"Kemper!" I shouted. "He's got a third eye! He's one of them! Knock him
flat with your riflestock!" And I seized a shot-gun from the top of
the baggage bundle on the ground beside me, and leaped at Grue, aiming
a terrific blow at him.
[Illustration: "'Kemper!' I shouted.... 'He is one of them! Knock him
flat with your riflestock!'"]
But the glassy eye in the back of his head was watching me between the
clotted strands of hair, and he dodged both Kemper and me, swinging his
heavy knife in circles and glaring at us both out of the front and back
of his head.
Kemper seized him by his arm, but Grue's shirt came off, and I saw his
entire body was as furry as an ape's. And all the while he was snapping
at us and leaping hither and thither to avoid our blows; and from the
corners of his puffed cheeks he whined and whimpered and mewed through
the saliva foam.
"Keep him from the water!" I panted, following him with clubbed shot-gun;
and as I advanced I almost stepped on a soiled heap of foulness--the dead
buzzard which he had caught and worried to death with his teeth.
Suddenly he threw his knife at my head, hurling it backward; dodged,
screeched, and bounded by me toward the shore of the lagoon, where the
pretty waitress was standing, petrified.
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