r. Tommy
heard Smithers stir suddenly, almost as if he had jumped. Then there
were scrapings which could only mean one thing: Smithers was climbing
out of the Tube into the jungle of the Fifth-Dimension world.

The noise rose abruptly to a roar as the muffling effect of Smithers'
body was removed. The yells were sharp and savage and half mad. There
was a sudden crackling sound and a voice screamed:

"_Gott!_"

The hair rose at the back of Tommy's neck. Then there came the
deafening report of an automatic pistol roaring itself empty above the
end of the Tube. Smithers' voice, vastly calm:

"It's a'right, Mr. Reames. Don't worry."

A second pistol took up the fusillade. Yells and howls and screams
arose. Men fled. Something came crashing to the mouth of the Tube.
Smithers' voice again, with purring note in it: "Get down there. I'll
hold 'em off." Then single deliberately spaced shots, while something
came stumbling, fumbling, squirming down through the Tube, so filling
it that Smithers' shooting was muted.

* * * * *

Then came the subtly different explosions of the Very pistols,
discharging gas bombs. And Tommy drew back, his jaw set, and he stood
with his weapons very ready indeed, and a scratched, bleeding,
exhausted, panting, terror-stricken human being in the tattered
costume of Earth crawled from the Tube and groveled on the floor
before him.

Evelyn gave a little exclamation, partly of disgust and partly of
horror. Because this man, who had had come from the world of the Fifth
Dimension, was wholly familiar. He was tall, and he was lean,
emaciated now; he wept sobbingly behind thick-lensed spectacles, and
his lips were far too full and red. His name was Von Holtz; he had
once been laboratory assistant to Professor Denham, and he had
betrayed Evelyn and her father to the most ghastly of possible fates
for a bribe offered him by Jacaro. Now he groveled. He was horrible to
look at. Where he was not scratched and torn his flesh was reddened as
if by fire. He was exhausted, and trembling with an awful terror, and
he gasped out abject, placatory ejaculations and suddenly collapsed
into a sobbing mass on the floor.

Smithers emerged from the Tube with a look of unpleasant satisfaction
on his face.

"I chased off the Ragged Men with sneeze gas," he observed with a vast
calmness. "They ain't comin' back for a while. An' I always wanted to
break this guy's neck. I think I'll do it