urry."

He turned back to his watch. Ordering Chiu-Ming to stay with him I
followed Ruth and Drake down the ruined stairway. At the bottom she came
to me, laid little hands on my shoulders.

"Walter," she breathed, "I'm frightened. I'm so frightened I'm afraid to
tell even Mart. He doesn't like them, either, these little things you're
going to see. He likes them so little that he's afraid to let me know
how little he does like them."

"But what are they? What's to fear about them?" asked Drake.

"See what you think!" She led us slowly, almost reluctantly toward the
rear of the fortress. "They lay in a little heap at the mouth of the
cleft where we heard the noises. Martin picked them up and dropped them
in a sack before we ran through the hollow.

"They're grotesque and they're almost CUTE, and they make me feel as
though they were the tiniest tippy-tip of the claw of some incredibly
large cat just stealing around the corner, a terrible cat, a cat as big
as a mountain," she ended breathlessly.

We climbed through the crumbling masonry into a central, open court.
Here a clear spring bubbled up in a ruined and choked stone basin; close
to the ancient well was their pony, contentedly browsing in the thick
grass that grew around it. From one of its hampers Ruth took a large
cloth bag.

"To carry them," she said, and trembled.

We passed through what had once been a great door into another chamber
larger than that we had just left; and it was in better preservation,
the ceiling unbroken, the light dim after the blazing sun of the court.
Near its center she halted us.

Before me ran a two-feet-wide ragged crack, splitting the floor and
dropping down into black depths. Beyond was an expanse of smooth
flagging, almost clear of debris.

Drake gave a low whistle. I followed his pointing finger. In the wall
at the end whirled two enormous dragon shapes, cut in low relief. Their
gigantic wings, their monstrous coils, covered the nearly unbroken
surface, and these CHIMERAE were the shapes upon the upthrust blocks of
the haunted roadway.

In Ruth's gaze I read a nameless fear, a half shuddering fascination.

But she was not looking at the cavern dragons.

Her gaze was fixed upon what at my first glance seemed to be a raised
and patterned circle in the dust-covered floor. Not more than a foot in
width, it shone wanly with a pale, metallic bluish luster, as though,
I thought, it had been recently polished. Compared with