“A full burro load of grub--with gun and ammunition he could live all winter--h’m!” He went on: “Looking now for a hideout--place where I can’t find him! Bill, my lad, you should pay more attention to details; one little oversight--such as a cigarette stub--has hanged a man before now. A good inch and a half of tobacco wasted here. You’ll be wanting a cigarette very badly, Bill, before you get another supply, remember.” He laid the stub down where he had found it and went on, haggard eyes peering this way and that, seeking further signs of the traitor’s presence. If Bill had been looking for his partner, then it was an odd twist of circumstance that had sent them both wandering around in the same labyrinth of caves and complicated katabothra without once permitting them to meet. If, on the other hand, Bill had been hunting a hiding place which Abington would never find--and the archaeologist was certain this was the case--he had a surprise in store. Just now Abington wanted most of all to get out of there and find his way back to their camp, where there should be food. If not--well, he had his automatic; he had seen game; and he was a fairly accurate shot. He would not starve. The passage sharply descended, as so many others had done. Abington went cautiously, lighting both walls and watching for obscure openings which for all he knew might be the one he should take. This whole country seemed to have been the playground of Vulcan, who rent mountains asunder, twisted whole ranges of hills and broke them into fragments and flung them aside when fresh land appeared above the great Sonora Sea and caught his sportive fancy. Just here the shattered formation of the old volcanic fissure lay in blocks that had been roughly hewn into the crude semblance of steps, down which Abington went slowly, choosing his footing with the deliberation of excessive weariness. His thirty-six-hour fast and that terrific climb up from the Pool of Evil Death--from the writings he had so named the place--had taken more out of him than he realized, until he began to negotiate this rather difficult descent. But he kept going, that cigarette stub serving now to urge him forward. * * * * * Stumbling from hunger and weariness, Abington emerged into another cavern of considerable extent and showing unmistakable signs of human occupancy in bygone ages. Crude pots--most of them broken--stood against the walls. Stone implements of various kinds, all thickly covered with dust, lay scattered about; and on the dust-strewn floor were the plain imprints of hiking boots. Bill, then, had visited this cavern, which proved that so far Abington had kept to the right trail.