There was a startled, weird outcry; and from the summit of the little rise a shape broke cover. A girl! She came bursting from a thicket no more than three feet to the side of the swath my flash had burned, and for a second or two she stood poised on a rock with the open evening sky a background above and behind her. A slim shape of bare legs and arms with a brief drape from shoulders to her thighs. The starlight and fading daylight gleamed on her bronzed skin as though she were a metal statue. "Well--I say--" Jim muttered. * * * * * Thoughts are instant things. There was in my mind the vague idea that here, by some wild circumstances, was a girl in a fancy-dress party costume or something of the kind. But the thought, and Jim's muttered words of astonishment, were in another second stricken away. She paused for that instant on the rock, and then she leaped. Amazing, incredible leap! It carried her in a flat arc some ten or fifteen feet above the ground and twenty feet away, where light as a faun she landed on the toes of her bare feet. Nearer to us now; and seeing us, perhaps for the first time, she stood and stared. I could see the silvery streaks running through the black hair that framed her face. It was a queerly beautiful face, apparently devoid of normal cosmetic-make-up. Negroid? Oriental? In that second I had the thought that it was neither--nor anything else that I could name. A girl with a mysterious wild beauty which stirred my pulses. "Well--good Lord--" Jim muttered again. He too was staring, with a hand in his shock of bristling red hair, and I can imagine the look of numbed astonishment on his freckled, pug-nosed face. "Good Lord, how did she jump like that?" I heard myself stammering, "You--up there--what in the devil--" Like a terrified fugitive the girl abruptly swept a look behind her; and then she leaped again, and landed almost beside us. "You--you--Oh you mus' help me! There was a flash that tried to kill me--" English! With weird, indescribable intonation, she gasped the English words. "I--shot at you," I stammered. "Sorry--we thought you were an animal. No human is allowed here today but us." Somehow it seemed futile, incongruous that I should try to explain anything rational to a girl so weird as this. But she smiled. "Oh--I thought--I thought--" "Someone is after you?" Jim said quickly. "Yes. I thought--but I guess not now. Oh you are good Earthmen--not like Curtmann. I escaped, and I have come long long a way from my poor terrified people." I saw Jim glance at me significantly. We both had the same thought, of course. A girl demented; with painted skin and fancy dress--trappings of insanity; and she had escaped from some asylum? But those leaps were far beyond the power of any trained athlete! "What's your name?" I murmured.