But the beast never moved.
He was suspicious of the wily one, however.

The devil, he knew, was sometimes busiest when he made least show of business.

And it was not till next morning, when he found the monster still as before, that he ventured down to the pool and looked into it, and saw what had happened.
The waves had hurled a huge boulder into it--and there you may see it to this day--and it had fallen on the devil-fish and ground him flat, and purged the rock of a horror.
Gard examined the hideous tentacles with the curiosity of intensest repulsion; yet could not but stand amazed at the wonderful delicacy and finish displayed in the tiny powerful suckers with which each limb was furnished on the under side, and the flexible muscularity of the monstrous limbs themselves, thick as his biceps where they came out of the pool, and tapering to a worm-like point, capable, it seemed to him, of picking up a pin.
He was mightily glad the beast was dead, however.

It had been a blot on Nature's handiwork, and the very thought of it a horror.
The strenuous interlude of the storm, which, to the lonely one exposed to its fullest fury, had seemed interminable--every shivering day the length of many, and the black howling nights longer still--had had the effect of relaxing somewhat his own oversight over himself and his precautions against being seen.
L'Etat in a furious sou'-wester is a sight worth seeing.

Possibly some telescope had been brought to bear on the foam-swept rock when he, secure in the general bouleversement and cramped with hunger, had turned the forbidden corner with no thought in his mind but eggs.
Possibly again, it was sheer carelessness on his part, born once more of the security of the storm and the recent non-necessity for concealment.
However it came about, what happened was that, as he stood in the valley of rocks examining his dead monster, he became suddenly aware that a fishing-boat had crept round the open end of the valley, and that it seemed to him much closer in than he had ever seen one before.
He dropped prone among the boulders at once, but whether he had been seen he could not tell--could only vituperate his own carelessness, and hope that nothing worse might come of it.
He lay there a very long time, and when at last he ventured to crawl to the rocks at the seaward opening, the boat was away on the usual fishing-grounds busy with its own concerns, and he persuaded himself that its somewhat unusual course had been accidental.