"I suppose most people would call it that. It has but three tentacles, however, and so is a tripus. And that scream we heard last night--well, we know now, Bill, what it was." I shivered. "No wonder," I said, "that we thought that the sound was unhuman! In the grip of that thing, the tentacle around his neck! So near, and we never stirred to his help!" "Because we never dreamed. And, had we known, Bill, we could not have saved him. Life would have been extinct, crushed out of him, before ever we could have got here and cut him down." "I thought of some dreadful things," I said, "but never of a monster like that." "A queer place, this forest, a horrible place, Bill," Milton Rhodes said, glancing a little nervously about him. "But come." He started forward. The Dromans hung back, but I moved along after him, whereupon the others followed, though with great apparent reluctance. "What I don't quite understand, Bill, is this: what happened?" "Why, the poor fellow was passing beneath the branches, the octopus thrust down its tentacle, wound it around the victim's neck and started to pull him up." "All that is very clear. But then just what happened to the octopus?" "The limb to which the monster had attached itself--see where the limb has been struck, perhaps by a falling tree, and weakened--well, it broke, and down the monster came crashing onto that branch on which we see it." "That too is quite clear," said Rhodes. "But what killed the thing? The fall, it seems to me, could not have done it." The next moment we halted, a little distance from the spot where hung the still, white body of the Droman. "Oh, I see it now," said Rhodes, pointing. "Why didn't I see that before? As the monster came down, it was impaled upon those sword-like stubs of branches, one going through the body, the other out through the face. Face! The thing seems to be all face. And the human aspect of that visage! How like the big face of a fat man!" That, there could be no doubt, was what had happened. And that Gorgonic horror, in the shock of the fall and its impalement, even in its death-throes, had never loosed the grip on its victim. "We can't leave the poor devil hanging like that," I said. "Of course not. And to give him burial will mean the loss of time probably more precious even than we think it. This is a wood horrible as any that Dante ever found himself in." "We must risk it. We can't leave him like that or the body lying on the ground for the beasts to devour." Rhodes and I still had our ice-picks, and we at once divested ourselves of the packs and started the grave. And, as we worked, try as I would I could not shake off from me--the feeling that, concealed somewhere in the trees, something was lurking, was watching us.