voice level.
"I hope so."

Tommy flung out his hands desperately.

"I want to help that man!" he cried savagely. "I want to do something!
I saw what they promised to do to him. I want to--to kill him, even!
It would be mercy!"

Smithers said, with a queer, stilly shock in his voice:

"I see the Professor now. He's got that gun-thing in his hand.... Miss
Evelyn's urging him to try to do something.... He's looking at the
sky.... It'll be a long time before it's dark.... He's gone back out
of sight...."

"If we had some dynamite!" said Tommy desperately, "we could take a
chance on blowing ourselves to bits and try to fling it through and
into the middle of those devils...."

* * * * *

He was pacing up and down the laboratory, harrowed by the fate of that
gray-faced man who awaited death by torture; filled with a wild terror
that Evelyn and her father would try to rescue him and be caught to
share his fate; racked by his utter impotence to do more than
watch....

Then Smithers said thickly:

"God!"

He stumbled away from the eye-piece. Tommy took his place,
dry-throated with terror. He saw the Ragged Men laughing uproariously.
The bearded man who was their leader was breaking the arms and legs of
the prisoner so that he would be helpless when released from the stake
to which he was bound. And if ever human beings looked like devils out
of hell, it was at that moment. The method of breaking the bones was
excruciating. The prisoner screamed. The Ragged Men rolled upon the
ground in their maniacal mirth.

And then a man dropped, heaving convulsively, and then another, and
still another.... The grim, gaunt figure of Denham came out of the
tree-fern forest, the queer small golden-metal trunchion in his hand.
A fourth man dropped before the Ragged Men quite realized what had
happened. The fourth man himself was armed--and a flashing slender
body came plunging from the forest and Evelyn flung herself upon the
still-heaving body and plucked away that weapon.

* * * * *

Tommy groaned, in the laboratory in another world. He could not look
away, and yet it seemed that the heart would be torn from his body by
that sight. Because the Ragged Men had turned upon Denham with a
concentrated ferocity, somehow knowing instantly that he was more
nearly akin to the men of the Golden City than to them. But at sight
of Evelyn, her garments rent by the thorns of th