"Or I'm going
nuts."

As their eyes grew accustomed to the changing light, the pit grew
clear. The animals became visible against the floor of the pit. There
were thousands of them lying about the chamber. They spread over the
floor carpeting it with rich fur like a deep rug of precious black and
silver.

One thing held Jim Drake spellbound. Every animal had its head lifted
toward the throne atop the bear's back.

His eyes lifted again slowly. His vision broke through the bright haze
of light. Stretched out in sleep across the stony back was the perfect
nude figure of a girl. She seemed frozen in death, yet the bronzed
flesh was alive and throbbing. It was the same girl he had saved from
Wildwood Zoo--_Sylvia Fanton_!

* * * * *

He tried to take his eyes away from the vision but could not. Color
seemed to splash and caress her body as though it alone gave her the
power to exist. Then he knew what it was that made her look human. The
light preserved her body during daylight hours, or she would have been
forced to enter the body of a fox and mingle in the pit with her own
kind.

A queen, Queen of the Flaming Diamond, doomed to lie dead until she
could be restored to her normal life.

"What do we do now?" Puffy asked in a tense whisper.

"What I want to know first," Drake said wonderingly, "is who saved us
from Lardner's mob?"

"Whoever it was," Adams offered, "he'll never escape them alive."

Soft footsteps came from behind them.

"But you are wrong!"

Drake pivoted, and faced the same man whom he had met in the apartment
that night he lost the fur. The man who brought his last message from
Sylvia Fanton.

"You see," the man went on quietly, "I am not your enemy. I asked you
to stay out of this, but I could not desert you."

Drake's face was lighted in a relieved smile. His hand gripped the
other's.

"Now you have saved our life, why did you do it?"

"Because," the man said simply, "you are human and you are good.
Sylvia Fanton asked me to help you, and I am her brother."

Puffy Adams sat down abruptly on the cave floor.

"And I," he said unbelievingly, "am the keeper of Cinderella Drake,
the sap who still looks for the silver slipper."

"But Sylvia is no fox woman," Drake protested. "She's too warm, too
human!"

For a moment there was silence. Then a warm smile lighted the
stranger's eyes.

"We are all human," he said. "We are early settlers who came to this