dash of her particular brand of redheaded chaos like a man in a death chamber could do with a shiny new, cross-cut file. It was just as he had come to this decision that alien voices broke through the delicate wall of his quiet, introspective mood, and left it shattered beyond recall.

His head darted up, and his hand raked back a disordered shock of hair that had fallen over his brow. Thus uncovered, his eyes, two charred embers projected through the throbbing sheet of flame that was his face, strained upward, to the top of the cliff, in search of the noisy intruders. Usually no one ever came to this particular beach, except himself, and he had come to think of it as exclusively his own. But if he were preparing to relinquish his solitude to a band of vapid, would-be bathers, he was quite, quite mistaken, for much to the contrary, at the head of the crude board stairway leading down to the tiny beach, there stood two of the most unlikely homo sapiens he had ever seen. They looked like the culls of a dyspeptic nightmare.

The man was short, stocky, mostly bald, and at the moment, extremely animated. But the woman at his side was another matter entirely. Nearly six feet tall, an almost ghostly figure without a trace of color, she was a cruel and unconditional triumph of plainness. Worse than a horse of another color, she was a horse without any color at all. It was hard to believe that blood, rather than water—or perhaps acid—ran in her veins. She was listening intently to what the little man was saying, but there was something clearly argumentative in the inclination of her raw-boned, equine body.

"But I tell you he's done it!" the little man wailed.

"But I tell you," the woman trumpeted authoritatively, "It just isn't possible. The old fool couldn't! It won't work!"

"You'll see! You'll see!" the little man piped in a voice that was becoming increasingly mindful of an amusement pier calliope. "He's done it!"

And suddenly turning, he started down the rickety flight of steps as fast as his hammy little legs could carry him. He seemed almost to jitter along them as he sped downward, his bald pate glistening nervously in the bright afternoon sun. The faded woman, apparently still partially unconvinced, hung back for a moment, gazing icily after him. Then suddenly, with a for-better-or-worse but I bet it'll-be-worse shrug of her mammoth shoulders, she decided to follow. Awkwardly, like a runaway beer wagon, she began jolting down the steps, two at a time. The ancient board 

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