ose tunnels. I
got suspicious when I found a hut at the Sharkey place with no windows
in it."

"Say, remember the time Sinclair barked at me for going near that shack
on his place when we first arrived?" said Roger.

Connel grinned. "I'll bet you a plugged credit that if you had opened
that door you'd have been frozen stiffer than a snowman on Pluto."

"Well, anyhow," said Tom happily, "we got what we came after."

"What was that?" asked Strong.

"A tyrannosaurus!" replied the curly-haired cadet.

"And that's another thing," said Connel. "That tyrannosaurus we killed
was a pet of the Nationalists. I don't mean a household pet, but it
fitted into their plans nicely. The tyranno's lair was near the top of
that canyon. Any time a stray hunter came along, the tyrannosaurus would
scare him away. So when you three came along and said you were
deliberately hunting for a tyrannosaurus, they got worried."

"Worried?" asked Roger. "Why?"

"They thought you were actually hunting or investigating them, and when
I started nosing around, they were sure. That's why Sinclair ordered his
boys to burn down his plantation--to try to throw us off the track. So
you see," Connel concluded, "your summer leave really started the ball
rolling against them."

"Summer leave!" shouted Roger. "What day is it?"

"The twenty-ninth of August," replied Strong.

"Oh, no!" moaned the blond-haired cadet. "We start back to class in
three days!"

"Three days!" roared Astro. "But--but it'll take three days to write up
our reports of everything that's happened! We won't have any time for
fun!"

"Fun!" snorted Connel. "Fun is for little boys. You three space-brained,
rocket-headed idiots are spacemen!"

[Illustration]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| Transcriber's Note |
| |
| One instance of "nearby" was changed to "near-by" to conform |
| with the hyphenation in the rest of the text. |
| |
| The following typos were corrected: |
| |
| Get "Get |
| it It