For one moment I thought he had her, but she picked up her skirts, ran
for the nearest boat, and seized a harpoon; and in his fierce eagerness
to catch her he leaped clear over the boat and fell with a splash into
the lagoon.
As Kemper and I sprang aboard and looked over into the water, we
could see him going down out of reach of a harpoon; and his body seemed
to be silver-plated, flashing and glittering like a burnished eel, so
completely did the skin of air envelope him, held there by the fur that
covered him.
And, as he rested for a moment on the bottom, deep down through the clear
waters of the lagoon where he lay prone, I could see, as the current
stirred his long, black hair, the third eye looking up at us, glassy,
unwinking, horrible.
* * * * *
A bubble or two, like globules of quicksilver, were detached from the
burnished skin of air that clothed him, and came glittering upward.
Suddenly there was a flash; a flurrying cloud of blue mud; and Grue was
gone.
* * * * *
After a long while I turned around in the muteness of my despair. And
slowly froze.
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