“Look out!” cried someone, and a large drab body struck him.  He was knocked flat into a tidal pool by one of the workmen, and as he went down he heard smothered, choking cries, that he believed at the time came from Hill.  Then he found himself marvelling at the shrillness and variety of Hill’s voice.  Someone jumped over him, and a curving rush of foamy water poured over him, and passed.  He scrambled to his feet dripping, and without looking seaward, ran as fast as his terror would let him shoreward.  Before him, over the flat space of scattered rocks, stumbled the two work-men—­one a dozen yards in front of the other.

He looked over his shoulder at last, and seeing that he was not pursued, faced about.  He was astonished.  From the moment of the rising of the cephalopods out of the water he had been acting too swiftly to fully comprehend his actions.  Now it seemed to him as if he had suddenly jumped out of an evil dream.

For there were the sky, cloudless and blazing with the afternoon sun, the sea weltering under its pitiless brightness, the soft creamy foam of the breaking water, and the low, long, dark ridges of rock.  The righted boat floated, rising and falling gently on the swell about a dozen yards from shore.  Hill and the monsters, all the stress and tumult of that fierce fight for life, had vanished as though they had never been.

Mr. Fison’s heart was beating violently; he was throbbing to the finger-tips, and his breath came deep.

There was something missing.  For some seconds he could not think clearly enough what this might be.  Sun, sky, sea, rocks—­what was it?  Then he remembered the boat-load of excursionists.  It had vanished.  He wondered whether he had imagined it.  He turned, and saw the two workmen standing side by side under the projecting masses of the tall pink cliffs.  He hesitated whether he should make one last attempt to save the man Hill.  His physical excitement seemed to desert him suddenly, and leave him aimless and helpless.  He turned shoreward, stumbling and wading towards his two companions.

He looked back again, and there were now two boats floating, and the one farthest out at sea pitched clumsily, bottom upward.

III.

So it was Haploteuthis ferox made its appearance upon the Devonshire coast.  So far, this has been its most serious aggression.  Mr. Fison’s account, taken together with the wave of boating and bathing casualties to which I have already alluded, and the absence of fish from the Cornish coasts that year, points clearly to a shoal of these voracious deep-sea monsters prowling slowly along the sub-tidal coast-line.  Hunger migration has, I know, been suggested as the force that drove them hither; but, for my own part, I prefer to believe the alternative theory of Hemsley.  Hemsley holds that a pack or shoal of these creatures may have become enamoured of human flesh by the accident of a foundered ship sinking among them, and have wandered in search of it out of their accustomed zone; first waylaying and following ships, and so coming to our shores in the wake of the Atlantic traffic.  But to discuss Hemsley’s cogent and admirably-stated arguments would be out of place here.