his
comrades. For the moment the destruction of the grass became secondary
to the rescue of the trapped tankmen. If field headquarters had bustled
before, it now turned into a veritable beehive, with officers shouting,
exhorting, complaining, and men running backwards and forwards as though
there were no specific for the situation except unlimited quantities of
their own sweat.

_19._ It would be futile to relate, even if I could recall them, all the
various methods and devices which were suggested and rejected or tried
and proved failures in the attempt to rescue the tankdrivers. Press and
radio followed every daring essay and carefully planned endeavor until
the last vicarious quiver had been wrung from a fascinated public. For
twentyfour hours there was no room on the front pages of the newspapers
for anything but the latest on the "prisoners of the grass," as they
were at first called. Later, when hope for their rescue had diminished
and they were forced from the limelight to make way for later
developments, they were known simply as "heroes in the fight against the
weird enemy."

For the grass had not paused chivalrously during the interval. On the
contrary, it seemed to take renewed vigor from the victims it had
entombed. House after house, block after block were engulfed. The names
of those forced from their homes were no longer treated individually and
written up as separate stories, but listed in alphabetical order, like
battle casualties. Miss Francis, frantically trying to get all her
specimens and equipment moved from her kitchen in time, had been ousted
from the peeling stucco and joined those who were finding shelter (with
some difficulty) in other parts of the city.

The southernmost runners crept down toward Hollywood Boulevard where
every effort was being marshaled to combat them, and the northernmost
wandered around and seemingly lost themselves in the desert of sagebrush
and greasewood about Hollywood Bowl. Traffic through Cahuenga Pass, the
great artery between Los Angeles and its tributary valley, was
threatened with disruption.

But while the parent body was spreading out, its offspring, as Miss
Francis foresaw, had come into existence. Dozens of nuclei were
reported, some close at hand, others far away as the Sunset Strip and
Hollywoodland. These smaller bodies were vigorously attacked as soon as
discovered but of course they had in every case made progress too great
to be countered, for t