for their flight. They had spent many
hours in arrow making: there were bundles of them stored away in
readiness for an attack, and Chet looked at them with regret, but knew
they must travel fast and light.

Out of his rocky "laboratory" Kreiss came at dusk to tramp slowly and
moodily down to the shelters.

"I shall leave when you do," he told Chet. "Perhaps we can find some
place, some corner of this world, where we can live in peace. But I had
hoped, I had thought--"

"Yes?" Chet queried. "What did you have on your mind?"

"The gas," the scientist replied. "I was working with a rubber latex. I
had thought to make a mask, improvise an air-pump and send one of us
through the green gas to reach the ship. And there was more that I hoped
to do; but, as you say, my work is ended."

"Bully for you," said Chet admiringly; "the old bean keeps right on
working all the time. Well, you may do it yet; we may come back to the
ship. Who can tell? But just now I am more anxious about Towahg. Right
now, when we need him the most, he fails to show up."

The ape-man was seldom seen by day, but always he came back before
nightfall; his chunky figure was a familiar sight as he slipped
soundlessly from the jungle where the shadows of approaching night lay
first. But now Chet watched in vain at the arched entrance to the leafy
tangle. He even ventured, after dark, within the jungle's edge and
called and hallooed without response. And this night the hours dragged
by where Chet lay awake, watching and listening for some sign of their
guide.

* * * * *

Then dawn, and golden arrows of light that drove the morning mist in
lazy whirls above the surface of the lake. But no silent shadow-form
came from among the distant trees. And without Towahg--!

"Might as well stay here and take it standing," was Chet's verdict, and
Harkness nodded assent.

"Not a chance," he agreed. "We might make our way through the forest
after a fashion, but we would be slow doing it, and the brutes would be
after us, of course."

They made all possible preparations to withstand a siege. Chet, after a
careful, listening reconnaissance, went into the jungle with bow and
arrows, and he came back with three of the beasts he had called
Moon-pigs. Other trips, with Kreiss as an assistant, resulted in a great
heap of fruit that they placed carefully in the shade of a hut. Water
they had in unlimited supply.

How they would stand of