men to guard her."

"You didn't look at the Tube I made," said Smithers impassively; "but
I turned on the steam. Looks like it worked. It's ready to go through,
anyways. It's the same place the other one was, down in that cellar.
I'm tellin' you in case anything happens."

He opened fire with a magazine rifle into the thick of the mob that
assailed the two towers. Tommy left him with fifty men to block a
highway and led his men again into the mass of mingled Ragged Men and
Rahnians. His followers saw his tactics now. They split off a section
of the mob and fell upon it ferociously. There were sudden awful
screams. Thermit flame was rising from two places in the very thick of
the mob. It burst up from a third, and fourth, and fifth.... Denham,
atop his tower, had the range with his steam cannon, and was flinging
heavy shells into the attackers of the two central buildings. And then
there was a roaring of steam and a ground vehicle came to a stop not
fifty feet away. A gun crew of Yugnans had shifted their unwieldy
weapon and its insulated steam boiler to a freight-carrying vehicle.
Now the gunner pulled trigger and traversed his weapon into the thick
of the massed invaders, while his companions worked desperately to
keep the hopper full of projectiles.

The invaders melted away. Steam guns in the towers, thermit
projectiles from the cannon far away: now this.... And the concealing
cloud of Death Mist was rising still, headed straight up toward the
zenith. It looked like a tiny, dwindling pearl.

* * * * *

The assault upon Yugna had been a mad one, a frantic one. But the
flight from Yugna was the flight of men trying to escape from hell.
Wild panic characterized the fleeing men. They threw aside their
weapons and ran with screams of terror no whit less horrible than
their howls of triumph had been. And Tommy would have stopped the
slaughter, but there was no way to send orders to the rampart gunners
in time. As the fugitives swarmed toward the walls again, the storms
of steam-propelled missiles mowed them down. Even those who scrambled
down to the ground outside and fled sobbing for the jungle were
pursued by hails of bullets. Of the eight thousand men who assailed
Yugna, less than one in five escaped.

Pursuit was still in progress. Here and there, through the city, the
sound of isolated combats still went on. Denham came down from his
tower, looking rather sick as he saw the carn