se. It happened directly in front of the
Schermerhorn twins. They turned their rifles on the tiger and killed it
instantly; but the man was dead, too.

* * * * *

Elvin was surprised to see tears in the eyes of the twins, but he
credited it to the unstable emotions of adolescence. Both of them had
acted with maturity when they faced the tiger; no adult could have done
more. Still they wept, even though the man was a stranger.

By eight o'clock the stirrings in the jungle had stopped. The men began
to relax. Waitresses from the Bid-a-Wee Cafe brought out doughnuts and
coffee and distributed them among the crowd.

There came, then, a new disturbance at the far end of Main Street, a
shouting of tumultuous voices. A mob moved slowly into the center of
town, clinging to the sides of an antiquated dump truck.

"Gold! Gold! Gold!" It was like a chant shouted with ecstatic antiphony.
The dump truck stopped and Elvin saw the unbelievable--gleaming heaps of
gold shoveled like gravel into the back of the vehicle. The driver stood
on the running board, weaving drunkenly.

"The whole damn' desert," he shouted. "All of it, as far as I could
see--all pure gold!"

He took a shovel and scattered the nuggets and dust among the throng.
"Take all you like. Lots more where this came from!"

The mob stirred slowly at first, and then more and more violently, as
the men began to race for their cars. The vehicles were already crowded
close together. Gears ground and fenders crumbled. The street became
helplessly jammed with locked cars. Only a few on the fringe escaped.
Angry arguments broke out, degenerating into fist fights. The peak
violence cooled a little after a few heads had been smashed, and
grudgingly the men turned to the task of freeing their cars.

Donald snatched Elvin's arm. "Stay here with Pop," he shouted above the
clatter. "Dave and I are going back to the ranch. Mom may need us. The
desert runs right up to the edge of our property, you know."

"Going to walk?"

"I think we can get the station wagon out. It's pretty far back."

Elvin and Pop Schermerhorn worked side by side helping untangle the mass
of vehicles. After an hour order had been more or less restored, and the
mob had thinned, since each of the freed cars had been driven off at top
speed to the desert bonanza.

For a moment the sky darkened. Elvin looked up. The jungle had
disappeared and a medieval castle, complete with