holding the door for her to pass out.

"Well," I said, when we were alone, "what is it--a romance or a crime?"

"Both, I think," he replied abstractedly, taking up the experiment which
the visit had interrupted.

"I think," he remarked late in the afternoon, as he threw off his
acid-stained smock, "that I will go over to the University library
before it closes and refresh my mind on some of those old Peruvian
antiquities and traditions. The big fish or _peje grande_, as I remember
it, was the name given by the natives to one of the greatest buried
treasures about the time of Pizarro's conquest. If I remember
correctly, Mansiche was the great cacique, or something of that
sort--the ruler in northern Peru at that time. He is said to have left a
curse on any native who ever divulged the whereabouts of the treasure
and the curse was also to fall on any Spaniard who might discover it."

For more than an hour Kennedy delved into the archeological lore in the
library. Then he rejoined me at the laboratory and after a hasty bite of
dinner we hurried down to the station.

That evening we stepped off the train at Atlantic Beach to make our way
to the Beach Inn. The resort was just springing into night life, as the
millions of incandescent lights flooded it with a radiance which we
could see reflected in the sky long before our train arrived. There was
something intoxicating about the combination of the bracing salt air and
the gay throngs seeking pleasure.

Instead of taking the hotel 'bus, Kennedy decided to stroll to the inn
along the boardwalk. We were just about to turn into the miniature park
which separated the inn from the walk when we noticed a wheel chair
coming in our direction. In it were a young man and a woman of
well-preserved middle age. They had evidently been enjoying the ocean
breeze after dinner, and the sound of music had drawn them back to the
hotel.

We entered the lobby of the inn just as the first number of the evening
concert by the orchestra was finishing. Kennedy stood at the desk for a
moment while Senorita Mendoza was being paged, and ran his eye over the
brilliant scene. In a minute the boy returned and led us through the
maze of wicker chairs to an alcove just off the hall which later in the
evening would be turned into a ballroom.

On a wide settee, the Senorita was talking with animation to a tall,
clean-cut young man in evening clothes, whose face bore the tan of a sun
much stronger than