The brute's little eyes looked long and in puzzled fashion into the eyes of Bentley. Then he began to chatter, and in a moment the other apes ambled grotesquely toward the door and out. Ellen and Bentley were alone together once more, unharmed--though numbed by realization of the near passing of disaster. "I don't understand it," muttered Bentley, brushing the beads of perspiration from his brow. "It was a miracle!" "Lee," Ellen answered, "I think I know, and it _is_ a sort of miracle. Somehow the apes felt that you were--whatever your guise--Manape. They did not recognize you by any of their means of recognition; yet that beast knew! How? Only God Himself might answer. But the beasts knew, and did not slay us. The inner voice which whispers inside us in times of crises, whispers also to the great apes! Barter, then must have understood their somehow spiritual kinship with us. His experiments--" Her words reminded Bentley of what she had been saying when the great apes had charged in upon them, murder bent. He interrupted her, gently. "And the one thing we must do?" he rallied her. Ellen rose, and her face was white and strained as she gathered together Barter's manuscript. This she carried to the fireplace. She applied a match and returned to Bentley's bedside. Then, side by side, the two who would never forget in any case watched the record of Barter's unholy experiment burn slowly to ashes, while the screams of the great apes died away second by second, proof that they were leaving this section of the jungle--going deeper and deeper into the forest gloom which was their rightful heritage, and from which no man had a right to take them. [Advertisement] Holocaust _By Charles Willard Diffin_ [Illustration: It passed beneath the planes, that were motionless by contrast.] [Sidenote: The extraordinary story of "Paul," who for thirty days was Dictator of the World.] I am more accustomed to the handling of steel ingots and the fabrication of ships than to building with words. But, if I cannot write history as history is written, perhaps I can write it the way it is lived, and that must suffice. This account of certain events must have a title, I am told. I have used, as you see: "Holocaust." Inadequate!--but what word can tell even faintly of that reign of terror that engulfed the world, of those terrible thirty days in America when dread and horror gripped the nation and the red menace, like a wall of fire, swept downward from the north? And, at last--the end! It was given to me to know something of that conflict and of its ending and of the man who, in that last day, took command of Earth's events and gave battle to Mars, the God of War himself. It was against the background of war that he stood out; I must tell it in that way; and perhaps my own experience will be of interest. Yet it is of the man I would write more than the war--the most hated man in the whole world--that strange character, Paul Stravoinski.