But, during that brief circular roll of the light, Gavin Brice caught the most fleeting glimpse of the sight that had caused Claire to cry out and shrink back against him.

He had seen, for the merest fraction of a second, the upper half of a man’s body—­thickset and hairy,—­upright, on a level with the ground, as though it had been cut in two and the legless trunk set up there.

By the time Brice’s eyes could focus fairly upon this very impossible sight, the half-body had begun to recede rapidly into the earth, like that of an anglework which a robin pulls halfway out of the lawn and then loses its grip on.

In practically the same instant, the rolling ray of light moved past the amazing spectacle, and less than a second later bumped against the fragment of coral—­the bump which smashed its bulb and left the two wanderers in total darkness for the remainder of their strange pilgrimage.

Claire, momentarily unstrung, caught Gavin by the arm and clung to him.  He could feel the shudder of her slender body as it pressed to his side for protection.

“What—­what was it?” she whispered, tremblingly.  “What was it?  Did I really see it?  It it couldn’t be!  It looked—­it looked like a—­a body that had been cut in half—­and—­and—­”

“It’s all right,” he whispered, reassuringly, passing his arm unchidden about her slight waist.  “Don’t be frightened, dear!  It wasn’t a man cut in half.  It was the upper half of a man who was wiggling down into a tunnel hidden by that smother of underbrush ....  And here I was just wondering why people should bother to come all the way through this path, instead of skirting the woods!  Answers furnished while you wait!”

Before he spoke, however, he had strained his ears to listen.  And the quick receding and then cessation of the sound of the scrambling body in the tunnel had told him the seen half and the unseen half of the intruder had alike vanished beyond earshot, far under ground.

“But what—?” began the frightened girl.

Then she realized for the first time that she was holding fast to the man whom she had forbidden to speak to her.  And she relinquished her tight clasp on his arm.

“Stand where you are, a minute,” he directed.  “He’s gone.  There’s no danger.  He was as afraid of us as you were of him.  He ducked, like a mud-turtle, as soon as he saw we weren’t the people he expected.  Stay here, please.  And face this way.  That’s the direction we were going in, and we don’t want to get turned around.  I’ve got to crawl about on all fours for a while, in the merry quest of the flashlight.  I know just about where it stopped.”

She could hear him groping amid the looser undergrowth.  Then he got to his feet.

“Here it is,” he reported.  “But it wasn’t worth hunting for.  The bulb’s gone bad.  We’ll have to walk the rest of the way by faith.  Would you mind, very much, taking my arm?  The path’s wide enough for that, from here on.  It needn’t imply that you’ve condoned anything I said to you, out yonder in the boat, you know.  But it may save you from a stumble.  I’m fairly sure-footed.  And I’m used to this sort of travel.”