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The revolver was e to where the shotgun stood, snatched it up He scooped into his pocket a handful of shells from the box where they were stored; and as he darted back to the , he cocked both ha of the revolver roared out in twin jets of flaain he fired

"Good Heaven! How many of 'em are there in the trees?" shouted he

"Try the Pulverite!" cried Beatrice "Maybe you un To the corner where the vials were standing he ran

Up he caught one--he dared not take two lest they should by soether

"Here--here, now, take this!" he bellowed

And fro at a pine that stood seventy-five feet away--a pine whose branches see it with all the strength of his uninjured arloom it vanished, the little meteorite of latent death, of potential horror and destruction

"If it hits 'eineer, peering eagerly But for a roaned "If I only had ht--"

Far belon there a hundred feet beneath theht yaide in a burst of hellish glare

A vast conical hole of flaed in the dark For a fraction of a second every tree, lilory shot aloft

All up through the forest the girl and Stern got amisshapen, hideous

Then, as a riven and distorted whirl burst upward in a huge geyser of annihilation, came a detonation that ripped, stunned, shattered; that sent both the defenders staggering backward fro h the trees, and down again in a titanic, slashing rain fell the wreckage of things that had been stone, and earth, and root, and tree, and living creatures--that had been--that noere but one indistinguishable mass of ruin and of death

After that, here and there, s down You ardener had shaken his orchard, his orchard where the pluineer, in a strange, wild, exultant voice