The reek made him gag now and then, but he had smelled some god-awful things in his time and was able to control his uneasy stomach. He considered the possibility of poison gas and judged it too slight to worry over; the destroying rays had certainly no need of accompanying gases, for they were as all-destructive as a thousand hurricanes rolled up in one package. By three o'clock--his watch, miraculously, was still going--Trace had entered the city itself. He trotted down a broken, heaped-up thoroughfare, his glance roving constantly from side to side in search of movement. A sergeant whose army was gone had to find himself another in a hurry; and if so be it he was the general in that one, well, Trace Roscoe was ready to take on the job. He had no fanatical hope of beating the greenies, because he was a soldier and level-headed, and odds of some millions to one were no odds at all. He figured the enemy's strength at something between ten and a hundred thousand saucers, with at least twenty individuals crewing each. There were at a conservative estimate 200,000 troops on the other side; and more like 2,000,000. So Trace was not indulging in any optimism when he started hunting for an army. He was merely following his natural inclinations, which were to fight the opposition as long as he had breath in his body and hands on the ends of his arms. He was not full of sorrow and wild regret either, for that wasn't Trace's way. Besides which, the destruction of the civilization of this earth was too big to be grasped and understood all at once. If Trace had found the bodies of a score of people, he might have burst into tears, for his heart was big and Irish and sentimental. But pacing down the stinking tomb of hundreds of thousands of men and women was so incredible as to be simply a fact and not a comprehensible horror. Alone he stood in the middle of a more-or-less flat plain in the city, staring and listening; and when he heard the shout, he went toward it at once, exulting that so quickly he'd discovered a private, or it might be a captain, for his army. There was a hole that was floored with cracked steps and went down into the ground, and Trace dived into it without hesitation. * * * * * Sitting at the bottom, with chunks of concrete heaped around him like divot around a duffer's tee, was a thin gentleman in a mustache, half a top hat, one leg of a pair of black trousers, and little else but a scowl. "They killed her," he said as Trace came into his view. "They blew her right out of my arms." "Can you stand?" Trace asked him, reaching out one big hand. "I don't know. Ouch! Yes, I can," said the man. "I tell you, they murdered Fannie." "I'm sorry, fellow. Your wife?" "My rabbit." "Rabbit?" Trace turned him around and looked him over for wounds; there were none more serious than extensive bruises.