until it was necessary to land the plane at the
destination.

Jetta of the Lowlands

Conclusion

_By Ray Cummings_

[Sidenote: Black-garbed figures move in ghastly greenness as the
invisible flyer speeds on its business of ransom.]

[Illustration: _Hans and I hauled out the heavy casket._]

CHAPTER XV

_In the Bandit Camp_

The dark cave, with its small spots of tube-light mounted upon movable
tripods, was eery with grotesque swaying shadows. The bandit camp.
Hidden down here in the depths of the Mid-Atlantic Lowlands. An
inaccessible retreat, this cave in what once was the ocean floor. Only
a few years ago water had been here, water black and cold and
soundless. Tremendous pressure, with three thousand or more fathoms of
the ocean above it. Fishes had roamed these passages, no doubt.
Strange monsters of the deeps: sightless, or with eyes like
phosphorescent torches.

But the water was gone now. Blue ooze was caked upon the cave floor.
Eroded walls; niches and tiny gullies; crevices and an arching dome
high overhead. A fantastic cave--no one, seeing it as I saw it that
morning at dawn, could have believed it was upon this earth. From
where De Boer had put me--on the flat top of a small, butte-like dome
near the upper end of the sloping cave floor--all the area of this
strange bandit camp was visible to me.

A little tent of parchment was set upon the dome-top.

"Yours," said De Boer, with a grin. "Make yourself comfortable.
Gutierrez will be your willing servant, until we see about this
ransom. It will have to be one very large, for you are a damn trouble
to me, Grant. And a risk. Food will come shortly. Then you can sleep:
I think you will want it."

He leaped from the little butte, leaving the taciturn ever-watchful
Gutierrez sitting cross-legged on the ledge near me, with his
projector across his knees.

* * * * *

The cave was irregularly circular, with perhaps, a hundred-feet
diameter and a ceiling fifty feet high. A drift of the fetid, Lowland
air went through it--into a rift at this upper end, and out through
the lower passage entrance which sloped downward thirty feet and
debouched upon a rippled ramp of ooze outside. It was daylight out
there now. From my perch I could see the sullen heavy walls of a
ridge. Mist hung against them, but the early morning sunlight came
down in shafts penetrating the mist and striking the oily surface of a
spread of water