In this she was wrong. Wrentz, watching from above—for he was afraid of the voices on the tracks, below and had not followed Pauline —watched with pleasure as she crawled to the side of the car, and, after two failures, managed to drag herself through the high door. She sank exhausted. Gradually, however, her strength returned. Her mind recovered from the dazing experiences of the last few hours. She began to gain courage and to plan her further flight.
As she moved toward the car door to reconnoiter, the sense of an invisible presence suddenly possessed her. Instinctively she turned.
One glance behind her and every fiber of her body seemed to turn to stone. Fear she had known, but never terror such as this. She stood paralyzed, unable to close her eyes, unable to move. For there beside her, towering above her in horrible strength, with wildly grinning face and cruelly outreaching claws, stood the thing that gave explanation to the hunt outside and the shouting. Pauline was in the clutches of a gorilla. She fainted as she felt herself gripped in the hairy arms.
Wrentz was gloating as he stood on watch over Pauline's hiding place. In a little while the men, would be out of the railroad yard and he would go down and finish the work. But his rejoicings were turned into amazement by the sight which now presented itself at the door of the car.
With Pauline, carried over one arm as if she had been a wisp of straw, the gorilla was crawling down to the trackside. Wrentz saw it crawl along the ditch and heard the crunch of broken bushes as the huge creature clambered up the cliff.
Wondering, scarcely able to believe his eyes, Wrentz followed at a safe distance.
Young Policeman Blount, searching for the fugitive chauffeur of the wrecked automobile and the mysterious young woman who had escaped from it, paused at the sound of heavy foot-falls. A low, guttural, snarling sound—a sound hardly human—accompanied the footsteps. He had reached the bottom of the cliff a half mile from where Pauline had found her perilous shelter. Peering up through the bushes, his astonishment and horror were a match for the astonishment and joy of Wrentz. The gorilla, with Pauline still clutched in the mighty paw, had reached almost the top of the cliff at its steepest point.
Blount blew his whistle, blast after blast. He started up the cliff, but came back at the sound of hurrying footsteps and calls; the hunters from the railroad yards had heard the signal.
"Hello! Have you seen anything of the gorilla?" yelled the first man to come up.
Blount pointed up the cliff side to where the hideous beast was just dragging Pauline over the topmost ledge.