152 THE ‘FIGHTER FROM FIGHTERSVILLE.’ 
why he tried to make out he was a bit broken 
off a dead twig while he made investigations. 
He knew, however, that it was a good many 
times larger than himself—he being less than 
an inch long—and that was why he had, as it 
were, cocked his tail, opened his jaws, and 
generally made himself look as ferocious a 
swashbuckler as possible, in case the other 
thing, whatever it was, did not take him for 
a bit of dead twig, after all. 
Next instant he recognised the thing in 
front of him as a common or garden slug, or 
two slugs, rather, one of which had added to 
its already manifold sins by turning cannibal. 
It might be imagined that a slug is not 
capable of expressing anything very much, 
and yet that slug, for all its size in comparison 
with the rove-beetle, had fear written all over it. 
Moreover, there was good reason. The beetle’s 
swashbuckling attitude was not all braggadocio. 
He rushed at the slug like a fury, rushed at 
it so quickly that the eye could scarcely follow 
the lightning-like manceuvre, any more than 
it could distinguish what followed. There 
was a mix up, that is all. The rove-beetle 
seemed literally to spring like a cat. Followed 
an interval of rolling, squirming muddle, which 
ended, as suddenly as it had begun, in the beetle, 
still cocking his tail defiantly, standing clear 
