He headed through the night toward the ditched small car.

It seemed a very long way, though he did stop and drink his fill from a little mountain stream over which a highway bridge had almost been completed.  In the night, though, and with hard going, it was not easy to estimate how far he’d gone.  In fact, he was anxiously debating if he mightn’t have passed the abandoned bulldozer when he came upon the place where blasting had been going on.  Still, it was a very long way to be negotiated over still-remaining tree stumps and the unfilled holes from which others had been pulled.

He reached the bulldozer and turned south, and at long last reached the highway.  His car should be no more than a quarter-mile away.  He moved toward it, close to the road’s edge.  He heard music.  It was faint, but vivid because it was the last sound that anybody would expect to hear in the hours before dawn in a wilderness deserted by mankind.  He scraped his foot on the roadway.  The music stopped instantly.  He said, “Jill?”

He heard her gasp.

“I found where Vale had been,” he said steadily.  “There was no blood there.  There’s no sign that he’s been killed.  Then I was caught myself.  I was put with three other men who were believed killed but who are still alive.  We escaped.  It is within reason to hope that Vale is unharmed and that he may escape or somehow be rescued.”

What he said was partly to make her sure that it was he who appeared in the darkness.  But it was technically true, too.  It was within reason to hope for Vale’s ultimate safety.  One can always hope, whatever the odds against the thing hoped for.  But Lockley thought that the odds against Vale’s living through the events now in progress were very great indeed.

Jill stepped out into the starlight.

“I wasn’t—­sure it was you,” she said with difficulty.  “I saw the things, you know, at a distance.  At first I thought they were men.  So when I first saw you—­dimly—­I was afraid.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t better news,” said Lockley.

“It’s good news!  It’s very good news,” she insisted as he drew near.  “If they’ve captured him, he’ll make them understand that he’s a man, and that men are intelligent and not just animals, and that they should be our friends and we theirs.”

The girl’s voice was resolute.  Lockley could imagine that all the time she’d been waiting, she’d been preparing to deny that even the worst news was final, until she looked on Vale’s dead body itself.

“Do you want to tell me exactly what you found out?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you while I work on the car,” said Lockley.  “We want to get moving away from here before daybreak.”

He went down to the little car, wedged in the saplings it had splintered and broken.  He began to clear it so he could lever it back on to the highway.  He used a broken sapling, and as he worked he told what had happened, including the three men in the compost pit shell and the dumping of assorted small wild life specimens into it with them.