* *

Jim Dent stooped and picked up something lying imbedded in the mud at
the edge of the black pool, and slipped it into his pocket. He had
been present at the inquest and had gone back to Columbia. That had
been five years before.

Professor McDowd, the palaeontologist, had identified the object Jim
had found as the milk molar of _merychippus insignis_, the miocene
representative of the modern horse. And that had made Jim Dent think
furiously.

The catastrophe must have been a gigantic one to have flung up that
fossil tooth from strata far beneath the level of the earth's surface.
More, there were even traces of archaean deposits around the borders
of the pool, whose depth, in the center, was ascertained to be 164
feet.

Black, silent, uninhabited, unstirred save by a passing breeze, the
pool had remained those five years past. The spot was shunned as
haunted or accursed by the superstitious country folks. Dense
underbrush had grown up around it.

Periodically, Jim had gone out to visit it. That was how he had come
to invest in a private plane. It was only an hour to the
flying-fields, and less than an hour from there to Peconic Bay. What
he expected to achieve he did not know. In the back of his mind was
the belief that some day he would light upon some clue that would
tell something of the unusual catastrophe.

And then that afternoon he had been shaken to the depths when a
message came to him in Lucille's voice over the telephone:

"I've heard from dad!"

* * * * *

Winging his way eastward through the storm, Jim Dent was mentally
reconstructing all that had led up to the present moment.

Lucille had finished her high school course and gone into business
life. Jim had found a position for her as secretary to a small group
of physicists, who were conducting private investigations, a position
for which her training well fitted her. She had done well. He had kept
in touch with her.

Six months before, their relations had altered. They had realized that
they were in love with each other. In the months that followed they
had discovered all sorts of things about each other that neither had
suspected, which might be summed up by saying that they had become all
in all to each other.

It was so amazing, this transformation of ordinary friendship into
radiant love, that they were still bewildered over it. They were to be
married at the end of the year.

It was the