"I'm sure of it, Joe. All they need is opportunity."
"So I'm to go back and get ten or twelve other guys," said Dolan, "and we'll clean out this Frog nursery."
"Right. I'll stay here and watch the whole procedure. Don't hurry back. Maybe a week or so will be better."
"Okay, Glade," said the scarred giant, moving at a crouch along the low-roofed way. "Be seeing you."
A turn in the ascending tunnel smothered the last low-spoken words, and Masson was left alone.
The blind men came into the cavern at the direction of the wrinkled old hags. They carefully stripped away layer upon layer of vegetation from the smallest and brownest mound.
Masson leaned further out over the rim of the hole above the cavern floor to watch. He had feared that the party of men from the crater would arrive before he could see the uncovering of a mound and the hatching of the Frog eggs.
The last layer of thidin and grass came away and perhaps a hundred of the leathery bluish ovoids lay revealed on their steaming warm nest. They were shapeless and limply alive now, that leather-hard outer shell rendered soft and rotten by the steady warmth of the heating vegetation. Masson saw two tiny monsters already free from their outgrown prisons as the blind men began scooping them up and carrying them to the empty pen beside the ones already occupied.
The young Butrads set up a throaty, hoarse bellowing that made the cave vibrate. It was not their feeding time but the excitement had aroused them and they knew but this one way to express their displeasure. Masson started to crawl back from the passage's outer lip even as the two old females started throwing thidin shoots and scraps of raw fish to the screeching young ones.
And the rotten gray rock betrayed him. A dozen times in the past eight days he had leaned out over the rim to watch, and a dozen times the rock had supported his weight. But this time it went scaling away, a great slab of it, and with it went the Earthman.