I am forced to admit that even though I had traveled a longdistance to place Bowen Tyler's manuscript in the hands of hisfather, I was still a trifle skeptical as to its sincerity,since I could not but recall that it had not been many yearssince Bowen had been one of the most notorious practical jokersof his alma mater. The truth was that as I sat in the Tylerlibrary at Santa Monica I commenced to feel a trifle foolishand to wish that I had merely forwarded the manuscript byexpress instead of bearing it personally, for I confess that Ido not enjoy being laughed at. I have a well-developed senseof humor--when the joke is not on me.

Mr. Tyler, Sr., was expected almost hourly. The last steamerin from Honolulu had brought information of the date of theexpected sailing of his yacht Toreador, which was nowtwenty-four hours overdue. Mr. Tyler's assistant secretary,who had been left at home, assured me that there was no doubtbut that the Toreador had sailed as promised, since he knewhis employer well enough to be positive that nothing short ofan act of God would prevent his doing what he had planned to do. I was also aware of the fact that the sending apparatus ofthe Toreador's wireless equipment was sealed, and that itwould only be used in event of dire necessity. There was,therefore, nothing to do but wait, and we waited.

We discussed the manuscript and hazarded guesses concerning itand the strange events it narrated. The torpedoing of theliner upon which Bowen J. Tyler, Jr., had taken passage forFrance to join the American Ambulance was a well-known fact,and I had further substantiated by wire to the New York officeof the owners, that a Miss La Rue had been booked for passage. Further, neither she nor Bowen had been mentioned among the listof survivors; nor had the body of either of them been recovered.

Their rescue by the English tug was entirely probable; thecapture of the enemy U-33 by the tug's crew was not beyondthe range of possibility; and their adventures during theperilous cruise which the treachery and deceit of Bensonextended until they found themselves in the waters of the farSouth Pacific with depleted stores and poisoned water-casks,while bordering upon the fantastic, appeared logical enough asnarrated, event by event, in the manuscript.

Caprona has always been considered a more or less mythicalland, though it is vouched for by an eminent navigator of theeighteenth century; but Bowen's narrative made it seem very real,however many miles of trackless ocean lay between us and it. Yes, the narrative had us guessing. We were agreed that it wasmost improbable; but neither of us could say that anything whichit contained was beyond the range of possibility. The weirdflora and fauna of Caspak were as possible under the thick,warm atmospheric conditions of the super-heated crater asthey were in the Mesozoic era under almost exactly similarconditions, which were then probably world-wide. The assistantsecretary had heard of Caproni and his discoveries, but admittedthat he never had taken much stock in the one nor the other. We were agreed that the one statement most difficult ofexplanation was that which reported the entire absence of humanyoung among the various tribes which Tyler had had intercourse. This was the one irreconcilable statement of the manuscript. A world of adults! It was impossible.

We speculated upon the probable fate of Bradley and his partyof English sailors. Tyler had found the graves of two of them;how many more might have perished! And Miss La Rue--could ayoung girl long have survived the horrors of Caspak afterhaving been separated from all of her own kind? The assistantsecretary wondered if Nobs still was with her, and then we bothsmiled at this tacit acceptance of the truth of the wholeuncanny tale:

"I suppose I'm a fool," remarked the assistant secretary; "butby George, I can't help believing it, and I can see that girlnow, with the big Airedale at her side protecting her from theterrors of a million years ago. I can visualize the entirescene--the apelike Grimaldi men huddled in their filthy caves;the huge pterodactyls soaring through the heavy air upon theirbat-like wings; the mighty dinosaurs moving their clumsy hulksbeneath the dark shadows of preglacial forests--the dragonswhich we considered myths until science taught us that theywere the true recollections of the first man, handed downthrough countless ages by word of mouth from father to son outof the unrecorded dawn of humanity."

"It is stupendous--if true," I replied. "And to think thatpossibly they are still there--Tyler and Miss LaRue--surrounded by hideous dangers, and that possibly Bradleystill lives, and some of his party! I can't help hoping allthe time that Bowen and the girl have found the others; thelast Bowen knew of them, there were six left, all told--themate Bradley, the engineer Olson, and Wilson, Whitely, Bradyand Sinclair. There might be some hope for them if they couldjoin forces; but separated, I'm afraid they couldn't last long."

"If only they hadn't let the German prisoners capture the U-33! Bowen should have had better judgment than to have trusted themat all. The chances are von Schoenvorts succeeded in gettingsafely back to Kiel and is strutting around with an Iron Crossthis very minute. With a large supply of oil from the wellsthey discovered in Caspak, with plenty of water and ampleprovisions, there is no reason why they couldn't havenegotiated the submerged tunnel beneath the barrier cliffsand made good their escape."

"I don't like 'em," said the assistant secretary; "butsometimes you got to hand it to 'em."

"Yes," I growled, "and there's nothing I'd enjoy more thanhanding it to them!" And then the telephone-bell rang.

The assistant secretary answered, and as I watched him, I sawhis jaw drop and his face go white. "My God!" he exclaimed ashe hung up the receiver as one in a trance. "It can't be!"

"What?" I asked.

"Mr. Tyler is dead," he answered in a dull voice. "He died atsea, suddenly, yesterday."

The next ten days were occupied in burying Mr. Bowen J. Tyler, Sr.,and arranging plans for the succor of his son. Mr. Tom Billings,the late Mr. Tyler's secretary, did it all. He is force, energy,initiative and good judgment combined and personified. I neverhave beheld a more dynamic young man. He handled lawyers, courtsand executors as a sculptor handles his modeling clay. He formed,fashioned and forced them to his will. He had been a classmateof Bowen Tyler at college, and a fraternity brother, and before,that he had been an impoverished and improvident cow-puncheron one of the great Tyler ranches. Tyler, Sr., had picked himout of thousands of employees and made him; or rather Tyler hadgiven him the opportunity, and then Billings had made himself. Tyler, Jr., as good a judge of men as his father, had taken himinto his friendship, and between the two of them they had turnedout a man who would have died for a Tyler as quickly as he wouldhave for his flag. Yet there was none of the sycophant or fawnerin Billings; ordinarily I do not wax enthusiastic about men, butthis man Billings comes as close to my conception of what aregular man should be as any I have ever met. I venture to saythat before Bowen J. Tyler sent him to college he had neverheard the word ethics, and yet I am equally sure that inall his life he never has transgressed a single tenet of thecode of ethics of an American gentleman.

Ten days after they brought Mr. Tyler's body off the Toreador,we steamed out into the Pacific in search of Caprona. There wereforty in the party, including the master and crew of theToreador; and Billings the indomitable was in command. We hada long and uninteresting search for Caprona, for the old mapupon which the assistant secretary had finally located it wasmost inaccurate. When its grim walls finally rose out of theocean's mists before us, we were so far south that it was aquestion as to whether we were in the South Pacific orthe Antarctic. Bergs were numerous, and it was very cold.

All during the trip Billings had steadfastly evaded questionsas to how we were to enter Caspak after we had found Caprona. Bowen Tyler's manuscript had made it perfectly evident to allthat the subterranean outlet of the Caspakian River was theonly means of ingress or egress to the crater world beyond theimpregnable cliffs. Tyler's party had been able to navigatethis channel because their craft had been a submarine; but theToreador could as easily have flown over the cliffs assailed under them. Jimmy Hollis and Colin Short whiled awaymany an hour inventing schemes for surmounting the obstaclepresented by the barrier cliffs, and making ridiculous wagersas to which one Tom Billings had in mind; but immediately wewere all assured that we had raised Caprona, Billings calledus together.

"There was no use in talking about these things," he said,"until we found the island. At best it can be but conjecture onour part until we have been able to scrutinize the coast closely. Each of us has formed a mental picture of the Capronian seacoastfrom Bowen's manuscript, and it is not likely that any two ofthese pictures resemble each other, or that any of them resemblethe coast as we shall presently find it. I have in view threeplans for scaling the cliffs, and the means for carrying outeach is in the hold. There is an electric drill with plentyof waterproof cable to reach from the ship's dynamos to thecliff-top when the Toreador is anchored at a safe distancefrom shore, and there is sufficient half-inch iron rod to builda ladder from the base to the top of the cliff. It would be along, arduous and dangerous work to bore the holes and insertthe rungs of the ladder from the bottom upward; yet it can be done.

"I also have a life-saving mortar with which we might be ableto throw a line over the summit of the cliffs; but this planwould necessitate one of us climbing to the top with thechances more than even that the line would cut at the summit,or the hooks at the upper end would slip.

"My third plan seems to me the most feasible. You all saw anumber of large, heavy boxes lowered into the hold beforewe sailed. I know you did, because you asked me what theycontained and commented upon the large letter 'H' which waspainted upon each box. These boxes contain the various partsof a hydro-aeroplane. I purpose assembling this upon the stripof beach described in Bowen's manuscript--the beach where hefound the dead body of the apelike man--provided there issufficient space above high water; otherwise we shall have toassemble it on deck and lower it over the side. After it isassembled, I shall carry tackle and ropes to the cliff-top, andthen it will be comparatively simple to hoist the search-partyand its supplies in safety. Or I can make a sufficient numberof trips to land the entire party in the valley beyond thebarrier; all will depend, of course, upon what my firstreconnaissance reveals."

That afternoon we steamed slowly along the face of Caprona'stowering barrier.

"You see now," remarked Billings as we craned our necks to scanthe summit thousands of feet above us, "how futile it wouldhave been to waste our time in working out details of a plan tosurmount those." And he jerked his thumb toward the cliffs. "It would take weeks, possibly months, to construct a ladderto the top. I had no conception of their formidable height. Our mortar would not carry a line halfway to the crest of thelowest point. There is no use discussing any plan other thanthe hydro-aeroplane. We'll find the beach and get busy."

Late the following morning the lookout announced that he coulddiscern surf about a mile ahead; and as we approached, we allsaw the line of breakers broken by a long sweep of rolling surfupon a narrow beach. The launch was lowered, and five of usmade a landing, getting a good ducking in the ice-cold watersin the doing of it; but we were rewarded by the finding of theclean-picked bones of what might have been the skeleton of ahigh order of ape or a very low order of man, lying close tothe base of the cliff. Billings was satisfied, as were therest of us, that this was the beach mentioned by Bowen, and wefurther found that there was ample room to assemble thesea-plane.

Billings, having arrived at a decision, lost no time in acting,with the result that before mid-afternoon we had landed all thelarge boxes marked "H" upon the beach, and were busilyengaged in opening them. Two days later the plane wasassembled and tuned. We loaded tackles and ropes, water, foodand ammunition in it, and then we each implored Billings to letus be the one to accompany him. But he would take no one. That was Billings; if there was any especially difficult ordangerous work to be done, that one man could do, Billingsalways did it himself. If he needed assistance, he never called for volunteers--just selected the man or men heconsidered best qualified for the duty. He said that heconsidered the principles underlying all volunteer servicefundamentally wrong, and that it seemed to him that callingfor volunteers reflected upon the courage and loyalty of theentire command.

We rolled the plane down to the water's edge, and Billingsmounted the pilot's seat. There was a moment's delay as heassured himself that he had everything necessary. Jimmy Holliswent over his armament and ammunition to see that nothing hadbeen omitted. Besides pistol and rifle, there was themachine-gun mounted in front of him on the plane, andammunition for all three. Bowen's account of the terrors ofCaspak had impressed us all with the necessity for proper meansof defense.

At last all was ready. The motor was started, and we pushedthe plane out into the surf. A moment later, and she wasskimming seaward. Gently she rose from the surface of thewater, executed a wide spiral as she mounted rapidly,circled once far above us and then disappeared over the crestof the cliffs. We all stood silent and expectant, our eyesglued upon the towering summit above us. Hollis, who was nowin command, consulted his wrist-watch at frequent intervals.

"Gad," exclaimed Short, "we ought to be hearing from him pretty soon!"

Hollis laughed nervously. "He's been gone only ten minutes,"he announced.

"Seems like an hour," snapped Short. "What's that? Did youhear that? He's firing! It's the machine-gun! Oh, Lord; andhere we are as helpless as a lot of old ladies ten thousandmiles away! We can't do a thing. We don't know what's happening. Why didn't he let one of us go with him?"

Yes, it was the machine-gun. We would hear it distinctly forat least a minute. Then came silence. That was two weeks ago. We have had no sign nor signal from Tom Billings since.