ck to the restaurant and found Jane still there with the
Blakinsons. Ten minutes later we were all in the Government House,
receiving the most authentic reports available.

From the windows of the second floor room where Mr. Dorrance sat
with a number of the officials, Don, Jane, and I could see across
the harbor and to the ridge where the enemy was operating. It was
not much over two miles from us. The huge, slightly flattened moon
had risen. The bay and the distant little hills were flooded with
its light. We could see, off on the ridge-top, the tiny flashing
green beams. But there was no sound save the turmoil of the excited
little city around us.

"They don't seem to be moving," Don murmured. "They're right where
they were first reported."

It seemed as though the small group of light-beams, darting back and
forth, nevertheless originated from one unshifting place. The beams,
we realized, must be extremely intense to be visible even these two
miles or so, for we could see that they were very small and of very
short range--more like a hand-flashlight than anything else. How
many of the enemy were there? They were men, we understood: solid,
human men garbed in the fashion of the apparitions which had been so
widely seen.

The patrolling airplane, connected with us here by wireless
telephone, gave us further details. There seemed to be some fifty of
the invaders. They stood in a group in what had been a small cedar
grove. It was a barren field now; the trees had melted and vanished
before the silent blasts of the green light-beams. They had, these
beams, seemingly a range of under a hundred feet. The invaders had,
at first, run with them along the nearby roads and attacked the
nearest houses. Part of those houses were still standing, save for
the wooden portion of them which had vanished into nothingness as
the green light touched it. The people, too, were annihilated. The
airplane pilot had seen a man running near the field trying to
escape. The light touched him, clung to him for a moment. There was
an instant as he fell that he seemed melting into a ghostly figure;
and then he was gone.

* * * * *

Fifty invaders. But they were human; they could be attacked. When
they first appeared, the nature of them still unrealized, a
physician's automobile, manned by three soldiers, had been coming
along the bay road at the foot of the ridge. The soldiers turned it
into a cross road and m