s the metal melted and failed, and the wild outward swing in
the beginning of the toppling fall. In the mind of Dean Rawson was but
one thought: the sights--and a something blurred beyond--a trigger to
be pressed.

He was still firing when the shriek of torn steel went to thundering
silence, and even the lights of Tonah Basin Camp were swallowed up in
the whirling night....

CHAPTER VI

_Into the Crater_

Smithy's agonized face was above him when he came back to life. "God!"
Smithy was breathing. "I thought you were gone, Dean! I thought you
were dead!"

As it had been with Riley, there was one thought uppermost in Rawson's
bewildered mind: "The fire!" he choked. "He's swinging it...."

Then, after a time: "The derrick--it's falling! I went down with
it!... I hit--"

"I'll say you did," said the relieved Smithy. "The derrick smashed
across the bunkhouse, snapped you off, sent you skidding down the side
of a sand dune. It darned near scoured the clothes off you at that."

Slowly Rawson began to feel the return flow of life through his body;
the shock had jarred every nerve to insensibility. Slowly he
remembered and comprehended what had happened.

He was in his little office; he recognized his surroundings now. The
windows were open. Outside the sun was shining. He realized at last
the utter silence of that outer world.

He tried to raise himself from the cot, but fell back as his
surroundings began to spin. "The camp!" he gasped weakly. "The men--I
don't hear them."

"Gone!" Smith told him, while his eyes narrowed at some recollection
and his hand came up unconsciously to a bruise of his cheek. "They
beat it--went last night after the derrick fell. I tried to stop them.
The fools were crazy with fear--devils, hell, all that kind of stuff.
It all wound up in a fight--I couldn't hold 'em.

"You've got to get better kind of fast," he told Rawson. "We've got to
get out of here ourselves--that flame-throwing stuff is too strong for
me to take."

Rawson suddenly remembered the vague figure that had directed that
flame. "Did I get him?" he demanded eagerly.

"You got him, yes, but then a whole swarm of things boiled up out of
nowhere and carried him off! We weren't any of us close enough to
see. The men said they were devils; I'm not sure they were wrong,
either. Dean, old man, we're up against something rotten. We've got to
get fixed for a fight; we can't handle this by ourselves."

*