laged so exhaustively that there
was no hope that whatever device had been included in its design, for
its return, remained even repairably intact. That device had not
worked, to be sure, but Tommy puzzled sometimes over the fact that he
had seen no mechanical device of any sort in the plunder that had been
brought out to be demolished. But he did not think of those things
when he saw Evelyn.

The Ragged Men's encampment was gone, but she and her father lingered
furtively, still near the pillaged globe. The first day Tommy saw her,
she was still blooming and alert. The second day she was paler. Her
clothing was ripped and torn, as if by thorns. Denham had a great raw
wound upon his forehead, and his coat was gone and half his shirt was
in ribbons. Before Tommy's eyes they killed a nameless small animal
with the trunchionlike weapon Evelyn carried. And Denham carted it
triumphantly off into the shelter of the tree-fern forest. But to
Tommy that shelter began to appear extremely dubious.

That same afternoon some of the Ragged Men came suspiciously to the
globe and inspected it, and then vented a gibbering rage upon it with
blows and curses. They seemed half-mad, these men. But then, all the
Ragged Men seemed a shade less than sane. Their hatred for the Golden
City seemed the dominant emotion of their existence.

And when they had gone, Tommy saw Denham peering cautiously from
behind a screening mass of fern. And Denham looked sick at heart. His
eyes lifted suddenly to the heavens, and he stared off into the
distance again, and then he regarded the heavens again with an
expression that was at once of the utmost wistfulness and the
uttermost of despair.

* * * * *

Tommy swung the dimensoscope about and searched the skies of that
other world. He saw the flying machine, and it was a swallow-winged
device that moved swiftly, and now soared and swooped in abrupt short
circles almost overhead. Tommy could see its pilot, leaning out to
gaze downward. He was no more than a hundred feet up, almost at the
height of the tree-fern tops. And the pilot was moving too swiftly for
Tommy to be able to focus accurately upon his face, but he could see
him as a man, an indubitable man in no fashion distinguishable from
the other men of this earth. He was scrutinizing the globe as well as
he could without alighting.

He soared upward, suddenly, and his plane dwindled as it went toward
the Golden City.