round. They solidified and dropped to
earth, with their comrades gathering over them. The babble of voices
in a strange tongue reached us. New arrivals materializing!

But was Jane here? And Tako, the giant? We had seen nothing of
either of them. These men seemed all undersized rather than
gigantic. We were about to start around the corner of the veranda
for a closer view of the figures in the grove, when a sound near at
hand froze us. A murmur of voices! Men within the house!

* * * * *

I pulled Don flat to the ground against the stone steps of the
porch. We heard voices; then footsteps. A little green glow of light
appeared. We could see over the porch floor into the black yawning
door rectangle. Two men were moving around in the lower front room,
and the radiation from their green lights showed them plainly. They
were small fellows in white, tight-fitting garments, with the black
helmet and the looped wires.

"Don, when they come out--" I murmured it against his ear. "If we
could strike them down without raising an alarm, and get those
suits--"

"Quiet! They're coming!"

They extinguished their light. They came down the front steps, and
as they reached the ground and turned aside Don and I rose up in the
shadows and struck at them desperately with the handles of our
revolvers. Don's man fell silently. Mine was able to ward off the
blow; he whirled and flashed on his little light. But the beam
missed me as I bent under it and seized him around the middle,
reaching up with a hand for his mouth. Then Don came at us, and
under his silent blow my antagonist wilted.

We had made only a slight noise; there seemed no alarm.

"Get them into the house," Don murmured. "Inside; someone may come
any minute."

We dragged them into the dark and littered lower room. We still had
our revolvers, and now I had the small hand-projector of the green
light-beam. It was a strangely weightless little cylinder, with a
firing mechanism which I had no idea how to operate.

In a moment we had stripped our unconscious captives of their white
woven garments. In the darkness we were hopelessly ruining the
mechanism of wires and dials. But we did not know how to operate the
mechanism in any event; and our plan was only to garb ourselves like
the enemy. Thus disguised, with the helmets on our heads, we could
get closer, creep among them and perhaps find Jane....

The woven garments which I had thought m