ld mean doom more certainly than
this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed.
The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of
white--for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was
surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up
through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that
his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond
recovery in this abyss.

The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the
dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the
shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was
jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force
of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on
his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not
think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath,
bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs.

His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and
his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish
eyes--like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State
University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye,
Betty ...

The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted
again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic
Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along
the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change,
seemed to wait....

* * * * *

"Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..."

The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated
accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch,
water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red
and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill.

"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..."

At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant
sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those
short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes
mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the
disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have
discovered something remarkable.

The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The
icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust f