closer range was something that froze
him to a tense, waiting crouch.

This wall of solid stone--it was not solid as it had seemed. There was
a doorway; the stone was swung inward; and at one side in a
straight-marked crack, he saw a thread of light.

He snapped off his own flash. Someone was there! Someone had beaten
him to it! He held himself crouched and rigid at the thought. But who
could it be? The utter silence and the steady, unchanging, pale-green
light showed him the folly of the thought. There was no one there;
there couldn't be anyone.

* * * * *

His hand, that trembled with excitement, reached across and over the
skeleton remains posted like a ghostly guard before the door. He threw
his weight upon the stone.

Its bearings groaned, but it moved at his touch. The stone swung
slowly and ponderously into a silent room, and Garry Connell stared
wide-eyed and wondering where rock walls, in carved and colored
brilliance reflected the softest of diffused light.

A great room, hewn from the solid rock!--and Garry tried to see it and
all that it held at one glance. He grasped the extent of the stone
vault, a hundred feet across; the distant walls were plain in the soft
light.

One high point of flashing color caught his eye and held it in
marveling amazement. A thing of beauty and grace. It was a shining,
silvery shape like a mushroom growth; it towered high in air, almost
to the ceiling, a slender rod that swelled and opened to a curved and
gleaming head. Graceful as a fairy parasol, huge enough to shelter a
giant, it was like nothing he had ever seen.

But there was no time now for conjectures. He made no effort to
understand; he wanted only to see what might be here; and his eyes
flashed quickly over sculptured walls and a stone floor where metal
boxes were arranged in orderly rows.

Hundreds of them, he estimated; huge cases, some eight or ten feet
long. Two nearby were raised above the floor on bases of carved stone.
Lusterless gray in color--metal, unmistakably--and in them....

"No use getting all hopped up over treasure hunting," Garry had told
himself. But under all his incredulous amazement had been flickering
thoughts of what he might find.

He stared hungrily at those two boxes near him. Each of the hundreds
was big enough to hold a fortune. He reached for a metal bar beside
the scattered bones, and, like a man in a sleep-walking dream, he
stepped across thos