There are some grave disadvantages in being invisible. So, at least, Gates concluded as he went groping through the woods in the effort to find his bearings. It is disconcerting, to say the least, to ask a passer-by the way, and to be greeted with a shriek, and watch the man turn and dash away frantically, as from a ghost. It is aggravating to reach an automobile road and find every car trying to drive full-tilt through one. Gates felt like a man returning from the dead as he picked his way out of the woods, and, reaching a village, began to make a few civil inquiries.... Inevitably, he found, his hearers would flee the vicinity of his voice; and the harder he tried to call them back the faster they would run. He passed the night in an open field under a haystack--which, considering the heat, was not at all a hardship. In the morning, driven by hunger, he strolled into a farmhouse; and while the family stampeded like sheep from the sound of his footsteps, he calmly helped himself to some ham and biscuits from the kitchen table. Having thus satisfied his needs, he wandered away along a railroad track, and after about an hour's walk reached a junction, where a sign on the station showed him that he was two hundred miles from home. "God! How'm I ever going to make the distance?" he wondered, reflecting that he had not a penny in his pockets. Twenty minutes later, while he still stood there baffled, a train puffed into the station--one of the few still running in those disorganized days. Several people stepped aboard; and, without hesitation, he joined them, trusting to his invisibility to save him from the demands of the ticket-taker. As there was no unoccupied seat, he stood in the vestibule, which caused not a little confusion, as people kept brushing against him as they went by, greatly to their consternation. Long before they had reached their destination, in fact, half the passengers were ready to swear that the train was haunted. This view was furthered by Buck Johnson, one of the colored waiters in the dining car, who testified that while his back was turned the better part of the contents of a tray disappeared--and that he turned about just in time to see a sausage go floating down the passageway, although nobody was in sight! It was fortunate, Gates thought, that the train was air-conditioned; the cool, fresh atmosphere made it easier for him to think. And, certainly, he needed to think as never before. What would he do upon getting back home? Obviously, go as soon as possible to Dunbar's apartment, to check that traitor's vile designs, if there were still time! And to rescue Eleanor from his clutches! But was it not already too late? Gates gravely feared so. Besides, how prevail against Dunbar, protected as he was by the overweening power of the Saturnians?