it before they could forbid me.
They are waiting--up there for us. There is no danger now, Jack."

The Very Young Man tried to silence her. A noise down the gully made him
turn. The gigantic reptile appeared round the nearby bend. It saw the
girl and scuttled forward, rattling the loose bowlders beneath its feet
as it came.

Aura saw it the same instant. She looked up helplessly to the Very Young
Man above her; then she turned and ran down the gully.

The Very Young Man stood transfixed. It was a sheer drop of forty feet
or more to the gully floor beneath him. There was seemingly nothing that
he could do in those few terrible seconds, and yet with subconscious,
instinctive reasoning, he did the one and only thing possible. A loose
mass of the jagged, gold quartz hung over the gully wall. Frantically he
tore at it--pried loose with feet and hands a bowlder that hung poised.
As the lizard approached, the loosened rock slid forward, and dropped
squarely upon the reptile's broad back.

It was a bowlder nearly as large as the Very Young Man himself, but the
gigantic reptile shook it off, writhing and twisting for an instant, and
hurling the smaller loose rocks about the floor of the gully with its
struggles.

The Very Young Man cast about for another missile, but there were none
at hand. Aura, at the confusion, had stopped about two hundred feet
away.

"Run!" shouted the Very Young Man. "Hide somewhere! Run!"

The lizard, momentarily stunned, recovered swiftly. Again it started
forward, seemingly now as alert as before. And then, without warning, in
the air above his head the Very Young Man heard the rush of gigantic
wings. A tremendous grey body swooped past him and into the gully--a
bird larger in proportion than the lizard itself.... It was the little
sparrow the Chemist had sent in from the outside world--maddened now by
thirst and hunger, which to the reptile had been much more endurable.

The Very Young Man, shouting again to Aura to run, stood awestruck,
watching the titanic struggle that was raging below him. The great
lizard rose high on its forelegs to meet this enemy. Its tremendous jaws
opened--and snapped closed; but the bird avoided them. Its huge claws
gripped the reptile's back; its flapping wings spread the sixty foot
width of the gully as it strove to raise its prey into the air. The
roaring of these enormous wings was deafening; the wind from them as
they came up tore past the Very Young Man in vi