side of in a scrap."

The foreman beamed with pleasure: Rawson went on in crisp sentences:

"Take these guns. Take plenty of ammunition. Pick five or six men you
know you can depend on. Mount guard around this camp to-night. I'll
post an order saying you're in charge--and I'm telling you now to use
those guns on anything you see.

"Smithy," he said to the other man who had been quietly listening,
"you and I are going to start for town. Only Riley will know that
we're gone for the night. We'll have a little listening post of our
own up here in the hills."

But Rawson postponed their going. More material was arriving; one
casting in particular needed all the men and Rawson's supervision to
place it on the sand where an erection crew could swing it into place
at some later date. And then, when he and Smithy had driven away from
camp with the distant city as their announced destination, Rawson
still did not go directly to the mountain grade. He swung off instead
where rolling sand-hills blocked all view from the camp, and he headed
the car into a gusty wind that brought whirling clouds of dust; they
almost obscured the crumbling walls at the volcano's base.

The ghost towns that are found here and there in the forsaken
wilderness of the West are depressing to one who walks their empty
streets. Little Rhyolite was no exception. In gray, ghostly walls,
empty windows stared steadily, disconcertingly like sockets of dead
eyes in tattered, weatherbeaten skulls.

* * * * *

Dean and Smithy walked among the roofless ruins. Lizards, the color of
the cold, gray walls, slipped from sight on silent, clinging feet.
Once a sidewinder, almost invisible against the sand, looped away from
the intruders with smooth deliberation.

"No marks here," said Rawson at last. "Even an Indian can't read sign
in this ashy sand when the wind has dusted it off."

He turned his head from a whirl of fine ash where the wind, sweeping
around a wall of stone, was scouring at a sand dune's sloping side.

"Dean," said Smithy, "old Riley may have been looking for banshees
when he saw these lights. Superstitious old cuss, Riley! Maybe there
wasn't anything here. But, Dean, there's some confoundedly funny
things happening around here."

"Are you telling me?" Rawson asked grimly. "But we want to remember
one thing," he added: "We've punched a hole in the ground, and we've
got into a place that is hot enough to melt Krieg