robbery with a deep-laid, premeditated purpose."

"Nothing else is gone?" queried Kennedy.

"Nothing," returned the professor. "That's the strangest part of
it--to me. It was a peculiar dagger, too," he continued
reminiscently. "I say that it was valuable, for on the blade were
engraved some curious Inca characters. I wasn't able to take the
time to decipher them, down there, for the age of the metal made
them almost illegible. But now that I have all my stuff unpacked
and arranged after my trip, I was just about to try--when along
comes a thief and robs me. We can't have the University Museum
broken into that way, you know, Kennedy."

"I should say not," readily assented Craig. "I'd like to look the
place over."

"Just what I wanted," exclaimed Norton, heartily delighted, and
leading the way.

We walked across the campus with him to the Museum, still
chatting. Norton was a tall, spare man, wiry, precisely the type
one would pick to make an explorer in a tropical climate. His
features were sharp, suggesting a clear and penetrating mind and a
disposition to make the most of everything, no matter how slight.
Indeed that had been his history, I knew. He had come to college a
couple of years before Kennedy and myself, almost penniless, and
had worked his way through by doing everything from waiting on
table to tutoring. To-day he stood forth as a shining example of
self-made intellectual man, as cultured as if he had sprung from a