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because he couldn’t move his three hundred pounds as agilely as Lila could move.
    And the damnedest thing was the species of attacking animals. They were guinea pigs!
    Common, ordinary guinea pigs, pets of laboratories, as mild an animal as ever lived. Usually a guinea pig is no match even for a determined wren; they aren’t built for fighting anything. And here were a dozen or more of the ordinarily harmless things doing real damage to two humans. Smitty felt like yelling, himself.
    It was high time something was done before their ankles got slashed to cat’s meat. And it would take too long to stamp on them one by one, the way they were flashing around.
    “Hold your breath!” Smitty yelled to the girl.
    Then he hastily dropped a flashing little thing, like a glass marble, which he had taken from a lower vest pocket.
    But the thing wasn’t a marble. It was a thin-shelled glass capsule. In it was a volatile, colorless gas invented by MacMurdie in his drugstore laboratory. The gas could knock any living thing cold in less than three seconds.
    It knocked the guinea pigs cold in about one second. They fell in midmotion, sliding along the floor, still in the direction of the two humans they had been insane enough to attack.
    “Whew!” Lila gasped.
    Which was an indiscretion. She got a whiff of gas.
    “Hang it, I told you to hold your breath!” said the giant, after he had carried her out to the little vestibule.
    Lila only looked at him and gasped for breath. The one little whiff was going to make it imperative for her to lie down somewhere for ten or fifteen minutes. Smitty pulled out a little nose clip, then went back into the laboratory and opened the windows. The air cleared.
    “What in the world kind of guinea pigs does your father raise?” he said, when Lila had recuperated.
    She shook her head wonderingly.
    “Just the ordinary kind,” she said. “They weren’t like that the last time I saw them.”
    Smitty thought a moment.
    “Didn’t Packer, your servant, say he thought your father had injected something into those pigs just before he vanished?” he asked.
    Lila nodded, equally thoughtful.
    “It must be,” Smitty said slowly, “that the behavior of those crazy little things has something to do with what your father was working on when he left here.” He sighed. “I’ll bet we never see a crazier thing than that.”
    The giant was wrong. They were to see a crazier thing in a very short time.

CHAPTER VI

The Red Pool
    The gas had gone out the opened windows when the two went back into the laboratory. But it hadn’t cleared in time for the luckless guinea pigs. They were dead. Mac’s gas was powerful stuff.
    Smitty shoved the little bodies under a table with his toe as unobtrusively as he could. But he needn’t have worried about sparing Lila’s feelings. She wasn’t looking at him at all. She was staring around the great room in dismay. And in a moment Smitty joined her.
    The dismay was well warranted.
    Everything in that fine shop had been smashed. Delicate instruments lay in shards on the floor. There were iridescent patches of glass, the remains of test tubes and beakers. The lab had had the finest of everything, tens of thousainds of dollars’ worth of instruments. And all was damaged beyond repair. Smitty, a scientist himself, groaned when he saw the havoc.
    “Poor Dad,” murmured Lila forlornly. “I’m glad he isn’t here to see this.”
    There was movement in a far corner. Instantly, Smitty crouched, ready to leap. Then the maker of the movement walked out on satin paws, and Smitty grinned sheepishly at himself.
    It was a cat, gray and white, purring loudly.
    “Mathilda!” exclaimed Lila. “Didn’t Packer put you out when he left?”
    She turned to Smitty. “She’s a tramp tabby; came to us out of the woods one day. We feed her when we’re here, then turn her loose to hunt field mice for herself when we’re away. Packer should have loosed her in the woods when