"Ah! Would you?" and he flung a hastily-snatched rock at a rattlesnake that had begun its dry, chirring defiance on top of what once had been a counter.
The snake vanished, while the rock rebounding, crashed through glass.
Stern wheeled about with a cry of joy. For there, he saw, still stood near the back of the shop a showcase from within which he caught a sheen of tarnished metal.
Quickly he ran toward this, stumbling over the loose dooring, mossy and grass-grown. There in the case, preserved as you have seen Egyptian relics two or three thousand years old, in museums, the engineer beheld incalculable treasures. He thrilled with a savage, strange delight.
Another blow, with the sledge, demolished the remaining glass.
He trembled with excitement as he chose what he most needed.
"I certainly do understand now," said he, "why the New Zealanders took Captain Cook's old barrel-hoops and refused his cash. Same here! All the money in this town couldn't buy this rusty knife--" as he seized a corroded blade set in a horn handle, yellowed with age. And eagerly he continued the hunt.
Fifteen minutes later he had accumulated a pair of scissors, two rubber combs, another knife, a revolver, an automatic, several handfuls of cartridges and a Cosmos bottle.
All these he stowed in a warped, mildewed remnant of a Gladstone bag, taken from a corner where a broken glass sign, "Leather Goods," lay among the rank confusion.
"I guess I've got enough, now, for the first load," he judged, more excited than if he had chanced upon a blue-clay bed crammed with Cullinan diamonds. "It's a beginning, anyhow. Now for Beatrice!"
Joyously as a schoolboy with a pocketful of new-won marbles, he made his exit from the ruins of the hardware store, and started back toward the tower.
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!