But the beast
never moved.
He was suspicious of the wily one, however. The devil, he knew, was
sometimes busiest when he made least show of business. And it was not
till next morning, when he found the monster still as before, that he
ventured down to the pool and looked into it, and saw what had happened.
The waves had hurled a huge boulder into it--and there you may see it to
this day--and it had fallen on the devil-fish and ground him flat, and
purged the rock of a horror.
Gard examined the hideous tentacles with the curiosity of intensest
repulsion; yet could not but stand amazed at the wonderful delicacy and
finish displayed in the tiny powerful suckers with which each limb was
furnished on the under side, and the flexible muscularity of the
monstrous limbs themselves, thick as his biceps where they came out of
the pool, and tapering to a worm-like point, capable, it seemed to him,
of picking up a pin.
He was mightily glad the beast was dead, however. It had been a blot on
Nature's handiwork, and the very thought of it a horror.
The strenuous interlude of the storm, which, to the lonely one exposed
to its fullest fury, had seemed interminable--every shivering day the
length of many, and the black howling nights longer still--had had the
effect of relaxing somewhat his own oversight over himself and his
precautions against being seen.
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