ir nerve. All day long they
remained safely in the ship and kept their guns trained on the lake
hoping that the beast would show himself. How or when it had left the
lake they could not surmise, but that it was more formidable than they
had thought now seemed certain, and Omega concluded to bring science to
his aid. In this way he was sure that he would soon exterminate the
monster.

So the next day he lay a cable carrying a high voltage all around the
lake and connected it with traps of various designs both in the water
and on the land. No more would they risk their lives hunting the beast
in the open after nightfall.

The hot, still days that followed were anxious ones for these last
children of life. Not a trap was sprung. The beast did not drag his
slimy body and tail across the heavily charged cable. The last of his
kind, fighting the last battle of existence, it seemed that nature had
endowed him with uncanny cunning. There was the life-giving water for
whose possession no human kind challenged them, but this enemy was more
terrible than any man, savage or civilized whom the earth had ever
known.

* * * * *

During these anxious, watchful days Omega and Thalma went often to the
Mirror and gazed into it in search of vapor clouds. And more than once
those gossamer-like formations appeared over different parts of the
world to gladden their hearts only to fade away before their vision. The
reflections of those embryo clouds became less frequent as the days wore
on. Omega and Thalma knew that they had no right to hope for the return
of water vapor. Their instruments, so finely attuned as to appear
endowed with intelligence, the records of the past and their own common
sense told them that. But nature and life in the upper reaches of the
air were dying as hard as their own hope. They knew that the aerial
manifestations they witnessed were but symptoms of the death struggle.
And yet a real cloud, dark and pregnant with moisture, suddenly appeared
in the Mirror. Consulting the chart they saw that it was hovering over a
great land of plain and mountains which formerly had been a part of the
United States of America.

"We will go and examine this gift from heaven," said Omega. "It moves
over a once beautiful land, which the voices of history tell us,
harbored a race of the free millions of years ago."

"Yes, we will go," agreed Thalma. "It may be after all that Alpha will
first see the