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Updated: August 25, 2024
He had slept, perhaps, and awakened to find a being, naked and defenceless, invading his pool. He was quite small, as octopods go, and young, yet he was large and powerful enough to have drowned an ox. The octopod has only been described once, in stone, by a Japanese artist. The statue is still extant, and it is the most terrible masterpiece of sculpture ever executed by human hands.
And that was the first and last time he addressed the man. We ran through Penfield Green, half stupefied with open air, drugged with the relentless boom of the Octopod, and extinct with famine. "I used to shoot about here," said Kysh, a few miles further on. "Open that gate, please," and he slowed as the sun touched the sky-line.
It represents a man who has been bathing on a low-tide beach, and has been caught. The man is shouting in a delirium of terror, and threatening with his free arm the spectre that has him in its grip. The eyes of the octopod are fixed upon the man passionless and lugubrious eyes, but steadfast and fixed.
At Argentine, Winton's speed was a mile a minute over a track rougher than a corduroy wagon-road; yet the octopod held the rail and was neck and neck with the runaway.
The where's the interestin' point for you just now." I had seen Kysh drive before, and I thought I knew the Octopod, but that afternoon he and she were exalted beyond my knowledge. He improvised on the keys the snapping levers and quivering accelerators marvellous variations, so that our progress was sometimes a fugue and sometimes a barn-dance, varied on open greens by the weaving of fairy rings.
But Winton opened his eyes and struggled to his feet unaided. "Not yet," he said. "I've left my automobile on the other side of the creek; and besides, I have a railroad to build. My respects to Mr. Darrah, and you may tell him I'm not beaten yet." And he swung over the railing and dropped off to mount the octopod and to race it back to the front.
The shrilling wheels were tracking around a curve into a scanty widening of the canyon. To the left, on the rails of the new line, the big octopod was heaving and grunting in the midst of an army of workmen swarming thick upon the overturned guard engine. "Goodness! it's like a battle!" she shuddered.
The big octopod coughed thrice like a mighty giant in a consumption; the clustering workmen scattered like chaff to a ringing shout of "Stand clear!" and the obstructing mass of iron and steel rolled, wallowing and hissing, into the stream. "Rails to the front! Hammermen!" yelled Winton; and the scattered force rallied instantly.
If he could outpace the runaway on the parallel line, stop the octopod and dash across to the C. G. R. track ahead of the Rosemary, there was one chance in a million that he might fling himself upon the car in mid flight and alight with life enough left to help Calvert with the hand-brakes. Now, in the most unhopeful struggle it is often the thing least hoped for that comes to pass.
"Certainly; anything that would hold the weight of the octopod. We shall have to rebuild most of the line, anyway, as soon as the frost comes out of the ground in the spring." The brown eyes became far-seeing. "I was thinking," she said musingly. "There is no time to make another nice little ridge.
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