he machine in the air was coming nearer, the roar of its
twin engines beating on the stillness of the Labrador night. In despair
Bennie threw himself flat on his face by the brush pile and made a tent
of the blanket, under which he at last succeeded in starting a blaze
among the oil-soaked twigs. Then he pushed the half-empty keg into the
fire, arose and stared up at the sky.

The machine was somewhere directly above him--just where he could not
say. Presently the motors stopped. He shouted feebly, running up and
down with his eyes turned skyward, and several times nearly fell into
the fire. He wondered why it didn't appear. It seemed hours since the
motors stopped! Then unexpectedly against the black background of the
sky the great wings of the machine appeared, illuminated on their
underside by the light of the fire. Silently it swung around on its
descending spiral, instantly to be swallowed up in the darkness again, a
moment later reappearing from the opposite direction, this time low down
and headed straight for him. He jumped hastily to one side and fell
flat. The machine grounded, rose once or twice as it ran along the
ground, and came to a stop twenty yards from the fire. A man climbed
out, slowly removed his goggles, and shook himself. Bennie scrambled to
his feet and ran forward waving his hat.

"Well, Hooker!" remarked the man. "What th' hell are you doing _here_?
You sure have some searchlight!"

* * * * *

How Hooker and Burke, under the guidance of Atterbury, who gradually
regained his normal mental status, explored and charted the valley of
the Ring is strictly no part of this tale which deals solely with the
end of War upon the Earth. But next day, after several hours of
excavation among the debris of the smelter, where Pax had extracted his
uranium from the pitch blend mined at the cliff, they uncovered eight
cylinders of the precious metal weighing about one hundred pounds
apiece--the fuel of the Flying Ring. Now they were safe. Nay, more:
universal space was theirs to traffic in.

Curious as to the reason why Pax had isolated himself in this frozen
wilderness, they next examined the high cliffs which shut in the valley
on the west and against the almost perpendicular walls of which he had
played the Lavender Ray. These cliffs proved, as Bennie had already
suspected, to be a gigantic outcrop of pitchblende or black oxide of
uranium. He estimated that nature had store