ling one. Dick set his jaws grimly. He was thinking that the
Council had let Von Kettler escape. He was thinking of Fredegonde. But
he would not let himself think of her. She deserved no more pity than
the rest of the murderous crew.

Over the Carolinas the conditions were still more appalling. Here
deadly gas had struck with all its concentrated power. A city
materialized out of the blue distance, a factory town with all
chimneys spiring upward into the blue, a section of tall buildings
intersected by canyonlike streets, around it a rim of trim houses,
bungalows, indicative of prosperity and comfort. And it was a city of
the dead.

For everywhere around it, on all the roads, the dead lay piled on top
of one another. For miles--all the inhabitants, rich and poor,
business men, factory hands, negroes. There had been a mad rush as the
fatal gas drove onward upon its lethal way, and all the fugitives had
been overwhelmed simultaneously.

Here were golf links, with little groups strewn on the grass and
fairways; here, at one of the holes, four men, their putters still in
their hands, crouched in death. Here was the wreckage of a train that
had collided with a string of freight cars at an untended switch, and
from the shattered windows the heads and bodies of the dead protruded
in serried ranks.

Dick looked back. His flight was driving on behind him. He guessed
their feelings. They had sworn, as he had sworn, that none of them
would return without stamping out that abomination from the earth
forever.

* * * * *

He signaled to the flight to rise, and zoomed upward to twelve
thousand feet. He did not want to look upon any more of those horrors.
At that height, the peaceful landscape lay extended underneath, in a
checker-board of farms and woodlands. One could pretend that it was
all a vile dream.

He avoided Charleston, and winged out above the Atlantic, striking a
straight course along the coast toward the Bahamas. The shores of
Georgia vanished in the west. Dick began to breathe more freely. His
mind shook off its weight of horror. Only the blue sea and the blue
sky were visible The aftermath of the gale remained in the shape of a
strong head breeze and white crests below.

Dick glanced at the guinea-pigs. They were busily gnawing their
cabbage and carrots. The gas had evidently been entirely dissipated by
the wind.

Toward sunset the low jutting fore-land of Canaveral on the eas