“Run, run!” she screamed aloud. “You ain’t going quick enough; dey got de heels of you!” She bowed and swayed in horrible derision, as he stumbled, recovered himself, and tore on. The next instant she had taken to her heels and was running faster than Erceldonne himself. But not to the boat. Something yellow and white had flashed by her, hunting silently, without a sound. By instinct, she ran, she knew not where; and as she ran she shrieked. The Italian captain of the _Flores_ had been a cutthroat from his youth up, and now made an excellent livelihood by hiring out his yacht and asking no questions. But even he was pale as he stood on the bridge and took the boat away from that accursed island. That there should be wild animals in so desolate a place seemed natural enough to a man who knew nothing of the Azores except the name; yet he had never seen even tigers so fierce as to hunt men in broad day. And hunt they had. Mr. Egerton had saved his life by a bare fifty yards, and the screams of the black servants, who had been too fat to run, rang in the captain’s ears still. No wonder the signorina had been carried on board half-dead, or that the two colored women crouched, weeping, on the deck. “The place is accursed,” he said sharply to his first officer, who would have liked to stay and hunt the strange, fierce beast that had stood snarling at the very water’s edge and disappeared like magic as he drew his revolver. “If Mattel had not been a son of the devil he would not have got off in his skin last night.” Mr. Raimond Erle drew a long breath of relief as he sat with his father in the saloon and heard the steady sound of the screw. He glanced at Erceldonne, seated opposite him, and aged by ten years by that flight down the glaring hillside. “That was a damned lucky escape,” he said slowly. “I didn’t half-believe in your beasts before. But they’ve done well by you now!” “How?” Erceldonne’s breath came unevenly still. “Do you ever read the papers?” but his own hand shook as he lifted his whisky and soda, for, for form’s sake, the two sat at luncheon, waited on by the servants, who could not understand a word they said. “Well, it will be an item: ‘Strange and Terrible Story From’--we can find a place. But it will go like this: