“Dr. Henry Powell he was, an elderly physics professor, lately retired from Cambridge. That was all he ever told me of his past, for even after we became better acquainted, he was close-mouthed about his former career. By chance I found the reason for that. A friend told me that Powell had left Cambridge under a cloud. It seems that he had been working for many months in collaboration with a fellow professor, Wooding by name, on an element-changing experiment. You know, transmute uranium into radium, or radium into lead. Modern alchemy they were attempting. After a year of work together the two had split over some disagreement, each carrying on the experiment alone. Wooding was the first of the two to publish his results, and immediately Powell claimed that his former partner in work had stolen his own results.

“There was rather a scandal over the matter, but an investigating committee ruled that Powell’s charges were unproved, so he was retired from the university. I never talked with Powell on the matter, and never learned the right of it, but I could see that the thing had embittered him greatly, so that he was wont to snarl viciously at all scientific people, and in fact, nearly all people, of any kind. He grated on me considerably, sometimes, for he was like an animated bottle of acid, thin lipped, sardonic, sneering. But one thing drew us together, a common interest in archeology. In fact, that branch of knowledge was my work, at the museum, and Powell had taken it up as a sort of hobby, to occupy his restless mind, I suppose. We got acquainted through his visits to the museum and had many a talk thereafter.

“He was intensely interested in the ‘vitrified forts’ of Scotland, as they are called. Piles of stone ruins on some of the Scottish hills, and in a few valleys, with some of the stones melted into glass. You’ve heard of them? Well, it was Powell’s radical theory that those glassy streaks were not made by lightning, as is commonly supposed, but by some powerful weapon or ray, striking from above. You will see what a revolution in conventional archeological thought would be the result, if he could prove that. He got to be a fanatic on the subject and spent most of his time roaming about Scotland and hunting and digging in such ruins.

“He had been off on such a trip for several weeks when he sent me an urgent wire, from a Scotch village named Dykirk. He had made a great discovery, he said, but needed my help, and offered me a handsome salary for my aid. My own interest was aroused by his message, so I procured the necessary leave from the museum and went at once, being met by Powell when I stepped off the train.