their horrid head: it seemed that a faint, uncanny odour, a hint of dead spices, like the secret wrapping cloths of old mummies, hung in the air. Now Antony knew, or supposed he knew, that cobras exhale no such odour, and in a disgusted curiosity he peered about for the source of it, but found nothing in the stained and faded tent, nor any nook or cranny in the obvious bareness where the source of it could lurk. The scene was a strange one; no officious showman called attention, in a raucous voice, to the ugly thing in the middle. There appeared to be no director, no advertisement of any kind, no appeal to a credulous or morbid crowd. The tent could contain but a score of visitors simultaneously, and they pushed in, fairly quiet as soon as they had entered, slowly encircled the scornful, wicked-eyed heap on the standard, discussed it in low tones and went out through another flap to make room for the next group. Indeed, the accustomed ease with which they performed these evolutions awoke in Antony the wonder whether they had not rehearsed them many times, and he involuntarily mentioned this idea to the girl, who gazed, at once fascinated and repelled, as Eve at the Seducer. "I suppose," she returned musingly, "they keep coming to see if it will by any chance bite some one." At this precise moment there pushed through the entrance-flap one who by his distinctive dress showed himself the mechanician of the claret-coloured motorcar. He was as obviously a foreigner, and among the simple rural types that filled the tent his mustachioed personality stood out as startlingly as the great cobra's. Elbowing his way through the little crowd he made himself a place directly beside Antony and the freckled boy, who had attached himself definitely to his patron, and smiled at the young man in easy cosmopolitan contempt of the rustics, conveying at the same time, In a graphic Continental hint of respectful salutation, his duty to the young lady. Antony accepted the smile with a lordly nod, expressive of his familiarity with mechanicians as a class and his appreciation of their place in the general scheme of things, and the two men surveyed the reptile in silence. "I know heem well," volunteered the big fellow in the leather suit, at last.