I'm rather baffled that I'm the first to comment...
Anyway, I've been turning the last clump of pages over in my head, and I was thinking about several things. First off, whatever happened to the jet of fire in the first chapters? Was it another one of those Martian capsules or just a threat to the people of Earth? Secondly, how could such an abnormal thing as a jet of fire shot from Mars, a planet everyone thought of as devoid of life, go almost completely unnoticed? Third, I highly doubt that a town full of hicks living in the early 1900's is at all capable of fending off a horde of aliens with technology at least a hundred years ahead of Earth technology. What are your thoughts?