Before the muscular writhing had ceased, his flesh began to change color. The tan of his face, stamped with lines of torture, became a reddish pink. Thousands of microscopic pinpoints of color spread in a creeping tide over his body. The silence held. Viciously, as though making certain no more life was left in his body, the silence held. When it lifted, went into nothingness, vanished, not more than a minute had passed. But in that minute Samuel Morton had died. The Lord of the Silent Death had emerged from the cell which had held him imprisoned for ages. * * * * * "Rocks" Malone--the name "Rocks" came from his calling--lived two blocks from the Asian Museum. But that wasn't his fault. He would have lived nearer if he could have found a room. In fact, for one deliriously happy month, he had slept on a cot in the basement of the museum. Then Sharp, the thin-faced business manager who had charge of the property and the finances, had caught him and given him the bounce. "Malone, get the hell out of here," Sharp said. "Of all the damned fools we have around here, you are probably the worst. I should think you would get enough archeology just by spending fourteen hours a day here." "Aw, hell, I'm not hurting anything. Why can't I sleep here if I want to?" Rocks had answered. "Because it is against the regulations, and you know it. Go on, now, before I report you to the Board." Grumbling, Rocks had taken his cot and left. And Sharp had reported him to the board anyhow, but that august body, in view of his youth and the pathetic interest he had in archeology, had not reprimanded him. They were archeologists themselves and they knew how the science gets into the blood and bones of a man. Secretly, they had rather approved of Rocks trying to sleep in the basement, so he could be near his beloved relics of dead and gone civilizations. They were grooming him for a place with the next expedition. "As likely a lad as I have ever seen," old Andreas McCumber had said about him. In his day McCumber had dug into half the buried cities in Asia Minor and it was his boast that he knew a man who had the makings of an archeologist when he saw one. "Of course he's young yet. But a little seasoning will cure that." Rocks was twenty-three, but to McCumber, who was past seventy, twenty-three was only late boyhood. "Besides," McCumber had rumbled in his beard at the board meeting. "Penny will--ah--comb my whiskers--if she--ah--discovers that I have permitted him to sleep in the basement." Penny was McCumber's grand-daughter. But Rocks had already located a room about two blocks from the museum and had moved in. That was why the police found him so quickly. It was an August night, as hot as hades, and Rocks was sleeping with both feet practically out the window, to take advantage of the late breeze. He awakened to the sound of his landlady's protesting voice.