up against something we haven't
dared speak of to each other. Don't tell me that it's just men we've
got to meet--"

"Wait," Rawson begged in a hushed whisper. "Wait till we know. That's
why I didn't dare go out without something definite to report. We'll
go up--but not here. We'll get a line on this up top."

* * * * *

He led the way from the crumbling walls and skirted the mountain's
base to the place where he had climbed before. And, with the help of a
supporting arm at times, he found himself again in the great cleft in
the rocks.

Darkness now made the passageway a place of somber shadows. The broad
cupped crater lay beyond in silent waiting; the vast sand-filled pit
seemed, under the starlight, to have been only that instant cooled.
The twisted rocks that formed the rim had been caught in the very
instant of their tortures and frozen to deep silence and eternal
death: the black masses of tufa, protruding from the packed ashy sand
might have been buried by the smothering mass but a moment before. It
was a place of death, a place where nothing moved--until again the
breeze that whirled gustily over the saw-tooth crags snatched at the
sand in that lowest pit and drew it up in a spiral of dust.

The word was on Rawson's lips. "Dust--dust in the crater. Fool! I said
I could read sign; I thought I was a desert man."

"Dust? And why shouldn't there be dust? How do you usually have your
volcanoes arranged, old man?"

"Fine dust!" Rawson interrupted in the same whisper. He was glancing
sharply about him as if in fear of being overheard. "See, the wind is
blowing it. Coarse sand and pumice--that's to be expected; but light
dust in a place that the winds have been sweeping for the last million
years! I don't have them arranged that way, Smithy--not unless the
sand has been recently disturbed!"

* * * * *

He moved soundlessly across the sand. There was no chance for
concealment; the surface was too smooth for that. Yet he wished, as he
moved onward down the long, gentle slope, that he had been able to
keep under cover. In all the wide bowl of the great crater top was
nothing but dead ashes of fires gone long centuries before, coarse,
igneous rock--nothing to set the little nerves of one's spine to
tingling. Rawson tried to tell himself he was alone. Even the gun in
his hand seemed an absurd precaution. Yet he knew, with a certainty
that went beyond m