it-clad figure the crowbar
traced a rude outline of a man in a sea-suit. The torpooner pointed to
the drawing and then fingered his suit, repeating the gesture several
times. Then he drew another figure in the soil, this one intended to
represent him without the sea-suit. It was not as bulky; the features
were sharper and thinner. Ken pointed to the twin dots standing for
eyes, then tapped his face-shield; he did this again and again.

For a moment the leader did not move; but then he slid forward and
stared through the shield. Rapidly Ken opened and closed his eyes, and
pointed again to the dots on the drawing's face.

"Eyes! Eyes!" he said excitedly, voicing the thought his brain was
making. "Eyes--inside the suit! The suit's not me; I'm inside! Eyes!" He
waited for a reaction, tense and strained. The blubber-man reached out
one flipper-arm and took the steel bar from his hand.

A thrill ran through him as the creature dipped its body down and began
to draw in the soil. Laboriously, crudely, he outlined another sea-suit,
and on the circle representing the face-shield marked two dots--eyes.

"He's getting it!" Ken cried.

The blubber-man went on drawing. He sketched a second suit, similar in
all respects, and looked up at the torpooner, inquiringly, it seemed.

Ken nodded rapidly. He tapped the drawings, then his suit; nodded again.
"The idea's over!" he told himself. "Now I'll make a move towards that
corridor to show them that I want to go, and if--"

But before he could stir, the leader of the blubber-men, with one quick
gesture, summoned two creatures from the innermost circle. Swiftly they
placed themselves alongside Kenneth Torrance, lifted him and bore him
forward, right across the cavern to another of the passageway-entrances.

It was so sudden that for a moment Ken could not think clearly. What had
happened? Were they releasing him? Or was he still to be kept a
prisoner? No doubt the latter. And he had been so sure that he was
communicating with the blubber-man's brain!

His lips pressed tight in a hard white line. It was a tough blow to
take.

"Well, that's that," he said. "It was all imagination."

He did not know that his drawings _had_ signified something to the
leader of the herd--that each had mistaken the meaning of the other. Nor
did he have any inkling of the greatest surprise of all that now lay
just before him.

* * * * *

The surprise lay in another cavern.