He cocked his gun and prodded the body with the muzzle.
“Good and dead,” he commented. “What luck! Generally it takes three or four bullets to finish one. I’ve known one with two bullets through her lungs to kill a man.”
“Did you murder this woman?” Waldo demanded fiercely.
“Murder?” the consul snorted. “Murder! Look at that.”
He knelt down and pulled open the full, close lips, disclosing not human teeth, but small incisors, cusped grinders, wide-spaced, and long, keen, overlapping canines, like those of a greyhound: a fierce, deadly, carnivorous dentition, menacing and combative.
Waldo felt a qualm, yet the face and form still swayed his horrified sympathy for their humanness.
“Do you shoot women because they have long teeth?” Waldo insisted, revolted at the horrid death he had watched.
“You are hard to convince,” said the consul sternly. “Do you call that a woman?”
He stripped the clothing from the carcass.
Waldo sickened all over. What he saw was not the front of a woman, but the body of a female animal, old and flaccid—mother of a pack.