"I suppose most people would call it that. It has but three tentacles, however, and so is a tripus. And that scream we heard last night—well, we know now, Bill, what it was."
I shivered.
"No wonder," I said, "that we thought that the sound was unhuman! In the grip of that thing, the tentacle around his neck! So near, and we never stirred to his help!"
"Because we never dreamed. And, had we known, Bill, we could not have saved him. Life would have been extinct, crushed out of him, before ever we could have got here and cut him down."
"I thought of some dreadful things," I said, "but never of a monster like that."
"A queer place, this forest, a horrible place, Bill," Milton Rhodes said, glancing a little nervously about him. "But come."
He started forward. The Dromans hung back, but I moved along after him, whereupon the others followed, though with great apparent reluctance.
"What I don't quite understand, Bill, is this: what happened?"
"Why, the poor fellow was passing beneath the branches, the octopus thrust down its tentacle, wound it around the victim's neck and started to pull him up."
"All that is very clear. But then just what happened to the octopus?"