day, the other on the fourth. He
had one ankle loose on the morning of the sixth day. But as evening
came on, and the great hammer reached the top of its stroke, the
fourth chain still defied him.

Before sunset, a swarm of the monsters appeared, wheeling on green
wings. He was forced to leave the work, hiding his improvised file.

Agnes still lay across the anvil, to conceal from the monsters the
fact that the chains were broken. Larry sat close beside her, nursing
hands that were blistered and sore from his days of filing at the
chains.

A sudden clatter came from the huge mechanism above them, and a sharp
hiss of steam, which became louder.

"It works!" Larry whispered to Agnes. "The old valve held, and the
steam can't get into the cylinder to smash us! But Allah knows what
will happen when the pressure rises in that old steam chest!"

Darkness came. Dusk swallowed the wheeling machine-monsters. All night
Larry and Agnes waited silently, together on the great anvil,
listening to the hissing of steam from above, which was slowly
becoming a shrill monotonous scream; monotonous, always higher,
shriller.

The "sun" rose again. Still the green-winged monsters wheeled about.
They came in glittering swarms, thousands of them. They came nearer
the machine now, and flew about more swiftly, is if excited.

* * * * *

Then it happened.

There was a roar like thunder, and a colossal, bellowing explosion.
The air was filled suddenly with scalding steam, and with screaming
fragments of the bursting steam chest. In the midst of it all, Larry
felt a crushing blow upon the head. And a blanket of darkness fell
upon him....

"The monsters are all gone, darling," Agnes' voice reached him. "As
though they were very much frightened. And a piece of the old hammer
hit the fence and knocked a hole in it. You must go. Leave me--"

"Leave you?" Larry groaned, struggling to sit up. "Not a bit of it!"
He touched his head gingerly, felt a swollen bruise.

Collecting a few fragments of the wrecked machine, to serve as tools,
he fell to work again upon Agnes' remaining chain. Already he had cut
a deep groove in it. Two hours later, it was broken.

Carrying the metal urn of brownish liquid, they crept out through the
hole in the fence, which had been torn by the flying fragment of a
broken casting of green metal. They left the wreck of the machine
which a strange race had worshiped as a bloody god and