"I'll go with you to saddle the ponies, Ramon. We'll go--you want to go, Hulda?" "Yes," she said. She felt at that moment too frightened to stay in the house without Dan, and thought of the elder Cains asleep in the adjoining room never occurred to either of them. With sweaters donned against the midnight cold, they saddled the ponies and started. Dan rode ahead, with Hulda almost beside him, and Ramon, his pony reluctant as himself, following after them. It was a brief ride, during which they hardly spoke. Down the knoll, past the silent garage; past the somnolent group of shacks of the plantation workers. The road was narrow--white sand like a trail; coconut trees arched it in places, and beside it spread the tracts of fruit trees. It wound back toward a low-lying range of hills and up a steep declivity, where it turned stony from the rain water which daily washed down it. Dan was flinging watchful glances around them. "Don't see anything yet, Hulda. Do you?" His voice was a cautious half whisper. The sure-footed ponies picked their way carefully up the stony trail. They went through a little ravine and emerged into a small valley, a plateau almost flat on this higher land. Hills a hundred feet high fenced it in; its table-like surface of white sand was ruled off with the dark green lines of fruit trees. It was the Cains' two-hundred acre "Eden tract." It lay brooding and drowsy under the moon, without a sign of human movement. Dan halted; Ramon's pony came beside him. "Where were you when you saw it, Ramon?" The boy gestured. He was trembling again. He held his pony forcibly from wheeling to run back. The other ponies seemed to sense the terror; they raised their heads; one whimpered; and they were all quivering. But Dan forced them slowly forward. The trail skirted the hills to the left. Above it, halfway up a steep ascent, three black yawning mouths of the bat-caves showed. Hulda had often been in them with Dan; a guano deposit in them was used as fertilizer for the trees. Hulda saw them now, round and black, with the moonlight on the rocks beside them, fifty feet above the valley. Ramon suddenly chattered: "There! You see it? _Ave Maria_--" Off at the edge of the fruit trees, in the shadows of a clump of coconut palms, a great round thing gleamed. A silver sphere, like a white ball some twenty feet high, lying there. A broken ball! It was several hundred feet away, but Hulda could see a black rift in it. A crack? A doorway! She knew it then. Not with conscious reasoning, but she knew then what all this was to mean. A silver sphere lying there, with a black rift in it like a doorway. And a small black patch on its side--like a window! "Hulda! Look!" Dan's hand went to her arm with a grip that both hurt and steadied her. The three ponies were standing with braced feet in the sand. Dan's flung up its head to neigh; but his fist thumped its head and stilled it.