"Look out!" I warned him. "Keep back, Correy! Keep the men back! I've got him, but he'll die hard--" As though to prove my words true, the head, a ghastly thing eroded into a shapeless mass, was jerked from the mud, and two tremendous loops of tortured body came hurtling over my head. One of the huge fins swung by like a sail, its hooked talons ripping one of Correy's men into bloody shreds. Correy himself, caught in a desperate endeavor to save the unfortunate man, was knocked twenty feet. For one terrible instant, I thought the beast had killed Correy also. Gasping, Correy rose to his feet, and I ran to assist him. "Back, men!" I shouted. "Hendricks! Get away as far and as fast as you can. Back! _Back!_" Half dragging Correy, who was still breathless from the blow, I hurried after the men. Behind us, shaking the earth in his death agonies, the monstrous serpent beat the plain about him into a veritable sea of slime. * * * * * From a point of vantage, atop the _Ertak_, we watched for the end. "I have never," said Correy in an awed voice, "seen anything take so long to die." "You have never before," I commented grimly, "seen a snake so large. It took ages to grow that mighty body; it is but natural that, even with the brain disintegrated into dust, the body would not die immediately." "Undoubtedly he has a highly decentralized nervous system," nodded Hendricks, who was, as I have said, something of a practical scientific man, although no laboratory worker or sniveling scientist. "And instinct is directing him back toward the sea from which, all unwillingly, he came. Look--he's almost in the water." "I don't care where he goes," said Correy savagely, "so he goes there as carrion. Clark was a good man, sir." Clark was the man the serpent had killed. "True," I said. Making the entry of that loss would hurt; even though the discipline of the Service is--or at least, used to be--very rigid, officers get rather close to their men during the course of many tours of duty in the confines of a little ship like the _Ertak_. "But the _Kabit_, with her nearly two thousand souls, is safe." We all looked up. The _Kabit_ was no longer visible. Battered, but still space-worthy, she had gone on her way. "I suppose," grinned Correy, "that we'll be thanked by radio." The grin was real; Correy had had action enough to make him happy for a time. The nervous tension was gone. "Probably. But--watch our friend! He's in the water at last. I imagine that's the last we'll see of him." * * * * *