ida had been released. Lying on the sand beside the dead ape-man, she
was looking up at him in stupefied wonder. And her other captor, instead
of remaining to fight, had clapped shaggy hands over his ears, and was
leaping headlong for the protection of the jungle!

Moreover, the soprano cries of the girls and the deep howls of the men
were rising everywhere, and everywhere the ape-men were dropping their
captives and plunging away after their leader.

"Huh," Kirby muttered aloud, and wondered what the citizens of Kansas
would have to say about _this_.

Naida looked at the dead and bleeding ape-man and shuddered, and then at
the score or so of others brought down by the puff balls. Then she
looked up at Kirby, raised her arms for his support, and smiled up into
his brown face.

Kirby forgot Kansas, lifted her, warm and alive, radiantly beautiful, in
his arms.

"Our friends the enemies," she whispered as she remained for a second in
his embrace and then drew away, "will attack no more this day--thanks to
you."

There was no possible need for another shot, Kirby saw. In terrified
silence, the first of the apes had already floundered behind the prickly
pear and aloe bushes, and the last stragglers were using all the power
in their legs to catch up. On the beach, Naida's followers were picking
themselves up, and already a few of them had burst into ringing
laughter.

"Come on, all of you," Naida said to them, and, including Kirby in her
glance, added, "We may as well go to the caciques now, and have it over
with."

CHAPTER IV

It was with Naida at his side and the other girls grouped about them,
that they started their journey to the "caciques," whoever they might
be, "to have it over with," whatever that might mean. As they strode
along in silence, Kirby did what he could to straighten out in his mind
the many curious things which had happened since he sat testing his rope
in the upper world this morning.

In final analysis, it seemed to him that, extraordinary as his
experience had been, there was nothing so much out of the way about it,
after all. The only unusual thing was the existence of this inhabited
pocket in the earth. For the rest, the strange colors to which he could
not put a name, were simply some manifestation of infra-reds and
ultra-violets. And then the startling effect of his single shot at the
ape-men--that was simply the old story of savage creatures running from
a new weapon and a new ene