repeat her caresses--and at
last he was free.

"I reached the _jana_," she told him in hurried whispers, "and then I
came up. Their great room, where the Pathway to the Light begins, was
deserted. With a cord I pulled the lever, and the _jana_ vanished. I
could not leave it for them to use. Then I followed--I knew by the
sounds where they were taking you. And now, what can we do, Dean-San?
Where can we go?"

It was real! Loah was there beside him; he had her in his arms, his
bruised, bleeding arms whose hurts he no longer felt. And then,
through his mind, flashed the question: if this was real, what of the
other--the rappings he had heard? Perhaps it hadn't been a dream.

He lifted a fragment of rock and crashed it against the wall from
which those rappings apparently had come. Laboriously he spelled out
his name, remembering the dots and dashes from earlier flying days
when planes had been equipped with key-senders. He spelled it slowly
and waited, while only the silence beat upon him and the blood pounded
in his ears. Then he heard it. The answer came from a quicker hand:

"Rawson--this is Smithy."

But Smithy was dead! What could it mean? Slowly Rawson pounded out the
letters of his question: "Where--are--you?" The answer dispelled his
last doubt as to the reality of what he had heard.

It _was_ Smithy. Others were with him, for Smithy said "we," and they
were prisoners, sealed up in a living tomb. But where? Smithy did not
know. He knew only that they were in a big room where the rocks had
been shattered and molten gold spilled on the floor. There was a hole
in the roof, but too small to get through--a round hole, about eight
inches in diameter. And, at that, Rawson interrupted to tap out a
single word.

"Coming!" he said, and turned toward Loah and the light.

The girl had found a metal rope in her wanderings; she had used it to
let herself down into the cave. And now it was she who helped Dean to
pull his bruised body up and into the narrow crack. Loah had clung to
the flame-thrower; they found it where she had left it up above.

The tapping rocks she could not understand, but she knew Dean had a
definite plan in mind when he whispered: "The room where you first
found me--do you remember? Do you know the way?"

"I will always remember," she said simply. "And, yes, I know the way."

Rawson caught glimpses now and again of that broad thoroughfare along
which he had once traveled, a prisoner of the mole