een bellowing
vituperation at an airplane.

They were not savages. Somehow he could not envision them as
primitive. Their features were hard-bitten, seamed with hatred and
with vice unspeakable. And they were white. The instant impression any
man would have received was that here were broken men; fugitives,
bandits, assassins. Here were renegades or worse from some higher,
civilized race.

They battered hysterically upon the steel globe. It was not the attack
of savages upon a strange thing. It was the assault of desperate,
broken men upon a thing they hated. A glass pane splintered and
crashed. Spears were thrust into the opening, while mouths opened as
if in screams of insane fury. And then, suddenly, the door of the
globe flew wide.

The Ragged Men did not wait for anyone to come out. They fought each
other to get into the opening, their eyes glaring madly, filled with
the lust to kill.

CHAPTER III

A battered and antiquated flivver came chugging down the wire-fenced
lane to the laboratory, an hour later. It made a prodigious din, and
Tommy Reames went out to meet it. He was still a little pale. He had
watched the steel globe turned practically inside out by the Ragged
Men. He had seen them bringing out cameras, cushions, and even the
padding of the walls, to be torn to bits in a truly maniacal fury. But
he had not seen one sign of a human being killed. Denham and his
daughter had not been in the globe when it was found and ransacked. So
far, then, they were probably safe. Tommy had seen them vanish into
the tree-fern forest. They had been afraid, and with good reason. What
dangers they might encounter in the fern forest he could not guess.
How long they would escape the search of the Ragged Men, he could not
know. How he could ever hope to find them if he succeeded in
duplicating Denham's dimension-traveling apparatus he could not even
think of, just now. But the Ragged Men were not searching the fern
forest. So much was sure. They were encamped by the steel sphere, and
a scurvy-looking lot they were.

Coming out of the brick laboratory, Tommy saw a brawny figure getting
out of the antiquated flivver whose arrival had been so thunderous.
That brawny figure nodded to him and grinned. Tommy recognized him.
The red-headed, broad-shouldered filling station attendant in the last
village, who had given him specific directions for reaching this
place.

"You hit that gate a lick, didn't you?" asked the erstwhi