“You’ve made this observatory in a pretty mess,” said Thaddy.

The Dyak boy was beating up an egg in brandy.  Woodhouse took this and sat up.  He felt a sharp twinge of pain.  His ankle was tied up, so were his arm and the side of his face.  The smashed glass, red-stained, lay about the floor, the telescope seat was overturned, and by the opposite wall was a dark pool.  The door was open, and he saw the grey summit of the mountain against a brilliant background of blue sky.

“Pah!” said Woodhouse.  “Who’s been killing calves here?  Take me out of it.”

Then he remembered the Thing, and the fight he had had with it.

“What was it?” he said to Thaddy—­“The Thing I fought with?”

“You know that best,” said Thaddy.  “But, anyhow, don’t worry yourself now about it.  Have some more to drink.”

Thaddy, however, was curious enough, and it was a hard struggle between duty and inclination to keep Woodhouse quiet until he was decently put away in bed, and had slept upon the copious dose of meat-extract Thaddy considered advisable.  They then talked it over together.

“It was,” said Woodhouse, “more like a big bat than anything else in the world.  It had sharp, short ears, and soft fur, and its wings were leathery.  Its teeth were little, but devilish sharp, and its jaw could not have been very strong or else it would have bitten through my ankle.”

“It has pretty nearly,” said Thaddy.

“It seemed to me to hit out with its claws pretty freely.  That is about as much as I know about the beast.  Our conversation was intimate, so to speak, and yet not confidential.”

“The Dyak chaps talk about a Big Colugo, a Klang-utang—­whatever that may be.  It does not often attack man, but I suppose you made it nervous.  They say there is a Big Colugo and a Little Colugo, and a something else that sounds like gobble.  They all fly about at night.  For my own part I know there are flying foxes and flying lemurs about here, but they are none of them very big beasts.”

“There are more things in heaven and earth,” said Woodhouse—­and Thaddy groaned at the quotation—­“and more particularly in the forests of Borneo, than are dreamt of in our philosophies.  On the whole, if the Borneo fauna is going to disgorge any more of its novelties upon me, I should prefer that it did so when I was not occupied in the observatory at night and alone.”

THE TRIUMPHS OF A TAXIDERMIST

Here are some of the secrets of taxidermy.  They were told me by the taxidermist in a mood of elation.  He told me them in the time between the first glass of whisky and the fourth, when a man is no longer cautious and yet not drunk.  We sat in his den together; his library it was, his sitting and his eating-room—­separated by a bead curtain, so far as the sense of sight went, from the noisome den where he plied his trade.