ering in semi-darkness, watching the blurred shadow of the
demon lurching back and forth upon the screen of shining
water.
It had been nothing but luck, not foreplanning, to find that
there was a considerable space between the back of the falls
proper and the blind wall of the canyon. It had been luck,
too, which had forced Honath to skirt the pool in order to
reach, the falls at all, and thus had taken them all bebind the
silver curtain at the point where the weight of the falling
water was too low to hammer them down for good. And it
had been the blindest stroke of all that the demon had charged
after them directly into the pool, where the deep, boiling
water had slowed the threshing hind legs enough to halt it be-
fore it went under the falls, as it had earlier blundered into
the hard wall of the gorge.
Not an iota of all this had been in Honath’s mind before he
had discovered it to be true. At the moment that the huge
reptile had screamed for the second time, he had simply
grasped Mathild’s hand and broken for the falls, leaping from
low tree to shrub to fern faster than he had ever leapt before.
He did not stop to see how well Mathild was keeping up with
him, or whether or not Alaskon was following. He only ran.
He might have screamed, too; he could not remember.
They stood now, all three of them, wet through, behind
the curtain until the shadow of the demon faded and van-
ished. Finally Honath felt a hand thumping his shoulder, and
turned slowly.
Speech was impossible here, but Alaskon’s pointing finger