ere hung. Beyond their smooth slopes a spreading
glow gave promise of the rising moon.

Rawson headed the car downgrade in readiness for a quick return; he
ran it close to the inner wall of rock out of which the road had been
carved, then seated himself on the outer rim without thought of the
thousand-foot sheer drop beneath his dangling legs. With a glass he
was sweeping the foreground where the scattered lights of the camp
were like vagrant reflections of the stars thrown back to them from
the dead sea of sand.

"Riley's on the job," he told Smithy when he passed over the glass
later on. "And I've got my pocket portable." He took the little radio
receiver from his pocket as he spoke. "Riley will signal me from my
office if he sees anything."

The moon had cleared the mountains; its flood of light poured across
their rugged heights and filled the bowl of Tonah Basin as some master
of a great theatrical switchboard might have flooded a dark stage with
magic illumination, half concealing, transforming whatever things it
touched.

All the hard brilliance of sunlit sands was gone. The rolling dunes
were softly mellow; the more distant mountains were dream-peaks. Half
real, they seemed, and half imagined in a veil of haze. Even the
buildings, the scattered piles of material, the gaunt skeleton of the
derrick--their stark blackness of outline and clear-cut shadow were
gone; the whole land was drenched in the mystery and magic of a desert
moon.

* * * * *

Rawson and the man beside him were silent. Even a mind perplexed by
unanswerable problems must pause before the witchery of nature's
softer moods.

"If Riley were here," said Smithy softly at last, "he wouldn't be
seeing any devils. Fairies, pixies, the 'little people'--he'd be
seeing them dancing."

Rawson shot his companion a sidelong, appraising glance. He had never
penetrated before to this sub-stratum of Smithy's nature. He had
never, in fact, felt that he knew much about Smithy, whose past was
still the one topic that was never mentioned. He saw his thick mop of
black hair and the profile of his face as Smithy stared fixedly down
toward the sleeping camp. It was a matter of a minute or so before he
knew that the head was outlined against an aura of red light.

Smithy was seated at his right. Off beyond him the three extinct
craters made a dark background where the moonlight had not yet reached
to their inner slopes. Smithy's