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put that coffee you sent to me
on the table. And his eyes shine in the dark."
    By this time Montgomery had recovered from the surprise of my question.
"I always thought," he said deliberately, with a certain
accentuation of his flavouring of lisp, "that there
was
something
the matter with his ears, from the way he covered them.
What were they like?"
    I was persuaded from his manner that this ignorance was a pretence.
Still, I could hardly tell the man that I thought him a liar.
"Pointed," I said; "rather small and furry,—distinctly furry.
But the whole man is one of the strangest beings I ever set
eyes on."
    A sharp, hoarse cry of animal pain came from the enclosure behind us.
Its depth and volume testified to the puma. I saw Montgomery wince.
    "Yes?" he said.
    "Where did you pick up the creature?"
    "San Francisco. He's an ugly brute, I admit. Half-witted, you know.
Can't remember where he came from. But I'm used to him, you know.
We both are. How does he strike you?"
    "He's unnatural," I said. "There's something about him—don't
think me fanciful, but it gives me a nasty little sensation,
a tightening of my muscles, when he comes near me. It's a touch—of
the diabolical, in fact."
    Montgomery had stopped eating while I told him this. "Rum!" he said.
"I can't see it." He resumed his meal. "I had no idea of it,"
he said, and masticated. "The crew of the schooner must have
felt it the same. Made a dead set at the poor devil. You saw
the captain?"
    Suddenly the puma howled again, this time more painfully.
Montgomery swore under his breath. I had half a mind to attack him
about the men on the beach. Then the poor brute within gave vent
to a series of short, sharp cries.
    "Your men on the beach," said I; "what race are they?"
    "Excellent fellows, aren't they?" said he, absentmindedly,
knitting his brows as the animal yelled out sharply.
    I said no more. There was another outcry worse than the former.
He looked at me with his dull grey eyes, and then took some
more whiskey. He tried to draw me into a discussion about alcohol,
professing to have saved my life with it. He seemed anxious
to lay stress on the fact that I owed my life to him. I answered
him distractedly.
    Presently our meal came to an end; the misshapen monster with
the pointed ears cleared the remains away, and Montgomery left
me alone in the room again. All the time he had been in a state
of ill-concealed irritation at the noise of the vivisected puma.
He had spoken of his odd want of nerve, and left me to the
obvious application.
    I found myself that the cries were singularly irritating,
and they grew in depth and intensity as the afternoon wore on.
They were painful at first, but their constant resurgence at last
altogether upset my balance. I flung aside a crib of Horace I
had been reading, and began to clench my fists, to bite my lips,
and to pace the room. Presently I got to stopping my ears with
my fingers.
    The emotional appeal of those yells grew upon me steadily,
grew at last to such an exquisite expression of suffering that I
could stand it in that confined room no longer. I stepped
out of the door into the slumberous heat of the late afternoon,
and walking past the main entrance—locked again, I noticed—turned
the corner of the wall.
    The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain
in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in
the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I
could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice
and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.
But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees
waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion,
blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot
of the house in the chequered wall.

IX - The Thing in the Forest
*
    I STRODE through the undergrowth that clothed the ridge behind the house,
scarcely heeding whither I went;