On came the Maeronicans, Broddok leading, his face flushed with triumph and hatred. In the captain's way was a large fragment of rock. As he sprang around it, it split in twain and flew into splinters, belching green flame. That flash was the last thing the captain ever saw; the thunderous roar that shook the hillside was the crack of doom for him. A sliver of rock smote him on the temple. Raula was avenged. Another terrific explosion tore up the earth and boulders right in the midst of the startled Maeronicans, and then another. Men were dying by the hundred. Bel-Ar's men turned and fled shrieking for the roadway. The charge was turned into a rout. Hardly were they out of the glen where such fearsome happenings had befallen them, when a cloud of Rutharian cavalry rolled down through the main pass and swept Bel-Ar's men and their supports into headlong flight toward the lowlands. On the brow of the rock a small, white-haired old man, clad in armor several sizes too large for him, stood up from his knees and patted a great black dog on the head. "Good shots those were, Rombar," he said. "Used to be a baseball pitcher once, and haven't lost my wing yet. By golly! I was just in time." Presently Zenas was down in the road with the others to greet Polaris. The geologist made light of what he had done, but Janess and the others knew that they owed their lives to his quick wit. Soldiers who had been driven into the hills had met the Rutharian riders and told them of the plight of their king. While the cavalry engaged the Maeronicans in the pass and cleared it, the old man and a small party, carrying melinite bombs, some few of which Zenas had fashioned in his laboratories, had ridden by a bridle-path to the top of the cliff. "Be careful, son," said Zenas, when Polaris threw an arm lovingly across his shoulder. "This chain jerkin of mine is packed with enough of that green hell-cake to spread us over two counties. And keep the brute away." For Rombar had found his master and was leaping about him like a crazed thing and barking as if to tell the whole army about it. * * * * * Despite the utmost efforts of Fanaer, the most trusted of Bel-Ar's captains and a general skilled in all the arts of war, Ruthar held the isthmus and the mountain passes, and through the Kimbrian defile poured down with horse and foot and chariot into upper Maeronica. Failing to hold back the host of the invader and fortify the passes, as he had hoped to do, Fanaer began a harrying, guerrilla warfare. From sea to sea he made the land barren of supplies for his enemy, sending the peasants and hill-dwellers with their cattle and provisions down to the coast cities of Zeddar and Aklon. He sent swarms of light riders into the hills, where by sally and ambuscade and the breaking of bridges and a hundred other means they fretted the advance of the Rutharian army.