rding. Our cage stopped and turned back. Tina located the
wreckage and stopped again.

We slid the door open. The outer air was deadly cold. The sun was a
huge dull-red ball hanging in the haze of a grey sky. The rocks were
grey-black, with the blood-light of the sun upon them.

Five hundred feet from us, by the shore of an oily, sullen sea, the
wreckage of Tugh's cage was piled in a heap. Near it, the crumpled
white figure of Mary lay on the rocks. And beside her, still with his
black cloak around him, crouched Tugh!

CHAPTER XXIII

_Diabolical Exile of Time!_

Tugh saw us as we stood in our cage doorway. His thick barrel-like
figure rose erect, and from his parted cloak his arms waved with a
wild gesture of defiance and triumph. He was clearly outlined in the
red sunlight against the surface of the sea behind. We saw in one of
his hands a ray cylinder--and then his arm came down and he fired at
us. It was the white, disintegrating ray.

We were stricken by surprise, and stood for that moment transfixed in
our doorway. Tugh's narrow, intensely white beam leaped over the
intervening rocks; but it fell short of us. I saw that it had a range
of about a hundred feet. Over the muffled heavy silence of the
blood-red day the cripple's curse floated clear. He lowered his
weapon; and, heedless that we also might be armed, he leaped nimbly
past Mary's prostrate form and came shambling over the rocks directly
for me!

It stung me into action, and for all the chaotic rush of these
desperate moments my heart surged with relief. Mary was not dead!
Beyond Tugh's oncoming figure, as he shambled like an infuriated
charging bear over the rough rocky ground, I saw the white form of
Mary move! She was striving to sit up!

I held my ray cylinder--the one I had rescued from Migul. But its
range was no more than twenty feet: I had tested it; and Tugh's beam
had flashed a full hundred! I whirled on Larry.

"Get away from here, you and Tina! You can't help me!"

"George, listen--"

"He's coming. Larry--you damn fool, get away from here! It goes a
hundred feet, that ray of his: it'll be raking us in a minute! Run, I
tell you! Get to that line of rocks!"

* * * * *

Close behind our cage was a small broken ridge of rocks--strewn
boulders in a tumbled line some ten or fifteen feet in height. It
would afford shelter: there were broken places to give passage through
it. The ridge curved crescent-sh