“Please, Mr. Beetle Man, I’m lost.”

“No, you’re not,” he said reassuringly.  “You’re not a quarter of a mile from the Puerto del Norte Road.”

“But I don’t know which direction—­”

“Perfectly simple.  Keep on over the top of the rock; turn left down the slope, right up the dry stream bed to a dead tree; bear right past—­”

“That’s too many turns, I never could remember more than two.”

“Now, listen,” he said persuasively.  “I can make it quite plain to you if—­”

“I don’t wish to listen!  I’ll never find it.”

“I’ll toss you up my compass.”

“I don’t want your compass,” she said firmly.

A long patient sigh exhaled from below.

“Do you want me to guide you?”

“No,” she retorted, and was instantly panic-stricken, for the monosyllable was of that accent which sets fire to bridges and burns them beyond hope of return.

Slowly she got to her feet.  Perhaps she would have dared and gone; perhaps she would have swallowed pride and her negative, and made one more appeal.  She turned hesitantly and saw the devil.

It was a small devil on stilts, not more than three or four inches tall, but there was no mistaking his identity.  No other living thing could possess such demoniac little red-hot pin points of eyes, or be so bristly and grisly and vicious.  The stilts suddenly folded flat, and the devil rushed upon his prey.  The girl stepped back; her foot turned and caught, and—­

“Of course,” the patient voice below was saying, “if you really think that you couldn’t find the road, I could draw you a map and send it up by the hair route.  But I really think—­”

“BLUMP!”

The rock had turned over on his unprotected head and flattened him out forever.  Such was his first thought.  When he finally collected himself, his eyeglasses, and his senses, he sustained a second shock more violent than the first.

Two paces away, the Voice, duly and most appropriately embodied, sat half-facing him.  The Voice’s eyes confirmed his worst suspicions, and, dazed though they were at the moment, there were deep lights in them that wholly disordered his mental mechanism.  Nor were her first words such as to restore his deranged faculties.

“Oh-h!  Aren’t you gogglesome!” she cried dizzily.

He raised his hands to the huge brown spectacles.

“Wh—­wh—­what did you come down for?” he babbled.  There was a distinct note of accusation in the query.

“Come down!  I fell!”

“Yes, yes; that may be true—­”

“May be!”

“Of course, it is true.  I—­I—­I see it’s true.  I’m awfully sorry.”

“Sorry?  What for?”

“That you came.  That you fell, I mean to say.  I—­I—­I don’t really know what I mean to say.”

“No wonder, poor boy!  I landed right on you, didn’t I?”