Lord of the Silent Death

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."