The creature seemed somehow to melt away into him, almost as though it
belonged to him and were a part of himself, but in the same
instant--that instant of extraordinary confusion and terror in my
mind--it seemed to pass over and behind him, and, in some utterly
unaccountable fashion, it was gone. And the Canadian woke and sat up
with a start.
"Quick! You fool!" I cried, in my excitement, "the beast has been in
your tent, here at your very throat while you sleep like the dead. Up,
man! Get your gun! Only this second it disappeared over there behind
your head. Quick! or Joan--!"
And somehow the fact that he was there, wide-awake now, to corroborate
me, brought the additional conviction to my own mind that this was no
animal, but some perplexing and dreadful form of life that drew upon my
deeper knowledge, that much reading had perhaps assented to, but that
had never yet come within actual range of my senses.
He was up in a flash, and out. He was trembling, and very white.
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