The Black River gang has trouble finding someone to guide them to Lost Angels, and finally has to settle for Mean Jake, who charges them seven hundred dollars for the privilege of his company. He threatens to add a hundred dollar surcharge if Vorpwhistle doesn't stop talking. He is, however, amenable when they pause along the way to give Vorpwhistle time to finally construct his artificial eye, which has a piece that goes in his eye socket and another piece that goes on top of his head.

When they get to Yuma a couple of weeks later, they find the town abandoned and several buildings smashed. Some investigation reveals... well, they end up using Elder Tanner's past vision, so let's just cut to the chase. He sees the town attacked by Mojave rattlers, three of them, and strange worm-men as well. They herd away all the townsfolk off into the desert. One of the worms has, instead of its normal writhing tentacles, a huge human face... a woman's face.

The discovery of some strangely mutated pigeons eating cats about town leads naturally into telling Robert about the time they were in Salt Lake City and helped the crazy scientist with her hybridization experiments (See "Quiet Interlude with Worms"). Words cannot fully describe his reaction to all this. He uses his own mystic powers to contact Eagle and receive a vision of the tunnels the rattlers herded their victims into. Also, Eagle shows him an incident some days ago where a caravan for Lost Angels was savagely attacked by Grimme cultists and winged angels and everyone killed... except for Nicodemus, who was merely brought down and left with both legs broken.

Regardless of Nicodemus, it seems important to rescue the townsfolk. After further negotiations with Mean Jake, who refuses to come along but will wait nearby for them for even more money, Vorpwhistle spends a couple of days making more rattler tranquilizer and charges his EKG.

Three days later they are close to the site, small tunnels opening on a scrubby rocky desert plain. To the south rise mountains, but there is no exposed bedrock nearby. They consider how to get to the tunnels unnoticed - they can't see any worms, but surely there are some around - and consider all sorts of daft plans. They finally retire to a rocky outcropping a few miles off and commence trying plans using the amazing chime of summoning that Vorpwhistle made a while back.

Unfortunately, he doesn't know the frequency for rattlers and is having trouble calculating it, even with the little mechanical calculator he built for just that occasion. First he summons some antelope (there's thought of running them across the plain as bait, but that doesn't go well as they can't really be herded). Then trying to go from them to horses, he gets a jackalope instead. Everyone waits quietly until it sticks the scientist in the leg as he tries to feed it and runs off.

Then he decides to bring the worms to them, and first summons actual worms from the ground (which he and Tobey eat some of), and then a hoop snake, which bites him (and then in revenge he and Tobey eat it), and tries several frequencies that don't actually produce anything. Small pieces of the chime keep popping off and having to be refitted.

So they're left that evening without an actual plan, but on the plus side they can easily get an antelope or a hoop snake if they get hungry.