. Again they
felt the poignantly exaggerated, express-elevator feeling, till the
plateau finally came to rest.

The crashing thunder of Matt's voice came to them, words utterly
indistinguishable. The saucer was tipped sideways....

Doubtless Matt thought he was acting with extreme gentleness; but in
fact the dish was tilted so quickly and so without warning that Jim and
Dennis slid from its center, head over heels, to fall over the edge and
land with a bump on the ground. Their spears, sliding after, narrowly
missed impaling them.

Once more came the distant crashing of Matt's voice. Then there was
silence. Their gigantic protector, having dumped them unceremoniously
into the grass of Morton's Grove, had ushered them squarely into the
start of their insane adventure. From now on their fate belonged to them
alone.

CHAPTER IV

_The Raid_

Bewilderedly, they looked around them.

Ahead of them, barely to be seen for the trunks of giant trees
intervening, was a smoothly-rounded mountain. Majestic and aloof it
soared, dwarfing all near it--the termitary which, yesterday, had been
but waist-high. There was their eventual goal; but meanwhile their
immediate surroundings roused their greater interest--and all their
alertness!

When Dennis had said they would find a common grass plot a wild and
exotic jungle, he had spoken perhaps more truly than he knew. At any
rate, the jungle they now found themselves in was something to exceed
man's wildest dreams.

Far over their heads towered a wilderness of trees. But such trees!
Without branches, shooting up and over in graceful, tangling curves,
their trunks oddly flat and ribbonlike and yellow-green. It was
impossible to look on them as grass stems.

Here and there the trees had fallen, presenting a tangled wilderness of
leathery, five-foot-wide strips. Webs of roots, tough and gnarled,
whitish in color, curled in all directions to catch the feet and baffle
the eye. It was an appalling underbrush. And it was an underbrush,
moreover, in which there was plenty of wild life!

A hairy, pulpy thing, reddish in color, with gauzy wings and a myriad
flashing eyes scuttled close to them as though drawn by curiosity to
inspect them. As big as an eagle it appeared to them; both grasped their
spears; but soon, with a wild whistle of its wings, it rose up through
the tangle of underbrush and hummed off. A fruit fly.

* * * * *

And now a mon