"As for you, you pitiable old dodo, with your bad manners and your worse
pictures, and your degraded mania for prunes, you are a necessary evil
that's all, and I haven't the slightest respect for either you or your
art!"
"Is that true?" he said in an altered voice.
"True?" I laughed bitterly. "Of course it's true, you miserable dauber!"
"D-dauber!" he stammered.
"Certainly! I _said_ 'dauber,' and I mean it. Why, your work would shame
the pictures on a child's slate!"
"Smith," he said unsteadily, "I believe I have utterly misjudged you.
I believe you are a good deal of a man, after all--"
"I'm man enough," said I, fiercely, "to go back, saddle my mule, kidnap
your daughter, and start for home. And I'm going to do it!"
"Wait!" he cried. "I don't want you to go. If you'll remain I'll be very
glad. I'll do anything you like. I'll quarrel with you, and you can
insult my pictures. It will agreeably stimulate us both. Don't go,
Smith--"
"If I stay, may I marry Wilna?"
"If you ask me I won't let you!"
"Very well!" I retorted, angrily. "Then I'll marry her anyway!"
"That's the way to talk! Don't go, Smith. I'm really beginning to like
you. And when Billy Green arrives you and he will have a delightfully
violent scene--"
"What!"
He rubbed his hands gleefully.
"He's in love with Wilna. You and he won't get on. It is going to be very
stimulating for me--I can see that! You and he are going to behave most
disagreeably to each other. And I shall be exceedingly unpleasant to you
both! Come, Smith, promise me that you'll stay!"
Profoundly worried, I stood staring at him in the moonlight, gnawing my
mustache.
"Very well," I said, "I'll remain if--"
Something checked me, I did not quite know what for a moment. Blythe,
too, was staring at me in an odd, apprehensive way. Suddenly I realised
that under my feet the ground was stirring.
"Look out!" I cried; but speech froze on my lips as beneath me the solid
earth began to rock and crack and billow up into a high, crumbling ridge,
moving continually, as the sod cracks, heaves up, and crumbles above the
subterranean progress of a mole.
Up into the air we were slowly pushed on the ever-growing ridge; and with
us were carried rocks and bushes and sod, and even forest trees.
I could hear their tap-roots part with pistol-like reports; see great
pines and hemlocks and oaks moving, slanting, settling, tilting crazily
in every direction as they were heaved upward in this gigantic
disturbance.
Blythe caught me by the arm; we clutched each other, balancing on the
crest of the steadily rising mound.
"W-what is it?" he stammered. "Look! It's circular. The woods are rising
in a huge circle. What's happening? Do you know?"
Over me crept a horrible certainty that _something living_ was moving
under us through the depths of the earth--something that, as it
progressed, was heaping up the surface of the world above its unseen
and burrowing course--something dreadful, enormous, sinister, and
_alive_!
"Look out!" screamed Blythe; and at the same instant the crumbling summit
of the ridge opened under our feet and a fissure hundreds of yards long
yawned ahead of us.
And along it, shining slimily in the moonlight, a vast, viscous, ringed
surface was moving, retracting, undulating, elongating, writhing,
squirming, shuddering.
"It's a worm!" shrieked Blythe. "Oh, God! It's a mile long!"
[Illustration: "'It's a worm!' shrieked Blythe."]
As in a nightmare we clutched each other, struggling frantically to avoid
the fissure; but the soft earth slid and gave way under us, and we fell
heavily upon that ghastly, living surface.
Instantly a violent convulsion hurled us upward; we fell on it again,
rebounding from the rubbery thing, strove to regain our feet and scramble
up the edges of the fissure, strove madly while the mammoth worm slid
more rapidly through the rocking forests, carrying us forward with a
speed increasing.
Through the forest we tore, reeling about on the slippery back of the
thing, as though riding on a plowshare, while trees clashed and tilted
and fell from the enormous furrow on every side; then, suddenly out of
the woods into the moonlight, far ahead of us we could see the grassy
upland heave up, cake, break, and crumble above the burrowing course of
the monster.
"It's making for the crater!" gasped Blythe; and horror spurred us on,
and we scrambled and slipped and clawed the billowing sides of the furrow
until we gained the heaving top of it.
As one runs in a bad dream, heavily, half-paralyzed, so ran Blythe and I,
toiling over the undulating, tumbling upheaval until, half-fainting, we
fell and rolled down the shifting slope onto solid and unvexed sod on the
very edges of the crater.
Below us we saw, with sickened eyes, the entire circumference of the
crater agitated, saw it rise and fall as avalanches of rock and earth
slid into it, tons and thousands of tons rushing down the slope, blotting
from our sight the flickering ring of flame, and extinguishing the last
filmy jet of vapour.
Suddenly the entire crater caved in and filled up under my anguished
eyes, quenching for all eternity the vapour wall, the fire, and burying
the little denizens of the flames, and perhaps a billion dollars' worth
of emeralds under as many billion tons of earth.
Quieter and quieter grew the earth as the gigantic worm bored straight
down into depths immeasurable. And at last the moon shone upon a world
that lay without a tremor in its milky lustre.
"I shall name it _Verma gigantica_," said I, with a hysterical sob; "but
nobody will ever believe me when I tell this story!"
Still terribly shaken, we turned toward the house. And, as we approached
the lamplit veranda, I saw a horse standing there and a young man hastily
dismounting.
And then a terrible thing occurred; for, before I could even shriek,
Wilna had put both arms around that young man's neck, and both of his
arms were clasping her waist.
Blythe was kind to me. He took me around the back way and put me to bed.
And there I lay through the most awful night I ever experienced,
listening to the piano below, where Wilna and William Green were singing,
"Un Peu d'Amour."