Not until he had crossed the ancient line of Madison Avenue and
penetrated some hundred yards still further along Twenty-Third Street,
did he find what he sought. "Ah!" he suddenly cried. "Here's something
now!"

And, scrambling over a pile of grass-grown rubbish with a couple of
time-bitten iron wheels peering out--evidently the wreckage of an
electric car--he made his way around a gaping hole where a side-walk
had caved in and so reached the interior of a shop.

"Yes, prospects here, certainly prospects!" he decided carefully
inspecting the place. "If this didn't use to be Currier & Brown's
place, I'm away off my bearings. There ought to be _something_ left."

"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.