Author Description

Without an instant's hesitation Juliet Moore scrambles up the steep incline, climbing swiftly enough to cut off the landward line of retreat for her mysterious assailant. Whoever had cast those stones at her -- well, she will give him a fright, at very least Then she stops sharply, for suddenly there rises before her a figure so strange that for a moment she feels like a scared child. It springs from the bushes and stands facing her like an animal at bay -- a short creature neither man nor boy... misshapen, grotesquely humped, possessing long thin arms of almost baboon-like proportions. The head, sunken into the shoulders, is flung back with the face upraised -- and it is the face that makes her pause, for it is the most pathetic sight she has ever looked upon. It is the face of a lad of two or three and twenty -- but drawn in lines so painful, so hollowed, so piteous, that her fear melts into compassion at the sight.