The evenings were lengthening with confidence towards summer now, and Bruce Fox arrived home before sunset. As he jumped from his bicycle this evening, he found his friend Gregory impatiently awaiting him.
They went indoors together, and while Fox ate a large tea, Gregory told him what had been happening at the farm that day.
“You're in trouble,” Fox said. “Look, tomorrow's Sunday. I'll skip church and come out with you. You need help.”
“Joseph may shoot me. He'll be certain to if I bring along a stranger. You can help me tonight by telling me where I can purchase a young dog straightaway to protect Nancy.” “Nonsense, I'm coming with you. I can't bear hearing all this at secondhand anyhow. We'll pick up a pup in any eventthe blacksmith has a litter to be rid of. Have you got any plan of action?”
“Plan? No, not really.”
“You must have a plan. Grendon doesn't scare too easily, does he?”
“I imagine he's scared well enough. Nancy says he's scared. He just isn't imaginative enough to see what he can do but carry on working as hard as possible.”
“Look, I know these farmers. They won't believe anything till you rub their noses in it. What we must do is show him an Aurigan.”
“Oh, splendid, Bruce! And how do you catch one?”
“You trap one.”
“Don't forget they're invisiblehey, Bruce, yes, by Jove, you're right! I've the very idea! Look, we've nothing more to worry about if we can trap one. We can trap the lot, however many there are, and we can kill the little horrors when we have trapped them.”
Fox grinned over the top of a chunk of cherry cake. “We're agreed, I suppose, that these Aurigans aren't socialist Utopians any longer?”
~
It helped a great deal, Gregory thought, to be able to visualize roughly what the alien life form looked like. The volume on serpents had been a happy find, for not only did it give an idea of how the Aurigans must be able to digest their prey so rapidly"a kind of soup or broth"but presumably it gave a clue to their appearance. To live in a space machine, they would probably be fairly small, and they seemed to be semi-aquatic. It all went to make up a picture of a strange being: skin perhaps scaled like a fish, great flipper feet like a frog, barrel-like diminutive stature, and a tiny he'ad with two great fangs in the jaw. There was no doubt but that the invisibility cloaked a really ugly-looking dwarf!
As the macabre image passed through his head, Gregory and Bruce Fox were preparing their trap. Fortunately, Grendon had offered no resistance to their entering the farm; Nancy had evidently spoken to good effect. And he had suffered another shock. Five fowls had been reduced to little but feathers and skin that morning almost before his eyes, and he was as a result sullen and indifferent of what went on. Now he was out in a distant field working, and the two young men were allowed to carry out their plans unmolestedthough not without an .oc– casional anxious glance at the pondwhile a worried Nancy looked on from the farmhouse window.
She had with her a sturdy young mongrel dog of eight months, which Gregory and Bruce had brought along, called Gyp. Grendon had obtained two ferocious hounds from a distant neighbor. These wide-mouthed brutes were secured on long running chains that enabled them to patrol from the horse trough by the pond, down the west side of the house, almost to the elms and the bridge leading over to West Field. They barked stridently most of the time and seemed to cause a general unease among the other animals, all of which gave voice restlessly this forenoon.
The dogs would be a difficulty, Nancy had said, for they refused to touch any of the food the farm could provide. It was hoped they would take it when they became hungry enough.
Grendon had planted a great board by the farm gate and on the board had painted a notice telling everyone to keep away.
Armed with pitchforks, the two young men carried flour sacks out from the mill and placed them at strategic positions across the yard as far as the gate. Gregory went to the cowsheds and led out one of the calves there on a length of binder twine under the very teeth of the barking dogshe only hoped they would prove as hostile to the Aurigans as they seemed to be to human life.
As he was pulling the calf across the yard. Grubby appeared.
“You'd better stay away from us. Grubby. We're trying to trap one of the ghosts.”
“Master, if I catch one, I shall strangle him, straight I will.”
“A pitchfork is a better weapon. These ghosts are dangerous little beasts at close quarters.”
“I'm strong, bor, I tell 'ee! I'd strangle un!”
To prove his point, Grubby rolled his striped and tattered sleeve even further up his arm and exposed to Gregory and Fox his enormous biceps. At the same time, he wagged his great heavy head and lolled his tongue out of his mouth, perhaps to demonstrate some of the effects of strangulation.
“It's a very fine arm,” Gregory agreed. “But, look. Grubby, we have a better idea. We are going to do this ghost to death with pitchforks. If you want to join in, you'd better get a spare one from the stable.”
Grubby looked at him with a sly-shy expression and stroked his throat. “I'd be better at strangling, bor. I've always wanted to strangle someone.”
“Why should you want to do that, Grubby?”
The laborer lowered his voice. “I always wanted to see how difficult it would be. I'm strong, you see. I got my strength up as a lad by doing some of this here stranglingbut never men, you know, just cattle.”
Backing away a pace, Gregory said, “This time, Grubby, it's pitchforks for us.” To settle the issue, he went into the stables, got a pitchfork, and returned to thrust it into Grubby's hand.
“Let's get on with it,” Fox said.
They were all ready to start. Fox and Grubby crouched down in the ditch on either side of the gate, weapons at the ready. Gregory emptied one of the bags of flour over the yard in a patch just before the gate, so that anyone leaving the farm would have to walk through it. Then he led the calf towards the pond.
The young animal set up an uneasy mooing, and most of the beasts nearby seemed to answer. The chickens and hens scattered about the yard in the pale sunshine as if demented. Gregory felt the sweat trickle down his back, although his skin was cold with the chemistries of suspense. With a slap on its rump, he forced the calf into the water of the pond. It stood there unhappily, until he led it out again and slowly back across the yard, past the mill and the grain store on his right, past Mrs. Grendon's neglected flowerbed on his left, towards the gate where his allies waited. And for all his determination not to do so, he could not stop himself looking backwards at the leaden surface of the pond to see if anything followed him. He led the calf through the gate and stopped. No tracks but his and the calf's showed in the strewn flour.
“Try it again,” Fox advised. “Perhaps they are taking a nap down there.”
Gregory went through the routine again, and a third and fourth time, on each occasion smoothing the flour after he had been through it. Each time, he saw Nancy watching helplessly from the house. Each time, he felt a little more sick with tension.
Yet when it happened, it took him by surprise. He had got the calf to the gate for a fifth time when Fox's shout joined the chorus of animal noises. The pond had shown no special ripple, so the Aurigan had come from some dark-purposed prowl of the farmsuddenly, its finned footsteps were marking the flour.
Veiling with excitement, Gregory dropped the rope that led the calf and ducked to one side. Seizing up an opened bag of flour by the gatepost, he flung its contents before the advancing figure.
The bomb of flour exploded all over the Aurigan. Now it was revealed in chalky outline. Despite himself, Gregory found himself screaming in sheer fright as the ghastliness was revealed in whirling white. It was especially the size that frightened: this dread thing, remote from human form, was too big for earthly natureten feet high, perhaps twelve! Invincible, and horribly quick, it came rushing at him with unnumbered arms striking out towards him.