The thing was moving toward the edge of the descent very slowly, as though having no object in life whatever.
It was a shapeless mass, anyway, or seemed to be, perhaps distorted by the moonlight and its own shadow. From all the scout could make out it might be a small haystack or a cord of wood out for a ramble.
With rifle ready, for the scout was suspicious of this peculiarity, he watched the thing approach the very edge of the precipice and pause. There it rested, minute after minute, as motionless as the rock itself, until the scout began to wonder if it had not all been an optical illusion, and that he had been glaring at a great bowlder perched on the brink of the abyss.
The scout rubbed his eyes, glanced away for a moment, and then looked back.
Again he was surprised into a smothered exclamation.
The thing had grown a head. But its head was in proportion to its size as that of a turtle. And it had grown out of the flat top of the body—it was still growing.
The head was followed by a pair of human shoulders, and then an arm was raised aloft, and in the hand was an object plainly outlined against the sky.
It was the head, shoulders, and arms of a man, and the arm was about to hurl something into the bushes far below.
Like lightning the scout’s rifle went into position, and just as the arm launched its missile there was a sharp crack, followed instantly by a thunderous roar and blinding flash at the crest of the mountain.
When the smoke had cleared away and the scout’s eyes became accustomed to the moonlight again, he saw that the strange craft of the clifftop had been wrecked. And out of the wreck an animated object was moving along the bare rock. Then the moving thing sprang into a human form and ran along the rocks for a short distance to disappear where the strange object had first appeared to the scout.