THE LITTLE MONSTERS COME

By RAY CUMMINGS

Desperately seeking escape from their own tortured chunk of hell, they needed a specimen from this great and gracious world they planned to steal. But swamp-roving, 'gator-fighting Allen Nixon wasn't the type to be cut up alive!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

There was absolutely nothing wrong or weird about the Florida Everglades at night. At least, not to Allen Nixon. He sat alone in the stern of a flat-bottomed rowboat paddling calmly, albeit soundlessly, with one small oar. The moon was down and the tall old pines were so many black rips and tears in the star-studded gown of the sky. The stars themselves dropped their fiery pin-points in the glassy surface of the winding bayou. The tangled banks, where sometimes the cypress branches dipped heavy and sodden into the water, were shadowed blurs so that the bayou was a twisted ribbon between them.

Nothing strange. Nothing unusual. Certainly not to Allen Nixon. Twenty-four years ago he had been born here, only a score or so miles north at the fringes of the great swamp, where a little Seminole village stood beside a bayou just like this. There his white father had loved and married his Indian mother; there he had lived and gone to the Mission School and then, in his 'teens, to the High School up in Jacksonville. Now he and his younger brother Ralph, with their parents dead, were running a small farm their father had left them. It was back at the mouth of the bayou, where the Gulf lapped in the starlight on the sandspits, and the tangled wire-grass was alive at night with the croaking of the marsh-hens. Ralph had not wanted to come out tonight. He was tired, perhaps lazy. He said he would have the four 'gators skinned by the time Allen got back at midnight; and he'd help with whatever others Allen brought in. Perhaps he would, but more likely he wouldn't.

So Allen Nixon, with the moon down, was paddling up into the silent twistings of the bayou alone. He was a tall, lean fellow, lanky like his father, with muscles hardened by a lifetime of the work of the backwoods. He was bareheaded; his sleek, straight, dead-black hair glistened in the starlight. His grey flannel shirt was open at a muscular throat. He sat erect, with his legs, clad in dark trousers and worn leather puttees, stretched out to the shotgun, knife and hatchet that 

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