shaken voices.

Meantime, the elevators inside the building were rushing and
clanging, and the hall filled with a white-faced mob, desperately
anxious to find out what had happened and why. The people poured
out of the door and stared about blankly. There was a peculiar
expression of doubt on every one of their faces. Each one was asking
himself if he were awake, and having proved that by pinches, openly
administered, the next query was whether they had gone mad.

Arthur led Estelle cautiously among the tents.

The village contained about a dozen wigwams. Most of them were made
of strips of birch-bark, cleverly overlapping each other, the seams
cemented with gum. All had hide flaps for doors, and one or two were
built almost entirely of hides, sewed together with strips of sinew.

Arthur made only a cursory examination of the village. His principal
motive in taking Estelle there was to give her some mental occupation
to ward off the reaction from the excitement of the cataclysm.

He looked into one or two of the tents and found merely couches of
hides, with minor domestic utensils scattered about. He brought
from one tent a bow and quiver of arrows. The workmanship was good,
but very evidently the maker had no knowledge of metal tools.

Arthur's acquaintance with archeological subjects was very slight,
but he observed that the arrow-heads were chipped, and not rubbed
smooth. They were attached to the shafts with strips of gut or
tendon.

Arthur was still pursuing his investigation when a sob from Estelle
made him stop and look at her.

"Oh, what are we going to do?" she asked tearfully. "What _are_
we going to do? Where are we?"

"You mean, _when_ are we," Arthur corrected with a grim smile. "I
don't know. Way back before the discovery of America, though. You
can see in everything in the village that there isn't a trace
of European civilization. I suspect that we are several thousand
years back. I can't tell, of course, but this pottery makes me
think so. See this bowl?"

He pointed to a bowl of red clay lying on the ground before one of
the wigwams.

"If you'll look, you'll see that it isn't really pottery at all. It's
a basket that was woven of reeds and then smeared with clay to
make it fire-resisting. The people who made that didn't know about
baking clay to make it stay put. When America was discovered nearly
all the tribes knew something about pottery."

"But what are we going to do?" Estelle tear