of a prospector.

The prospector was still there, his rigid figure wrapped in a blanket,
and his wide-open eyes staring sightlessly at the malignant green moon
in the sky above. Dixon knelt to examine the stricken man's body. It
showed the same mysterious condition as that of the quail, rigidly
stiff in every muscle, yet with the slow pulse and respiration of life
still faintly present.

* * * * *

Dixon found the prospector's horse and burro sprawled on the ground
half a dozen yards away, both animals frozen in the same baffling
condition of living death. Dixon's brain reeled as he tried to fathom
the incredible calamity that had apparently overwhelmed the world
while he had been hidden away in his subterranean laboratory. Then a
new and terrible thought assailed him.

If the grim effect of the baleful green rays was universal in its
extent, what then of old Emil Crawford and his niece, Ruth Lawton?
Crawford, an inventor like Dixon, had his laboratory in a valley some
five miles away.

An abrupt chill went over Dixon's heart at the thought of Ruth
Lawton's vivid Titian-haired beauty being forever stilled in the grip
of that eery living death. He and Ruth had loved each other ever
since they had first met.

Dixon broke into a run as he headed for a nearby ridge that looked out
over the valley. His pulse hammered with unusual violence as he
scrambled up the steep incline, and his muscles seemed to be tiring
with strange rapidity. He had a vague feeling that the rays of that
malignant green moon were beating directly into his brain, clouding
his thoughts and draining his physical strength.

Gaining the crest of the ridge, he stopped aghast as he looked down
the valley toward Emil Crawford's place. Near the site of Crawford's
laboratory home was an unearthly pyrotechnic display such as Dixon had
never seen before. An area several hundred yards in diameter seemed
one vivid welter of pulsing colors, with flashing lances of every hue
crisscrossing in and through a great central cloud of ever-changing
opalescence like a fiery aurora borealis gone mad.

* * * * *

Dixon fought back the ever-increasing lethargy that was benumbing his
brain, and groped dazedly for a key to this new riddle. Was it some
weird and colossal experiment of Emil Crawford's that was causing the
green rays of death from a transformed moon, an experiment the earthly
base of which was