the crater floor, out
through the cleft in the rocks and down the steep mountainside.

He was stunned by the suddenness of the catastrophe that had overtaken
them. The horror of Dean Rawson's going; the fearful reality of those
"devils from hell" that old Riley had seen--it was all too staggering,
too numbing, for easy acceptance. Time was required for the truth to
sink in; and through the balance of the night Smithy had plenty of
time to think.

He dared not go back to the camp where ripping flashes of green light
told him the enemy was at work. And then, even had it been possible to
creep up on them in the darkness, that one chance vanished as the
desert about the camp sprang into view. One after another the
buildings burst into flame, and Smithy was thankful for the
concealment of the vast, empty desert.

* * * * *

The embers were still glowing when he dared go near. This enemy, it
seemed, worked only at night, and Smithy waited only for the sun to
show above distant purple ranges. It had been their enemy once, that
fiercely hot sun; they had fought against the heat--but never had the
sun wrought such destruction as this.

Smithy looked from haggard, hopeless eyes upon the wreckage of
Rawson's camp. For the men who had worked there, this had meant only a
job; to Smithy it had been a fight against the desert which had
defeated him once. But to Rawson it meant the fruit of years of
effort, the goal of his dreams brought almost within his reach.

Smithy looked at the smoldering heaps of gray where an idle wind
puffed playfully at fluffy ash or fanned a bed of coals to flame.
Twisted steel of the wrecked derrick was still further distorted; the
enemy had ripped it to pieces with his stabbing flames. Even the
unused materials, the steel and cement that had been neatly stacked
for future use--the flames had been turned on it all.

And Smithy, though his voice broke almost boyishly from his repressed
emotion, spoke aloud in solemn promise:

"It's too late to help you, Dean. I'll go back to town, report to the
men who were back of you, and then.... They're going to pay, Dean!
Whoever--whatever--they are, they're going to pay!"

He turned away toward the mountains and the ribbon of road that wound
off toward the canyon. Then, at some recollection, he swung back.

"The cable's still down--he would have wanted it left all shipshape,"
he whispered.

Where the derrick had stood was t