But hardly had he gone a hundred feet when all at once he drew back with a sharp cry of wonder and alarm. There at his feet, in plain view under a little maple sapling, lay something that held him frozen with astonishment. He snatched it up, dropping the sledge to do so. "What? _What?_" he stammered; and at the thing he stared with widened, uncomprehending eyes. "Merciful God! How--what--?" cried he. The thing he held in his hand was a broad, fat, flint assegai-point! CHAPTER IX HEADWAY AGAINST ODDS Stern gazed at this alarming object with far more trepidation than he would have eyed a token authentically labeled: "Direct from Mars." For the space of a full half-minute he found no word, grasped no coherent thought, came to no action save to stand there, thunder-struck, holding the rotten leather bag in one hand, the spear-head in the other. Then, suddenly, he shouted a curse and made as though to fling it clean away. But ere it had left his grasp, he checked himself. "No, there's no use in _that_," said he, quite slowly. "If this thing is what it appears to be, if it isn't merely some freakish bit of stone weathered off somewhere, why, it means--my God, what _doesn't_ it mean?" He shuddered, and glanced fearfully about him; all his calculations already seemed crashing down about him; all his plans, half-formulated, appeared in ruin. New, vast and unknown factors of the struggle broadened rapidly before his mental vision, _if_ this thing were really what it looked to be. Keenly he peered at the bit of flint in his palm. There it lay, real enough, an almost perfect specimen of the flaker's art, showing distinctly where the wood had been applied to the core to peel off the many successive layers. It could not have been above three and a half inches long, by one and a quarter wide, at its broadest part. The heft, where it had been hollowed to hold the lashings, was well marked. A diminutive object and a skilfully-formed one. At any other time or place, the engineer would have considered the finding a good fortune; but now--! "Yet after all," he said aloud, as if to convince himself, "it's only a bit of stone! What can it prove?" His subconsciousness seemed to make answer: "So, too, the sign that Robinson Crusoe found on the beach was only a human foot-mark. Do not deceive yourself!" In deep thought the engineer stood there a moment or two. Then, "Bah!" cried he. "What does it matter, anyhow? Let it come--whatever it is! If I hadn't just happened to find this, I'd have been none the wiser." And he dropped the bit of flint into the bag along with the other things. Again he picked up his sledge, and, now more cautiously, once more started forward.