d message, and the faint night
noises served but to intensify the silence of the mountain. It was
some time before the grind of straining gears came faintly in the air
to announce the coming of a car up the long grade. And still later he
heard it come to a stop some distance beyond. There were footsteps,
and voices calling: he heard the voice of Colonel Boynton. And he was
able to call out in reply, even to move his head and turn it to see
the approaching figures in the night.

Colonel Boynton knelt beside him. "Did they get you, old man?" he
asked.

"Almost," Blake told him. "My oxygen--I was lucky. But the others--".
He did not need to complete the sentence. The silent canyons among
those wooded hills told plainly the story of the lost men.

"We will fight them with gas masks," said the colonel; "your
experience has taught us the way."

"Gas-tight uniforms and our own supplies of oxygen," Blake
supplemented. He told Boynton of the man-things he had seen come from
the ship, of their baggy suits, their helmets.... And he had seen a
small generator on the back of each helmet. He told him of the small,
shining weapons and their powerful jets of gas. Deadly and unescapable
at short range, he well knew.

"They got McGuire," Blake concluded; "carried him off a prisoner. Took
another man, too."

For a moment Colonel Boynton's quiet tones lost their even steadiness.
"We'll get them," he said savagely, and it was plain that it was the
invaders that filled his mind; "we'll go after them, and we'll get
them in spite of their damn gas, and we'll rip their big ship into
ribbons--"

Captain Blake was able to raise a dissenting hand. "We will have to go
where they are, Colonel, to do that."

Colonel Boynton stared at him. "Well?" he demanded. "Why not?"

"We can't go where _they_ went," said Blake simply. "I laughed at
McGuire; told him not to be a fool. But I was the fool--the blind one;
we all were, Colonel. That thing came here out of space. It has gone
back; it is far beyond our air. I saw it go up out of sight, and I
know. Those creatures were men, if you like, but no men that we
know--not those shrieking, wailing devils! And we're going to hear
more from them, now that they've found their way here!"

CHAPTER VI

A score of bodies where men had died in strangling fumes in the
observatories on Mount Lawson; one of the country's leading
astronomical scientists vanished utterly; the buildings on the
mountain top r