“Ugh!” cried the Babe with a shudder.  “But how did they hold on to him?”

“You see,” said Uncle Andy, “every feeler, long or short, had a row of saucer-shaped suckers along its underside, like the heads of those rubber-tipped arrows which I’ve seen you shooting at the wall, and which stick where they strike.  Only these suckers could hold on, I can tell you, so fast that you could never have pulled off even the littlest of them.

“Little Sword looked down into the awful eyes of the Inkmaker, and realized that he had made a great mistake.  But he was game all through.  It was not for a swordfish, however young, to give in to any odds.  Besides, just below those two great eyes, which stared up at him without ever a wink, he saw a terrible beak of a mouth, which opened and shut as if impatient to get hold of him.  This sight was calculated to encourage him to exert himself, if he had needed any more encouragement than the grip of those two, pale, writhing feelers on his flesh.

“Now, for his size, Little Sword was putting up a tremendous fight.  His broad, fluked tail and immense fins churned the water amazingly, and enabled him to spring this way and that in spite of all the efforts of the two long tentacles to hold him still.  Nevertheless, he was slowly drawn downwards, till one of the shorter feelers reached for a hold upon him.  He darted at it, and by a lucky plunge of his sword cut its snaky tip clean off.  It twisted back out of the way, like a startled worm; and Little Sword lunged at the next one.  He pierced it all right, but at a point where it was so thick that the stroke did not sever it, and the tip, curling over, fastened upon him.  At the same moment another feeler fixed itself upon the base of his tail, half paralyzing his struggles.

“Little Sword was now being drawn implacably downwards.  In his fierce rage he struck at everything in reach, but he was too closely held to inflict any serious wounds.  He was within eight or nine inches of those awful, unwinking, ink-black eyes.  The great beak opened upwards at him eagerly.  It looked as if his career was at an end—­when the Fates of the Deep Sea decided otherwise.  Apparently they had more use for Little Sword than they had for the Inkmaker.  A long shadow dropped straight downward.  It missed Little Sword by an inch or two.  And the gaping, long-toothed jaws of an immense barracouta closed upon the head of the Inkmaker, biting him clean in halves.  The blind body curled backwards spasmodically; and the tentacles, shorn off at the roots, fell aimlessly and helplessly apart.  Little Sword flashed away, trailing his limp captors behind him till they dropped off.  And the barracouta ate the remains of the Inkmaker at his leisure.  He had no concern to those swordfish when there was tender and delicious squid to be had; for the Inkmaker, you know, was just a kind of big squid, or cuttlefish.”