ndits' voices.

Then my strength came. The cold sweat on me was drying in the night
breeze that swept through the car as it climbed the winding ascent. I
could see through its side oval a vista of bloated Lowland crags with
moonlight on them.

It seemed that we should be nearly to the mine. We stopped. The men in
the car began climbing out.

De Boer's voice: "Is he conscious now? I'll take the girl."

Someone bent over me. "You hear me?"

"Yes," I said.

I found myself outside the car. They held me on my feet. Someone
gratuitously cuffed me, but De Boer's voice issued a sharp, low-toned
rebuke.

"Stop it! Get him and the girl aboard."

* * * * *

There seemed thirty or forty men gathered here. Silent dark figures in
black robes. The moonlight showed them, and occasionally one flashed a
hand search-beam. It was De Boer's main party gathered to attack the
mine.

I stood wavering on my feet. I was still weak and dizzy, with a lump
on the back of my head where I had been struck. The scene about me was
at first unfamiliar. We were in a rocky gully. Rounded broken walls.
Caves and crevices. Dried ooze piled like a ramp up one side. The
moonlight struggled down through a gathering mist overhead.

I saw, presently, where we were. Above the mine, not below it: and I
realized that the car had encircled the mine's cauldron and climbed
to a height beyond it. Down the small gully I could see where it
opened into the cauldron about a hundred feet below us. The lights of
the mine winked in the blurred moonlight shadows.

The bandits led me up the gully. The car was left standing against the
gully side where it had halted. De Boer, or one of his men, was
carrying Jetta.

The flyer was here. We came upon it suddenly around a bend in the
gully. Although I had only seen the nose if it earlier in the evening.
I recognized this to be the same. It was in truth a strange looking
flyer: I had never seen one quite like it. Barrel-winged, like a
Jantzen: multi-propellored: and with folding helicopters for the
vertical lifts and descent. And a great spreading fan-tail, in the
British fashion. It rested on the rocks like a fat-winged bird with
its long cylindrical body puffed out underneath. A seventy-foot cabin:
fifteen feet wide, possibly. A line of small window-portes; a circular
glassite front to the forward control-observatory cubby, with the
propellors just above it, and the pilot cubby up the