We sat up for perhaps an hour. It was snowing outside, with a howling wind that swirled the snow about the eaves of the little plantation house. At about one o'clock we all bade each other good night and went to bed. Ah, if we had but known! I awoke to find Freddie shaking me. He and I had slept together. It was four in the morning, and the house was noisy with the storm outside. Freddie was alarmed--he did not know why. Something had awakened him--we decided it was a thumping which we now heard in the living room, a door banging in the wind, with a queer, broken rattle to it. There is a sense of evil which comes to any one awakened unexpectedly in the night. I felt it very strongly now. And Freddie's face was very white and solemn in the glow of the night light which he had switched on. "The door to the porch," I said. "It's blown open--it's banging." We went out to close it. The living room was very cold; snow was blowing in through the outer doorway. We turned on the light. The door was not only open, it was hanging askew, half torn from its hinges. More than that, part of its wooden framework was gone. Not broken--vanished--as if melted off. A leprous wreck of a door, hanging there, banging with a thump and rattle in the wind! No need to tell us what had happened--I think we both knew then. The door to father's bedroom stood open. He was not there. The bed had been occupied; there was no sign of a struggle, no abnormal disorder anywhere about the house, except for that dismembered front door, which had been locked. Our light and our voices awakened Dan and his parents. They came out from their rooms. But Hulda did not come, nor Zetta! Their bedroom doors, like father's stood open; but the occupants were gone. Horrified moments followed, during which we searched the house and the buildings near it. There was no evidence of any kind of how, in the noisy night, while the rest of us slept, father, Hulda and Zetta had been spirited away. The terrified elder Cains remained in the house. Hastily dressing, Dan, Freddie and I rushed to the corral. The chilled little ponies welcomed us. We saddled, and in single file, slowly against the wind and driving snow, we rode out into the night. There was no surprise left for us when we reached the "Eden tract" in the valley by the caves where once the Cains' treasured fruit trees had grown so luxuriantly. It was all a dim gray expanse of snow, with the naked tree branches showing in black, forlorn rows. The trunks of the coconut trees stood like huge black sticks in a patch of white. But among them there was no small silver vehicle. The guards had been withdrawn a week before. There was no evidence here of anything. The heavy falling snowflakes would have covered up even recent footprints; there was only the depression in the sand and snow to mark where the vehicle had been. The last communication was broken. The last remaining evidence of Xenephrene upon our earth was gone!