How had the creature—man or beast—reached the house? How had it made its way silently through the rooms at midnight, with one of us awake and on guard? Could it be that one of the servants had remained, hidden in some secret place while the others had left, and now prowled about at night while the rest far off in the bush yelled and howled, drummed and danced, and gradually became ripe to attack us?
Arthur came out of his dark room with a glass plate in his hand. His face was pale.
"Look at this," he said quietly. "If you'll hold it so the light strikes it diagonally, you'll see it in its proper lights and shades, instead of reversed."
The plate was still wet, where he had just taken it from the fixing bath. We looked. We saw, running aimlessly here and there, curiously like the branches of a tree, little dark lines. Those were the blood vessels that nourished the eye. We gave no heed to them, however. The sight that made both Evan and myself gasp was the strange picture that we saw amid all those little blood vessels.
There, distorted and hideous, menacing and terrible, we saw the cause of the native girl's death, and of her terror. We saw the head of a gorilla, with its horrible, discolored fangs protruding from blackened lips in a grimace of unspeakable ferocity.
[CHAPTER V.]
AS BY MAGIC.
"And it's in the house," observed Evan grimly. "A full-grown beast will weigh three hundred pounds, and he'd leave plenty of sign when he walked. There are no tracks leading away from here. Murray and I looked."
Arthur was ashen as he stared at us. I felt rather shaky myself. The thought of a creature like that in the same house, with Alicia exposed to its insane rage at any moment it might choose to emerge from its hiding place, was appalling.
The two ladies were in the large front room. I went in and remained with them, my rifle in my hand, while Arthur and Evan went over the house again. They had the dogs with them, and they went into every room and every corner, ready at any instant to face what is possibly the most terrible of all wild beasts at close quarters.