She had been hurried out of the upper entrance to the monorail, which
conveyed her in a special car to the landing station. A few minutes
later she had been on her way to join the camp of other victims, a
hundred miles away. Within two hours she was on her way southward.

Stunned by the tragedy, none of the victims had made much of an
outcry. They had been given water by the airship police. No food for
boys and girls already dead. Days and nights had passed, and now she
was here, faint from exhaustion, and wondering at the despair shown by
those others. What difference would it make in half an hour? Besides,
that Government pamphlet had insisted that this death was painless!

But an immense longing to see Kay once more came over her. There had
been a time when she thought she loved Cliff; then Kay had come into
her life, and she had known that other affair was folly. She had
never told Kay of the bitter scene between Cliff and herself, how he
had raved against Kay and sworn to win her in the end.

Cliff had calmed down and apologized, and Ruth had never seen him
again. She wished he had not taken it like that. But above all she
wanted to see Kay, just to say good-by.

And she tried to send out her whole heart to him in an unspoken
message of love that would surely somehow convey itself to him.

* * * * *

The wall of devils was creeping up on every side, slowly,
lethargically. The monsters took their time, because they knew they
were invincible. The sobs and shrieks had died away. Collected into a
mass almost as rigid as that of the Earth Giants, the victims waited,
palsied as a rabbit that awaits the approach of the serpent.

A humming overhead. An airplane shooting down from the sky. Rescue?
No. Only a solitary pilot, armed with a woodsman's ax.

Kay drifted down, touched ground, leaped to his feet. Chance had
brought him within five hundred yards of where Ruth was standing. But
Ruth had known who that lone flyer must be. She broke through the
throng; she rushed to meet him. Her arms were around him.

"Kay, darling Kay!"

"Ruth, dearest!"

"I knew you'd come."

"I've come to die beside you!"

* * * * *

It was perhaps odd that it did not enter the head of either as a
possibility that Kay should simply place Ruth in the plane and fly
away with here to safety. Had the thought occurred to Kay, he might
have been tempted. But such black tre