arm, simple enough to know what to do. But now suddenly his emotion at this weird attack was only one of puzzled anger. He stooped swiftly, seized the tiny figure that was at his ankle. It screamed as his hand closed over it, a thin, high-pitched squeaking cry. But it was blood-curdling—so nearly human in its frenzied, agonized sound. As he raised it up, still it was screaming. A heavy little thing, heavy as though it were of metal. And it was solid, so solid that his squeezing fingers could have held a leaden figure.

For an instant Nixon held the screaming little thing up and stared at it; and the starlight showed him the contorted features of its tiny bluish face, its flailing arms. Then he flung it out over the bayou. There was a little splash. The screaming stopped as the figure sank like a stone. Now abruptly, the dazed incredulous astonishment of Nixon dropped from him, and a stab of fear came; fear and a surge of anger as he realized that this attack was reality. He staggered back from the rain of tiny missiles pelting him, and another flash of the tiny wheeled gun. The ground here was black now with the lunging, milling little shapes. His first backward step trod on two or three of them, mashed their solid, heavy little bodies into the soggy ground of the bayou bank.

As he staggered, there must have been a tree root that caught his heel. At the same instant, a pellet struck his eye; and as his arm flung up and he stumbled over the root, suddenly he fell backward to the soggy sand. It was enough for the alert little figures. Their cry of triumph sounded as they pounced upon him, swarming over him. A hundred? It could have been more. Scores of scrambling things. Perhaps, small though they were, each of them weighed a pound. A hundred pounds of treading steps and jabbing arms were in an instant upon the fallen Nixon. He felt himself really frightened now, a fear that he had never felt before, no matter what the antagonist, fear engendered by the strangeness of it, the unknown.

Nixon tried to get up, but the sheer weight of the swarming little adversaries seemed pinning him down. Now they were on his throat, on his face. Tiny things jabbed at his eyes, so that his hands flailed in a frenzy, plucking them away. But then there were others. He found himself rolling, mashing them. But he couldn't mash them, he could only shove them into the ground....

Damned persistent, wildly reckless little things. A sweep of his arm knock a dozen of them away. Some screamed. But always there were more.... Why didn't he get to his feet? Get up now! Knock them off! Get up! He 

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