an debris piled on the
landing-stage, and upon these masses, too, the old men turned their
implements, until only a few heaps of charred carbon remained on the
landing-stage, impalpable as burned paper, and slowly rising in the
low atmospheric pressure until they drifted over the crater.

Nat had cried out in horror at the sight, and tried to tear himself
free from the grasp of the Moon dwarfs who held him. So had the rest.
Never was struggle so futile. Despite their short arms and legs, the
Moon dwarfs held them in an unshakable grip, chattering and squealing
as they compressed them against their barrel-like chests until the
breath was all but crushed out of their bodies.

"Devil!" cried Nat furiously, as Axelson came up to him. "Why don't
you kill us, too?" And he hurled furious taunts and abuse at him, in
the hope of goading him into making the same comparatively merciless
end of his prisoners.

Axelson looked at him calmly, but made no reply. He looked at Madge
again, and his features were convulsed with some emotion that gave him
the aspect of a fiend. And then only did Nat realize that it was Madge
who was responsible for the Black Caesar's madness.

Axelson spoke again, and the prisoners were hustled up the ladder and
on board the black vessel.

* * * * *

"The Kommandant-Kommissar will see you!" The door of their prison had
opened, letting in a shaft of light, and disclosing one of the
graybeards, who stood there, pointing at Nat.

"The--who?" Nat demanded.

"The Kommandant-Kommissar, Comrade Axelson," snarled the graybeard.

Nat knew what that strange jargon meant. He had read books about the
political sect known as Socialists who flourished in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries, and, indeed, were even yet not everywhere
extinct. And with that a flash of intuition explained the presence of
these old men on board.

These were the men who had been imprisoned in their youth, with
Axelson's father, and had escaped and made their way into space, and
had been supposed dead long since. Somewhere they must have survived.

And here they were, speaking a jargon of past generations, and
ignorant that the world had changed, relics of the past, dead as the
dead Moon from which the black ship was winging away through the
ether.

"Don't go, Captain," pleaded Madge. "Tell him we'll all go together."

Nat shook his head. "Maybe I'll be able to make terms with him," he
answered