“Is not that like a man! No woman would have made that mistake.”
Waldo was confuted and sat down again. The children circulated around him, chattering, laughing, giggling, snickering, making noises indicative of glee.
“Please get me something cool to drink,” said Waldo, and his tongue was not only dry but big in his mouth.
“We shall have to drink shortly,” she said, “but it will be warm.”
Waldo began to feel uneasy. The children pranced around him, jabbering strange, guttural noises, licking their lips, pointing at him, their eyes fixed on him, with now and then a glance at their mother.
The woman stood silent, her arms hanging at her sides, and it seemed to Waldo she was shorter than she had been.
“Patience, patience,” she growled, and came a step nearer to him.
The sunlight struck upon her back and made a sort of halo about her hips. She seemed still shorter than before. There was a something furtive in her bearing, and the little ones sniggered evilly.
At that instant two rifle shots rang out almost as one. The woman fell face downward on the floor. The babies shrieked in a shrill chorus. Then she leapt up from all fours with an explosive suddenness, staggered in a hurled, lurching rush toward the hole in the wall, and, with a frightful yell, threw up her arms and whirled backward to the ground, doubled and contorted like a dying fish, stiffened, shuddered and was still. Waldo, his horrified eyes fixed on her face, even in his amazement noted that her lips did not open.
The children, squealing faint cries of dismay, scrambled through the hole in the inner wall, vanishing into the inky void beyond. The last had hardly gone when the consul appeared in the doorway, his smoking gun in his hand.
“Not a second too soon, my boy,” he ejaculated. “She was just going to spring.”
He cocked his gun and prodded the body with the muzzle.
“Good and dead,” he commented. “What luck! Generally it takes three or four bullets to finish one. I’ve known one with two bullets through her lungs to kill a man.”
“Did you murder this woman?” Waldo demanded fiercely.
“Murder?” the consul snorted. “Murder! Look at that.”
He knelt down and pulled open the full, close lips, disclosing not human teeth, but small incisors, cusped grinders, wide-spaced, and long, keen, overlapping canines, like those of a greyhound: a fierce, deadly, carnivorous dentition, menacing and combative.