r a potential weapon. If the girl had to die--and he--it would be
better to go out and meet his enemies, taking some of them with him in
full fight.

And then his heart leaped madly at the sight of something lying on one
of the shelves.

A stumpy black shape, it was, with a short barrel of cold blue steel,
and it looked as much out of place in that chamber as did the fur-clad
man who stared half-unbelievingly at it. It was a foreigner, as he
was, in the gloomy corridors and chambers of the race that worshipped
Aten. It too was American. It was a friend--his automatic!

To Wes Craig, bewildered and tired and sadly without hope, it almost
seemed to be alive, smiling at him with its wicked round mouth. He
picked it up, and it bolstered his courage, his hope and his energy
enormously. At once he leaped to the closed entrance-door and felt for
the lever that opened it. But there he paused a moment to think.

There was only the faintest chance of fighting free with Taia now.
There were at least thirty men outside, and he had only seven bullets.
And then he remembered where he was, and what the purpose of the
secret room was. He remembered, also, a certain nervous expression on
the High Priest's face that he had just seen....

He swung around and inspected the levers and crude wheels of wood that
led to a handle up in the niche, shoulder-high to whoever might stand
on the platform there. He had had experience with certain idols in
Egypt. He remembered particularly one that had been worshipped in a
degenerate age--its hands, its eyes. And then he stepped over the
sprawling body of the still unconscious priest and climbed to the
platform and his peep-hole again.

As he pressed himself forward in the niche, and applied his eye to the
slit, he gently fingered the handle of the large lever right beside
him. And he also measured the size of the slit in the right eye of the
god....

* * * * *

Craig had not minded shooting the murderous High Priest Hrihor, but he
did not want to kill the under-priest in the secret room. He had had
no choice in the matter. At the tensest moment in the dramatic scene
in the Temple, just when he had been hoping that the mysterious death
he had sent to Hrihor would frighten the worshippers away, he had
heard a slight rustling sound behind him, and had turned just in time
to see a hate-distorted face within feet of him, and a short
curved-knife upraised to strike h