"No, there's no use in _that_," said he, quite slowly. "If this thing
is what it appears to be, if it isn't merely some freakish bit of
stone weathered off somewhere, why, it means--my God, what _doesn't_
it mean?"

He shuddered, and glanced fearfully about him; all his calculations
already seemed crashing down about him; all his plans, half-formulated,
appeared in ruin.

New, vast and unknown factors of the struggle broadened rapidly before
his mental vision, _if_ this thing were really what it looked to be.

Keenly he peered at the bit of flint in his palm. There it lay, real
enough, an almost perfect specimen of the flaker's art, showing
distinctly where the wood had been applied to the core to peel off the
many successive layers.

It could not have been above three and a half inches long, by one and
a quarter wide, at its broadest part. The heft, where it had been
hollowed to hold the lashings, was well marked.

A diminutive object and a skilfully-formed one. At any other time or
place, the engineer would have considered the finding a good fortune;
but now--!

"Yet after all," he said aloud, as if to convince himself, "it's only
a bit of stone! What can it prove?"

His subconsciousness seemed to make answer: "So, too, the sign that