attention.

"I have slight suggestion, perhaps merely cat's meow and not worthy exalted attention," he offered. "Why not all people as gentlemen old time in my country, carry sword? It is better than without weapon."

"Why not, indeed?" said Ben above a hum of laughter. "Let's go." And an hour later the company re-emerged from an antique store, belted with the strangest collection of swords and knives and fishing gaffs ever borne by an earthly army.

"I wonder, though," said Gloria to Murray Lee, as they reached the Institute as dawn was streaking up the sky. "All this hooey doesn't seem to mean much. If those birds are as big as that they aren't going to be scared by these little toad-stabbers."

She was right. That night Ola Mae Roberts was missing.

The siege came a week later.

It was a week of strained tenseness; a certain electricity seemed at hand in the atmosphere, inhibiting speech. The colonists felt almost as though they were required to whisper....

A week during which Murray, with Dangerfield and Tholfsen, worked energetically at their radio, and progressed far enough so they could do a fairly competent job of sending and receiving in Morse code. A week during which the naval party got a freighter from the South Street docks and brought her round into the Hudson.

At dawn one morning, Gloria, with Farrelly, Kevitz and Yoshio, piled into a limousine with the idea of taking the freighter on a trip to Coney Island. Murray accompanied them to try communicating with the shore via the ship's wireless.

The day was dark, with lowering clouds, which explains why they missed seeing the tetrapteryxes. But for the General Sherman statue they never would have seen them until too late. The general's intervention was purely passive; Murray noticed and called Gloria's attention to the curious expression the misty light gave the bronze face and she looked up to see, to be recalled to her driving by a yell from Kevitz announcing the metallic carcass of a policeman squarely in their path.

Gloria twisted the wheel sharply to avoid it; the car skidded on the damp pavement, and reeling crazily, caromed into the iron fence around the statue with a crash. At the same moment an enormous mass of rock struck the place where they should have been and burst like a shell, sending a shower of fragments 

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