"Do not laugh! I try to save you from something even worse than death that can come to you. I want to return to you the favor that you did me. If you do not listen to me, how can I help you?" Her voice took on a plaintive, charming note; she smiled a half-smile of complete witchery. A high, keening cry came suddenly from the slopes above us, and she raised on her toes as if to spring away. "They come, my friends! I must leave you. I can only tell you to stay close by your fire at night. I cannot say what fate will strike you. I cannot help you. Go back, friend who would live, go back!" She turned and sprang lightly up the slope toward the sound of the cry, half human, half beast-like, that she had called "her friends." It had sounded to me like the cry of a wolf, or a cat-man, anything but human. But people can make odd sounds, and imitate beasts. Still it had been an eerie sound that gave me a foreboding, added to her warning words. What kind of people were these, who wore leather and jewels and used bows that might have come off an Assyrian wall painting? Came a tumult above, the high clear blast of some horn, a dozen eerie cries hardly human--a rush and a pounding in the earth as though a party had ridden off on heavy, full-size horses. No Manchurian pony ever made such a sound on soft ground! Polter and Noldi came back about an hour later. I had dragged the big Barto into a tent and made him comfortable. He was snoring peacefully. Polter squatted down beside me, folding his long form like a jackknife. "That thing _was_ a ship, Keele," he said. There was a husky excitement, repressed but still obvious about him. I grunted. "It landed among some big timber on the south end of the mountain. We got pretty close, enough to see the sides of the thing. Men busy around it, we couldn't get too close, afraid they'd see us." I started, a pulse of unreasoning fear, of terrific interest, ran through me. I asked in a voice I couldn't keep calm, "What kind of men, Hank? I saw reports of such ships in the papers, no one got close enough to see _that_ much. Newspapers called them illusions!" "They're not our kind of men; they are something very different. I don't know just how to tell you, besides I couldn't be sure. But they seem to be a people--" He stopped. "I'd rather you'd see it yourself. You wouldn't believe me." Noldi came out of the tent where Barto was still snoring. He came over and squatted across the fire, eyeing me strangely. "What happened to the big jerk, Carl?" he asked, a little tremor of anger in his voice. "I've got to tell you fellows we're in trouble," I began. I did not believe that the girl's people would ignore Jake's attack upon her. Hank looked at the slender man from New York's East Side. "What's the matter with Barto?" "S'got a bruise on his jaw the size of a goose-egg. Like a mule kicked him. Scratched up quite a bit. I just wondered. He's unconscious, too; I couldn't wake him up."