stubby mass at the cable's end, where all that remained of the
long tube he had sent down was a dangling two feet of discolored
metal, warped and distorted. The lower part, a full twenty feet in
length, had been fused cleanly off.

Dean Rawson was there to watch the next attempt. Again Riley's roaring
bass rolled out the count, but this time the call stopped at
fifty-two-seven. The jangling bell told that the carrier had touched.

"Divil a bit do I understand this," Riley was calling. "We're right at
the point where we dropped through into the clear. Right at the roof
of the big cave--fifty-two-seven, it says--and no lower do we go. The
bottom of the hole is plugged!"

* * * * *

Rawson made no reply. He was scowling while he stared speculatively at
the mouth of the twenty-inch bore--a vertical tunnel that led from the
drilling floor down, down to some inner vault. "Molten gold," he was
thinking. "It melted a cylinder of the new Krieger alloy--melted it
when its melting point is way higher than that of any rock that we've
hit. And now the bore is closed...."

He was trying vainly to project his mental vision through those miles
of hard rock to see what manner of mystery this was into which he had
probed. He shook his head slowly in baffled speculation, then spoke
sharply.

"Drill it out!" he ordered. "We're into a hot spot sure enough, though
I can't just figure out the how of it. But we'll tame it, Smithy. Send
down the drill. Clean it out. Then we'll poke around down there and
get the answer to all this."

Five days were needed to send down the big drill with a new drill-head
replacing the other too fouled with gold for any use. The tubular
sections, a hundred feet in length, were hooked together and lowered
one by one. Each joint meant the coupling of the air-pipe as well.
Air, mixed with water from the outer jacket, must come foaming up
through the central core to bring the powdered rock to the surface.

Five days, then one hour of boring, and another five days to pull out
the drill before Rawson could hope for his answer. But he found it in
the severed shaft of the great drill where the head had been melted
completely off. The big stem that would have resisted all but electric
furnace heat, and been cut through like a tallow candle in the blast
of an oxy-acetylene flame.

CHAPTER III

_Red Drops_

The flat-roofed shack of yellow boards that was Dean Rawson's "of