there
are plenty more where they came from. And now that they've found their
way out, we've got a scrap on our hands. And don't think they're not
fighters, either. They're armed--those flame-throwers are nothing we
can laugh off, and what else they've got, we don't know."

He leaned forward earnestly across the Governor's desk. "But that's
your job," he said. "Mine is to find Dean Rawson. He's alive, or he
was. He sent up his ring as proof of it. I've got to find him--I've
got to go down in that pit and I want your help."

CHAPTER XI

_The White-Hot Pit_

How far his guard of wild, red man-things had taken him Dean Rawson
could not know. Many miles, it must have been. And he knew that the
air had grown steadily more stiflingly hot. But the heat of those long
tunneled passages was like a cool breeze compared with the blasting
breath of the room into which he was plunged.

It seared his eyeballs; it struck down from the tongues of flame that
played in red fury in the recess high up on the farther wall. And the
vast room, the fires, the hundreds of kneeling figures, all blurred
and swam dizzily before him.

The hot air that he breathed seemed crisping his lungs. Vaguely, for
the stupefying, brain-numbing heat, he wondered at the figure he saw
dimly in its grotesque posturing close to the flames. And the hundreds
of others--how could they live? How could he himself go on living in
this inferno?

They had been chanting in unison, the kneeling red ones. Dean heard
the regular beat of their repeated words change to an uproar of
shrill, whistling voices. But he could neither see nor hear plainly
for the unbearable, suffocating heat.

The clamor was deafening, confusing; it echoed tremendously in the
rocky room and mingled with the steady, continuous roar of the flames.
The mass of bodies that surged about him made only a blurring
impression; he tried to make himself see clearly. He must fight--fight
to the last! Only this thought persisted. He was striking out blindly
when he knew that his red guard had cleared a way through the mob and
was dragging him forward.

He knew when they reached the farther wall. Somewhere above him was
the deep-cut niche in which the fires roared. And then, when again he
could see from his tortured eyes, he found directly ahead another
doorway in the solid rock. Beyond it all was black; it gave promise of
coolness, of relief from the stifling air of the room. Red hands were
thru