Again he was pacing restlessly back and forth in the little board shack that was Rawson's field head-quarters. Rawson, seated by the window, was looking at tables of comparative melting points. He glanced up sharply. "You haven't found it yet?" he questioned. "A forty-foot bailer! Now that's a nice easy little thing to mislay." Riley had followed the excited Smithy into the room; he stood silently by the door until he caught Rawson's questioning glance. "Forty feet or forty inches," he said, "'tis gone! 'Twas there by the derrick last night, and this marnin'--" "That's fine," Rawson interrupted with heavy sarcasm. "I haven't enough down below ground to keep my mind occupied--I need a few mysteries up top. Now do you really expect me to believe that a thing like that bailer has been carried off?" This time it was Smithy who interrupted. "You can just practise believing on that, Dean," he said. "When you get so you can believe a forty-foot bailer can vanish into thin air, then you'll be ready for what I've got. This is what I came in to tell you: that one truckload of steel grillage beams for the turbine footings--they were put out where we surveyed for the first power house--dumped on the sand...." "Well?" questioned Rawson, as Smithy paused. His look was daring Smithy to say what he knew was coming. "Five tons of steel beams," said Smithy softly, "gone--just like that! Just a hollow in the sand!" * * * * * The big figure of the Irish foreman was still beside the door. Rawson saw one clumsy hand make the sign of the Cross; then Riley held that hand before him and stared at it in horror. "Divils' blood," he whispered. "And I dipped my hands in it. Saints protect us all!" "That will be all of that!" Dean Rawson's usually quiet voice was as full of crackling emphasis as if it had been charged with electrical energy. "If anyone thinks that I have gone this far, just to be scared out by some dirty sabotage.... "I see it all. I don't know how they did it, but it's all come since the gold was found. Someone else wants it. They think they can scare off the men, maybe take a pot-shot at me, come back here and clean up later on, pull up gold by the pailful, I suppose--" Riley leaped forward and banged his big fist down on the table. "Right ye are!" he shouted, until loitering men in the open "street" outside stared curiously. "Divils they are, but they're the kind of divils we know how to handle. And now I'll tell ye somethin' else, sir: I know where they are hidin'. "There was no work for anyone last night, but I'm used to bein' up. I couldn't sleep. I was wanderin' around, thinkin' of nothin' at all out of the way, and I thought I saw some shadows, like it might be men, way off on the sand. Then later over to the old ghost town, d'ye mind! I saw a light, a queer, green sort of light. Sure, a fool I was callin' meself at the time, but now I believe it." * * * * *