"Quick! We must not meet them here!" And then-- "Holy St.Brigid!" gasped Larry.
From the rift in the tunnel's continuation, nigh a mile beyond the cleft through which we had fled, lifted a crown of horns--of tentacles--erect, alert, of mottled gold and crimson; lifted higher--and from a monstrous scarlet head beneath them blazed two enormous, obloid eyes, their depths wells of purplish phosphorescence; higher still--noseless, earless, chinless; a livid, worm mouth from which a slender scarlet tongue leaped like playing flames! Slowly it rose--its mighty neck cuirassed with gold and scarlet scales from whose polished surfaces the amber light glinted like flakes of fire; and under this neck shimmered something like a palely luminous silvery shield, guarding it.

The head of horror mounted--and in the shield's centre, full ten feet across, glowing, flickering, shining out--coldly, was a rose of white flame, a "flower of cold fire" even as Rador had said.
Now swiftly the Thing upreared, standing like a scaled tower a hundred feet above the rift, its eyes scanning that movement I had seen along the course of its lair.

There was a hissing; the crown of horns fell, whipped and writhed like the tentacles of an octopus; the towering length dropped back.
"Quick!" gasped Rador and through the fern moss, along the path and down the other side of the steep we raced.
Behind us for an instant there was a rushing as of a torrent; a far-away, faint, agonized screaming--silence! "No fear _now_ from those who followed," whispered the green dwarf, pausing.
"Sainted St.Patrick!" O'Keefe gazed ruminatively at his automatic.
"An' he expected me to kill _that_ with this.

Well, as Fergus O'Connor said when they sent him out to slaughter a wild bull with a potato knife: 'Ye'll niver rayilize how I appreciate the confidence ye show in me!' "What was it, Doc ?" he asked.
"The dragon worm!" Rador said.
"It was Helvede Orm--the hell worm!" groaned Olaf.
"There you go again--" blazed Larry; but the green dwarf was hurrying down the path and swiftly we followed, Larry muttering, Olaf mumbling, behind me.
The green dwarf was signalling us for caution.

He pointed through a break in a grove of fifty-foot cedar mosses--we were skirting the glassy road! Scanning it we found no trace of Lugur and wondered whether he too had seen the worm and had fled.