moment later he had rejoined the girl and hand in hand they were
following the dark corridor upstream toward the farther end of the
city. She told him that the Wieroos seldom frequented these lower
passages, as the air here was too chill for them; but occasionally they
came, and as they could see quite as well by night as by day, they
would be sure to discover Bradley and the girl.

"If they come close enough," she said, "we can see their eyes shining
in the dark--they resemble dull splotches of light. They glow, but do
not blaze like the eyes of the tiger or the lion."

The man could not but note the very evident horror with which she
mentioned the creatures. To him they were uncanny; but she had been
used to them for a year almost, and probably all her life she had
either seen or heard of them constantly.

"Why do you fear them so?" he asked. "It seems more than any ordinary
fear of the harm they can do you."

She tried to explain; but the nearest he could gather was that she
looked upon the Wieroo almost as supernatural beings. "There is a
legend current among my people that once the Wieroo were unlike us only
in that they possessed rudimentary wings. They lived in villages in
the Galu country, and while the two peoples often warred, they held no
hatred for one another. In those days each race came up from the
beginning and there was great rivalry as to which was the higher in the
scale of evolution. The Wieroo developed the first cos-ata-lu but they
were always male--never could they reproduce woman. Slowly they
commenced to develop certain attributes of the mind which, they
considered, placed them upon a still higher level and which gave them
many advantages over us, seeing which they thought only of mental
development--their minds became like stars and the rivers, moving
always in the same manner, never varying. They called this tas-ad,
which means doing everything the right way, or, in other words, the
Wieroo way. If foe or friend, right or wrong, stood in the way of
tas-ad, then it must be crushed.

"Soon the Galus and the lesser races of men came to hate and fear them.
It was then that the Wieroos decided to carry tas-ad into every part of
the world. They were very warlike and very numerous, although they had
long since adopted the policy of slaying all those among them whose
wings did not show advanced development.

"It took ages for all this to happen--very slowly came the different
change