* * * * *

Gerd brought the car down beside the rectangular excavation.  It was fifty feet square and twenty feet deep, and still going deeper, with a power shovel in it and a couple of dump scows beside.  Five or six men in coveralls and ankle boots advanced to meet them as they got out.

“Good morning, Mr. Holloway,” one of them said.  “It’s right down over the edge of the hill.  We haven’t disturbed anything.”

“Mind running over what you saw again?  My partner here wasn’t in when you called.”

The foreman turned to Gerd.  “We put off a couple of shots about an hour ago.  Some of the men, who’d gone down over the edge of the hill, saw these Fuzzies run out from under that rock ledge down there, and up the hollow, that way.”  He pointed.  “They called me, and I went down for a look, and saw where they’d been camping.  The rock’s pretty hard here, and we used pretty heavy charges.  Shock waves in the ground was what scared them.”

They started down a path through the flower-dappled tall grass toward the edge of the hill, and down past the gray outcropping of limestone that formed a miniature bluff twenty feet high and a hundred in length.  Under an overhanging ledge, they found two cushions, a red-and-gray blanket, and some odds and ends of old garments that looked as though they had once been used for polishing rags.  There was a broken kitchen spoon, and a cold chisel, and some other metal articles.

“That’s it, all right.  I talked to the people who lost the blanket and the cushions.  They must have made camp last night, after your gang stopped work; the blasting chased them out.  You say you saw them go up that way?” he asked, pointing up the little stream that came down from the mountains to the north.

The stream was deep and rapid, too much so for easy fording by Fuzzies; they’d follow it back into the foothills.  He took everybody’s names and thanked them.  If he found the Fuzzies himself and had to pay off on an information-received basis, it would take a mathematical genius to decide how much reward to pay whom.

“Gerd, if you were a Fuzzy, where would you go up there?” he asked.

Gerd looked up the stream that came rushing down from among the wooded foothills.

“There are a couple more houses farther up,” he said.  “I’d get above them.  Then I’d go up one of those side ravines, and get up among the rocks, where the damnthings couldn’t get me.  Of course, there are no damnthings this close to town, but they wouldn’t know that.”

“We’ll need a few more cars.  I’ll call Colonel Ferguson and see what he can do for me.  Max is going to have his hands full with this investigation Gus started.”

* * * * *