.

"Sure. What about it?"

"I suppose I'm to give it to you when the first cave-woman appears."

"That's what!"

I pondered the matter for a while in silence. I could see no risk in
paying him this draft on sight.

"All right," I said. "Bring on your cave-dwellers."

Hour succeeded hour, but no cave-dwellers came down to the pool to drink.
We ate luncheon--a bit of cold duck, some koonti-bread, and a dish of
palm-cabbage. I smoked an inexpensive cigar; Mink lit a more pretentious
one. Afterward he played on his concertina at my suggestion on the chance
that the music might lure a cave-girl down the hill. Nymphs were
sometimes caught that way, and modern science seems to be reverting more
and more closely to the simpler truths of the classics which, in our
ignorance and arrogance, we once dismissed as fables unworthy of
scientific notice.

[Illustration: "He played on his concertina ... on the chance that the
music might lure a cave-girl down the hill."]

However this Broadway faun piped in vain: no white-footed dryad came
stealing through the ferns to gaze, perhaps to dance to the concertina's
plaintive melodies.

So after a while he put his concertina into his pocket, cocked his derby
hat on one side, gathered his little bandy legs under his person, and
squatted there in silence, chewing the wet and bitter end of his extinct
cigar.

Toward mid-afternoon I unslung my field-glasses again and surveyed the
hill.

At first I noticed nothing, not even a buzzard; then, of a sudden, my
attention was attracted to something moving among the fern-covered slabs
of coquina just above where we lay concealed--a slim, graceful shape half
shadowed under a veil of lustrous hair which glittered like gold in the
sun.

"Mink!" I whispered hoarsely. "One of them is coming! This--this indeed
is the stupendous and crowning climax of my scientific career!"

His comment was incredibly coarse: "Gimme the dough," he said without a
tremor of surprise. Indeed there was a metallic ring of menace in his low
and entirely cold tones as he laid one hand on my arm. "No welchin'," he
said, "or I put the whole show on the bum!"

The overwhelming excitement of the approaching crisis neutralized my
disgust; I fished out the certified check from my pocket and flung the
miserable scrap of paper at him. "Get your machine ready!" I hissed. "Do
you understand what these moments mean to the civilized world!"

"I sure do," he said.

Nearer and