It was a hot summer day and I was sitting under the big tree down by the road, where we caught the bus when school was in, when Wendell Haney came up the road on his bike and told me somebody had found a skeleton in a cave down in Moonshine Hollow.

"No lie," he said. "My cousin Wilma Jean lives in town and she came by the house just now and told Mama about it."

I put down the Plastic Man comic book I had been reading. "You mean a human skeleton?" I said, not really believing it.

Wendell made this kind of impatient face. "Well, of course a human one," he said. "What did you think?"

He was a skinny kid with a big head and pop eyes like a frog and when he was excited about something, like now, he was pretty funny-looking. He was only a year younger than me, but I’d just turned thirteen last month and a twelve-year-old looked like a little kid now.

He said, "Gee, Ray, don’t you want to go see? Everybody’s down there, the sheriff and all."

Sure enough, when I looked off up the blacktop I saw there was a lot of dust hanging over the far end of Tobe Nelson’s pasture, where the dirt road ran down toward Moonshine Hollow. Somebody in a pickup truck was just turning in off the road.

I stood up. "I’ll go get my bike," I told him. "Go on, I’ll catch up with you."

I went back to the house, hoping Mama hadn’t seen me talking to Wendell. She didn’t like for me to have anything to do with him because she said his family was trashy. They lived down a dirt road a little way up the valley from us, in an old house that looked about ready to fall down, with a couple of old cars up on blocks in the front yard. Everybody knew his daddy was a drunk.

Mama was back in the kitchen, though–I could hear her through the window, singing along with Johnny Ray on the radio–and I got my bicycle from behind the house and rode off before she could ask me where I was going and probably tell me not to.

I caught up with Wendell about a quarter of the way across Tobe Nelson’s pasture. That wasn’t hard to do, with that rusty old thing he had to ride. When I came even with him, I slowed down and we rode the rest of the way together.

It was a long way across the field, with no shade anywhere along the road. Really it wasn’t much more than a cow path, all bumpy and rutty and dusty, and I worked up a good sweat pedaling along in the sun. On the far side of the pasture, the ground turned downhill, sloping toward the creek, and we could ease off and coast the rest of the way. Now I could see a lot of cars and trucks parked all along the creek bank where the road ended.

At the bottom of the hill I stopped and got off and put the kickstand down and stood for a minute looking around, while Wendell leaned his bike against a tree. A good many people, men and women both, were standing around in the shade of the willows and the big sycamores, talking and looking off across the creek in the direction of Moonshine Hollow.

Moonshine Hollow was a strange place. It was a little like what they call a box canyon out west, only not as big. I guess you could call it a ravine. Anyway it ran back into the side of the ridge for maybe half a mile or so and then ended in this big round hole of a place with high rock cliffs all around, and a couple of waterfalls when it was wet season.

I’d been up in the hollow a few times, like all the kids around there. It was kind of creepy and I didn’t much like it. The trees on top of the bluffs blocked out the sun so the light was dim and gloomy even on a sunny day. The ground was steep and rocky and it was hard to walk.

It wasn’t easy even getting there, most of the year. First you had to get across the creek, which ran strong and fast through this stretch, especially in the spring. It was only about thirty or forty feet across but you’d have had to be crazy to try to swim it when the water was high. And that was just about the only way in there, unless you wanted to take the road up over the ridge and work your way down the bluffs. A few people had done that, or said they had.

In a dry summer, like now, it was no big deal because you could just walk across without even getting your feet wet. Except that right now Deputy Pritchard was standing in the middle of the dry creek bed and not letting anyone cross.

"Sheriff’s orders," he was saying as I moved up to where I could see. "Nobody goes in there till he comes back."

There was a little stir as somebody came pushing through the crowd. Beside me, Wendell said softly, "Uh oh," and a second later I saw why.

Wendell’s daddy was tall and lean, with black hair and dark skin–he beat a man up pretty bad once, I heard, for asking him if he was part Indian–and mean-looking eyes. He stopped on the edge of the creek bank and stared at Deputy Pritchard. "Sheriff’s orders, huh?" he said. "Who’s he think he is?"

Deputy Pritchard looked back at him. "Thinks he’s the sheriff, I expect," he said. "Like he did the last couple of times he locked you up."

Everything got quiet for a minute. Then, farther down the bank, Tobe Nelson spoke up. "What’s he doing," he said, "asking the skeleton to vote for him?"

He was a fat bald-headed man with a high voice like a woman, always grinning and laughing and making jokes. Everybody laughed now, even Wendell’s daddy, and things felt easier. I heard Wendell let his breath out.

Somebody said, "There they are now."

Sheriff Cowan was coming through the trees on the far side of the creek, pushing limbs and brush out of his way. There was somebody behind him and at first I couldn’t see who it was, but then I said, "Hey, it’s Mr. Donovan!"

"Well, sure," Wendell said, like I’d said something dumb. "He was the one who found it."

Mr. Donovan taught science at the junior high school in town. Everybody liked him even though his tests were pretty hard. He was big and husky like a football player and the girls all talked about how handsome he was. The boys looked up to him because he’d been in the Marines and won the Silver Star on Okinawa. I guess half the men around there had been in the service during the war–that was what we still called it, "the war," even though the fighting in Korea had been going on for almost a year now–but he was the only one I knew who had a medal.

I always enjoyed his class because he made it interesting, showing us things like rocks and plants and even live animals. Sometimes he let me help when he did experiments. When he saw I liked science, he helped me pick out some books in the school library. He offered to loan me some science fiction magazines he had, but I had to tell him no because there would have been big trouble if Daddy had caught me reading them.

Sheriff Cowan climbed down the far bank of the creek and walked over to stand next to Deputy Pritchard. His face was red and sweaty and his khaki uniform was all wrinkled and dusty. He looked up and down the line of people standing on the creek bank. "I don’t know what you all heard," he said, "and I don’t know what you thought you were going to see, but you’re not going to see anything here today."

A couple of people started to speak and he raised his hand. "No, just listen. I’ve examined the site, and it’s obvious the remains are too old to come under my jurisdiction." He tilted his head at Mr. Donovan, who had come up beside him. "Mr. Donovan, here, thinks the bones might be thousands of years old. Even I don’t go back that far."

After the laughter stopped he said, "He says this could be an important discovery. So he’s going to get in touch with some people he knows at the university, and have them come take a look. Meanwhile, since the site is on county land–"

"Is not," Wendell’s daddy said in a loud voice. "That’s our land, on that side of the creek. My family’s. Always has been."

"No, it isn’t," Sheriff Cowan said. "It used to be your family’s land, but the taxes weren’t paid and finally the county took over the property. And nobody ever wanted to buy it."

"I guess not," Tobe Nelson said. "Just a lot of rocks and brush, not even any decent timber."

"I don’t care," Wendell’s daddy said. "It was ours and they taken it. It ain’t right."

"That’s so," Sheriff Cowan said. "It’s not right that you managed to throw away everything your daddy worked so hard for, while your brother was off getting killed for his country. Just like it’s not right that your own family have to do without because you’d rather stay higher than a Georgia pine than do an honest day’s work. And now, Floyd Haney, you just shut up while I talk."

Wendell’s daddy looked madder than ever but he shut up. "All right, then," Sheriff Cowan said, "as I was saying, since it’s county property, I’m closing it to the public till further notice. Tobe, I want you to lock that gate up at the main road, and don’t let anybody cross your land to come down here without checking with me first. Or with Mr. Donovan."

A man said, "You mean we can’t even go look?"

"Yep," the sheriff said. "You hard of hearing?"

Mr. Donovan spoke up. "Actually there’s not much to see. Just a hand and a little bit of the wrist, sticking out from under a pile of rocks and dirt, and even that’s partly buried. We’re just assuming that there’s a whole skeleton under there somewhere."

"Not that any of you could find that cave," Sheriff Cowan said, "even if I let you try. I’d have walked right past it if he hadn’t been there to show me."

He started waving his hands, then, at the crowd, like somebody shooing a flock of chickens. "Go on, now. Everybody go home or back to the pool hall or something. Nothing to see down here."

People started moving, heading toward their cars, talking among themselves and glancing back in the direction of Moonshine Hollow. Wendell’s daddy was walking our way and Wendell sort of scooched down behind me, but he went right past us and climbed into his old pickup truck and drove away, throwing gravel and dirt as he went up the hill. When he was gone, we went over and got our bikes, without speaking or looking at each other. There was a lot I wanted to talk about but I could tell Wendell wasn’t in the mood.

"Lot of foolishness," Daddy said that evening over supper when I told him the story. "Going to have a bunch of damn fool scientists, now, poking around and spouting off a bunch of crap."

Daddy didn’t like scientists because they believed in evolution. He used to ask me if Mr. Donovan was teaching evolution at the school. He said he could get him fired if he was.

He said, "I’m not surprised, though. There’s a good many caves and holes up in that hollow. That’s why they call it Moonshine Hollow, you know, the bootleggers used to hide their whiskey there during Prohibition. Could be some bootlegger’s bones," he said, "that hid in there running from the law. Or maybe a runaway nigger back in slave times. Probably not even an Indian at all."

"Mr. Donovan says the bones are a lot older than that," I said, and Mama gave me a warning look. She didn’t like for me to argue with Daddy about anything. She said it wasn’t my place.

Daddy said, "Oh, that’s a crock. Damn scientists know everything, to hear them tell it. I heard one on the radio telling how far it is to the moon." He snorted. "Guess he’d been there and measured it off."

Mama said, "Who wants pie?"

Later on Mr. Donovan told me how he happened to find the skeleton.

He was hiking up in the hollow, looking for things he might be able to use in class next year. He was working his way along the foot of a bluff, where there were a lot of great big boulders that had fallen down from above, when he saw a snake of a kind he didn’t recognize. Before he could get a good look, it slipped in behind a boulder that rested against the rock of the bluff.

So Mr. Donovan went up to the boulder, and after walking around it and pushing aside some brush, he found a gap between it and the bluff. He got out his flashlight from his pack and shone it into the hole, still looking for the snake, and saw what looked like a dark opening in the face of the rock. Without stopping to think about it, he squeezed himself through the gap to have a closer look.

"One of the dumbest things I’ve ever done," he told me. "You never, never go into a place like that alone. Don’t tell the school board, Raymond, but I’m a real idiot sometimes."

Behind the boulder, sure enough, a hole led back into the rock. The opening was so low he had to bend over double and then get down on his hands and knees and crawl–"getting stupider by the minute," he said–but then it opened up and he found himself in a small cave.

The floor was covered with loose rock that he guessed had fallen from the ceiling. He squatted down and picked up a few pieces and looked at them by the light of his flashlight, hoping for fossils, but they were just plain old rock.

Then he turned over a big flat slab and saw the hand bones.

"It took a few seconds to register," he said. "The light was bad and the bones were still half buried, just barely exposed. I started to poke at them, and then I realized what I was looking at and yanked my fingers back. Then I just sat there for a little while, as the implications sank in."

I said, "How’d you know they were so old?"

"I didn’t," he admitted. "Archaeology isn’t my field, after all. But they sure as hell looked old, and if there was any chance they were then they needed to be protected. So maybe I bluffed the sheriff a little. But that’s our secret, right?"

Mr. Donovan didn’t waste any time and neither did his friends from the university. They showed up next Saturday afternoon.

"I’m just an ignorant old country boy," Tobe Nelson said, talking to a bunch of people in front of the church after service let out the next morning. "When that schoolteacher said some scientists were coming, I was expecting old men in beards and white coats, you know?"

He shook his head, grinning. "Then here come this nice-looking young couple driving up in front of my house in a brand-new bright red Mercury, with a little house trailer hitched on behind. I took them for tourists that had lost their way, till they got out and came up and introduced theirselves and wanted to know if they could set up camp down by the creek."

Daddy said, "You let those fools onto your land?"

"Hey," Tobe Nelson said, "they asked me real nice, and they paid me some good money. The nice part would have been enough, but I sure didn’t turn down the money either."

He laughed his high-pitched laugh. "But I tell you what, if I was young and I had me a car like that and a woman like that, you wouldn’t see me spending my time digging up a bunch of old bones. I could think of a lot better things to do."

It stayed hot and dry. Wednesday afternoon I rode my bike down toward the little crossroads store to get myself a soda pop. On the way, though, I stopped by Tobe Nelson’s pasture gate and got off and stood for a while leaning on the fence and looking off down the trail toward Moonshine Hollow. The gate wasn’t locked now and I could have gone on in but I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to.

Then I heard somebody pull up behind me, and when I turned around there was Mr. Donovan, sitting behind the wheel of the war surplus jeep he drove. "Hey, Raymond!" he called. "Be a buddy and open the gate for me, will you?"

I went over and undid the latch and swung the big gate open and held it back while he drove through, and then closed it and pushed until the latch snapped shut. "Thanks," Mr. Donovan said, stopping the jeep. "So what have you been doing with your summer, Raymond? Anything interesting?"

"Not really," I said. "Too hot to do very much."

"I heard that. Say," he said, "how would you like to meet a couple of real scientists?"

Would I? I said, "Sure," and he got out and picked up my bike and tossed it in the back of the jeep while I got in, and off we went. That was when he told me about how he found the cave, while we were bumping across Tobe Nelson’s pasture.

Pretty soon we were rolling down the hill toward the creek. Even before we got to the bottom I saw the red car parked near the creek bank, and, just beyond, a shiny bare-metal trailer.

Mr. Donovan stopped the jeep in the shade of a big tree and we got out and walked toward the trailer, which I saw now had a big canvas awning coming off one side, with a table and some chairs underneath. A man got up from the table and came toward us. "David," Mr. Donovan called. "Working hard, I see."

"To the verge of exhaustion," the man said, and turned his head and yelled back over his shoulder, "Maddy! Bob’s here!"

The trailer door opened and a woman came out. "Oh, hi," she said, and then, looking at me, "And who’s this?"

"This is Raymond," Mr. Donovan said, "one of my best students. Raymond, meet David and Madeleine Sloane."

The man stuck out his hand and I took it. The woman came trotting over from the trailer and put out her hand too. "So," she said, "you like science, Raymond?"

"Yes, ma’am," I said, and she threw her head back and laughed.

"‘Ma’am,’" she said, "my God, you make me sound like your grandmother. Call me Maddy. Everybody does."

"Come sit down in the shade," the man said. "We’re just taking a little break."

He was a medium-sized young man with blond crewcut hair and glasses. That was about all I noticed. He wasn’t the one I was looking at.

The woman said, "Well, Raymond, would you like a Coke?"

She was the prettiest lady I’d ever seen outside of the movies. She was taller than me and I’d hit five feet five right before my birthday. She had light brown hair, cut off short at the nape of her neck, and dark blue eyes and nice white teeth.

She was wearing a red top thing with no sleeves, tied up so her stomach was showing, and shorts that I saw were blue jeans with the legs cut off. Whoever cut them off hadn’t left much. Her legs were tanned and they just went on and on.

I said, "Yes, ma’am. Uh, Maddy."

"Bob? Anything for you?" He shook his head and she went back to the trailer.

We went over and sat down at the table under the awning. I noticed there was a noise coming from somewhere nearby, like a power lawnmower, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from. "Generator," David Sloane said, seeing me looking around. "You know, for electricity."

"Quite a fancy setup you’ve got here," Mr. Donovan said.

"Oh, yes," David said. "All the civilized comforts money can buy." His face got a little funny when he said that last part. "What a good thing some of us have it," he added, so low I could barely hear him, and he looked off toward the trailer just as Maddy came back out carrying a bottle of Coke.

"Did you want a glass and ice?" she asked me. I shook my head. "Good," she said. "I had you figured for a bottle man." She dragged up a chair and sat down. "Bob Donovan, I’m going to strangle you, bringing company around when I’m looking like this." I saw now there were some dusty smudges on her arms and legs. "Just look at me," she said. "Like a field hand."

"Been grubbing away?" Mr. Donovan said, grinning. "How’s it going?"

"Slowly," David said. "As it’s supposed to."

"It’s quite a process," Mr. Donovan said to me. "The earth’s got to be removed very gradually, just a little bit at a time, so as not to damage whatever’s underneath. And everything’s got to be measured and recorded. Takes a lot of patience and steady hands."

"Actually," Maddy said, "we’re still working through that pile of loose rock from the ceiling fall. And having to examine every bit of it too, in case–" She stopped and looked at David. "Show them the point, why don’t you?"

David started to say something, but then he grunted and got up and headed for the trailer. "Wait till you see this," Maddy said. I sipped my Coke and tried not to stare at her. Around our part of the state you didn’t see very many grown women in shorts, because most of the churches said it was a sin. My Uncle Miles, who was the pastor of the Baptist church where we belonged, even said they weren’t supposed to wear their hair bobbed short.

Just about the only women you saw dressed the way Maddy Sloane was right now were the trashy ones who hung around the pool hall in town, or the honky-tonks out at the county line. But it was easy to see that this one wasn’t trashy at all.

David came back carrying a little flat wooden box and set it down on the table in front of me. He opened it and pulled back some cotton and said, "There. Look what we found this morning."

I tried not to look disappointed. I’d seen Indian arrowheads before, who hadn’t? People were always finding them along the creek banks, or turning them up plowing. A couple of the boys at school had regular collections.

Now I looked closer, though, this one didn’t look like any arrowhead I’d seen. It was sure a beauty, made of some kind of shiny yellowish-brown stone with dark bands running through it, and really well made. It was pretty big, maybe three inches long, and it didn’t have the usual notches on the sides, just one big notch at the bottom. There was a kind of groove going up the middle.

Mr. Donovan said, "I’ll be damned. Clovis?"

"I’d bet on it," David said. "And I saw enough of them last year, on that dig in New Mexico."

I said, "Do you know what kind of Indians made this kind of arrowhead?"

"Not Indians. At least not the kind you’re thinking about. More like their prehistoric ancestors."

"And it’s a spearhead," Maddy said. "Bows and arrows hadn’t been invented yet."

"Wow." I ran my finger over the smooth stone. "Old, huh?"

David nodded. "Just how old, well, there’s still some pretty hot arguing going on. Well over ten thousand years, though."

"To give you an idea," Mr. Donovan said to me, "that thing was very likely made to hunt mammoths with."

"Wow," I said again. "But you don’t really know if it goes with the skeleton, do you?"

They all looked at each other. "Damn," Maddy said. "You’re right, Bob, this one’s sharp."

"That’s right," David told me. "No guarantee the skeleton’s from the same time period. Not even safe to guess yet."

"Still nothing on that?" Mr. Donovan asked.

David shrugged. "It’s damned old, all right. Just from a superficial examination of the exposed bones, I’m nearly sure there’s some degree of fossilization. But so far there’s nothing to date it." He sighed. "Best would be the new radiocarbon test, that Dr. Libby’s been working on up at the University of Chicago. But half the archaeologists in the country are waiting in line for that. Could be a long time before we have an answer."

"But," Maddy said, "now you see why we’re excited about this site. It could be really important."

David stood up and stretched. "And so we need to get back to work. Sorry."

He picked up the box and closed it carefully. I saw that there were some numbers marked on the lid. As he carried it back to the trailer Maddy said, "Raymond, it was great meeting you." She reached over and put her hand on my shoulder. "Come back and see us again some time, won’t you?"

"Sure." My voice didn’t come out quite right. "I will."

But as it turned out I didn’t see the Sloanes again for quite a while. I rode down there several times over the next few days, but there was never any sign of them, just the trailer sitting there and the generator running. I guessed they were up at the cave, working, and I thought about going up the hollow and trying to find them, but I didn’t know the way.

By now everybody was talking about them. Especially about Maddy. "Parades around practically naked," my Aunt Ethel, who worked at the Ben Franklin five-and-dime store in town, said to Mama. "She was in the store yesterday. Looked like a you-know-what."

Uncle Miles even worked them into his sermon the next Sunday. "I’m reminded," he said, "of the old colored spiritual, ‘Them bones, them bones, them dry bones, now hear the word of the Lord.’ Some people need to quit worrying about a lot of dry bones and start hearing the word of the Lord."

Next morning I woke up with a head cold. It wasn’t all that bad, but it was enough for Mama to keep me in bed for a couple of days and indoors for the rest of the week. I spent the time reading and listening to the radio and mostly being bored and wishing I could go see David and Maddy again.

Daddy came in from town one evening with a big grin on his face. "That schoolteacher of yours," he said to me, "I got to say one thing for him, he’s no sissy."

"What happened?" I asked, and Daddy laughed.

"Damnedest thing," he said. "Floyd Haney came up to him in front of the diner, drunk as a skunk as usual, and started cussing him out–still going on about that land across the creek–and when the schoolteacher tried to walk past him, Floyd took a swing at him. Next thing you know Floyd was flat on his ass. I saw the whole thing from across the street."

"Mr. Donovan hit him?"

"Fastest left I ever saw. Deputy Pritchard drove up while Floyd was still laying there, but the schoolteacher said he didn’t want to press charges. Probably right," Daddy said. "It never does no good, locking Floyd’s kind up. Some folks are just the way they are."

Finally I got to feeling better and Mama let me out of the house again. Naturally I took off right away for the creek.

Mr. Donovan’s jeep was sitting there when I came down the hill, and as I stopped the bike I saw they were all three up by the trailer sitting under the awning. As I walked toward them I could hear Maddy talking, sounding angry.

"I don’t believe this," she was saying. "The most important discovery of the century, and you’re acting as if it’s a bomb that’s going to explode in your face."

"It is," David said. "Oh, sure, maybe not for you. Your tight little rich-bitch ass isn’t the one on the line, is it? Nobody pays any attention to graduate students." His voice was getting louder. "I’m the poor son of a bitch with the ink still fresh on his doctorate. If I blow this I’ll be lucky to get a job at City College of Rooster Poot, Arkansas."

They looked up and saw me, then, and they got all quiet and embarrassed-looking, the way grown people do when kids catch them quarreling. After a second Maddy said, "Why, hello, Raymond."

I said, "Maybe I ought to go?"

"No, no." Maddy waved her hands. "I bet you’d like a Coke, wouldn’t you? Why don’t you just go help yourself? The box is just inside the door, you can’t miss it."

I went over to the trailer and climbed up the little steps and opened the door. Sure enough, there was a refrigerator, the littlest one I’d ever seen, just inside. I could see up into the front part of the trailer, which was mostly taken up by a bed that needed making. I got myself a Coke and went back out just as Mr. Donovan was saying, "Anyway, I hope these are all right."

I saw now that there was a big yellow envelope on the table and a couple of stacks of big glossy photographs. David was holding a picture up and looking at it from different angles. "Oh, yes," he said, "this is really first-class work. Thanks, Bob."

"Been a while since I’ve done any darkroom work," Mr. Donovan said. "Took a couple of hours just to dig out my old equipment and get it dusted off. Glad the prints turned out okay."

I walked over and looked at the photos while they talked. One of the ones on top was a close-up shot of a skull, half buried in the ground. Another one looked like a full-length view of the whole skeleton. I picked that one up for a closer look and then I saw something that didn’t make any sense at all.

"Hey," I said. "He’s wearing clothes!"

They all turned and stared at me. I said, "If the skeleton’s as old as you said, wouldn’t they have rotted away by now?"

"Oh, shit," David said, and reached over and snatched the picture out of my hand. "Bob, why’d you have to bring–"

"Shut up, David," Maddy said. "Raymond, come here."

I walked around the table and stood in front of her. She took both my hands in hers and looked right into my face. "Raymond," she said, "you wouldn’t do anything to hurt us, would you?"

"No, ma’am," I said. My throat had tightened up till I could barely talk. "No, Maddy."

"And if you knew something that could cause trouble for us, you wouldn’t tell? I don’t mean anything bad or illegal," she said quickly. "Just something that could make a lot of trouble."

"No." I didn’t know what she was talking about but I would have agreed with anything she said.

"Then come on," she said, standing up and picking up a big battery lantern that was sitting on the table. "There’s something I want to show you."

David stood up too, fast. "You will like hell!"

"Don’t be stupid, David," Maddy said without looking at him. "And for once in your life try trusting someone."

"Raymond’s a smart boy," Mr. Donovan said. "He’ll cooperate, once he understands."

"Oh, all right," David said, throwing up his hands, "why not? Hell, let’s hold a press conference. Call the White House, invite Truman for a look. Bring in the damn United Nations."

"Watch your step," Maddy said as we started across the dry creek bed.

It was a long hard walk up the hollow to the cave, and hot even in the deep shade under the trees. By the time we got there, I was wishing I’d brought the rest of that Coke along.

About halfway up the hollow Maddy turned left and started up a steep slope, covered with big loose rocks, to the foot of the bluff. "Here," she said, and I saw what Sheriff Cowan had meant. If I hadn’t known there was a cave there I’d never have guessed.

"It’s a little rough getting through the brush," she said, "but we didn’t want to advertise the location by clearing it away."

She walked around to the side of a gray boulder, big as a good-sized car, that rested against the face of the bluff. She switched on the battery lantern and pushed aside some bushes and disappeared behind the boulder.

"You know," Mr. Donovan said as we started after her, "I believe this must have been sealed off until recently. Look at all that loose rock and earth down below. There’s been a slide, not too long ago. Maybe that last big rainstorm in May set it off."

"You could be right," David said. "There’s hardly any animal sign in the cave."

I pushed through the brush and found myself in a narrow little space, dark except for the light that was coming from off to my right. "You’ll have to get down and crawl a little way," Maddy called back. "It’s not too bad."

It was as far as I was concerned. The light from up ahead helped, but it was still a scary place, and going through the tightest part I could feel the whole world pressing in on me. The air was cold, too, with a creepy dead smell. I wanted to yell but I choked it down because I didn’t want Maddy to think I was a coward. Then the hole got bigger and the light got brighter and there I was in the cave.

"Sorry about the light," Maddy said as I straightened up. "We usually use carbide lamps, which are brighter. But they’re a pain to get started and I don’t feel like fooling with it."

It wasn’t a fancy cave like the ones in the books, with stalactites and all. It was just a kind of room, about the size of a one-car garage. It looked even smaller because of all the stuff stacked and piled over by the walls–shovels and trowels, big round screen-wire dirt sifters, boxes and bags and a lot of things I didn’t recognize.

In the middle of the floor, a space had been marked off with wooden pegs and lengths of twine. Inside that, the ground had been dug or scraped down for a foot or so, and in the dug-out space lay the skeleton.

It didn’t look much like the ones in the Halloween decorations. It looked more like a bundle of loose sticks, till you got a good look. It lay on its left side with its knees drawn up part way, and its left arm flung out straight. The right hand was out of sight up near its chest.

And sure enough, it was wearing clothes, and they didn’t look like Indian clothes to me. It was hard to be sure, but it looked more like some kind of one-piece outfit, like the coveralls my cousin Larry wore when he worked at the Texaco station in town. Maddy held the light up higher and now I saw it had on shoes, too. Or rather boots, with big heavy-looking soles. Actually, I could only see one, because the left foot was still buried.

After a minute I said, "I don’t get it."

David said, "Welcome to the club, kid."

"Don’t feel bad," Maddy said. "Neither does anyone else."

David went around and squatted down by the hole and reached down and touched the right sleeve. "You asked a good question, back there," he said. "Fabric should have rotted away a long time ago, but just look at this stuff. Oh, it’s deteriorated badly, it’s brittle and flimsy, but it’s still in a hell of a lot better condition than it should be. Than it can be."

"But then," I said, thinking I got it now, "it must not be as old as you thought. Must be, uh, modern."

David nodded. "That would be the logical conclusion. The condition of the bones, the partial fossilization, well, there might be some other explanation, chemicals in the soil or something. The Clovis point you saw could have been here long before this guy arrived. But there’s just one other thing."

He moved a little to one side and motioned to me. "Come look at this."

I went over and hunkered down beside him, though I didn’t really want to get any closer to that skeleton. He said, "Hold that light closer, Maddy. Look here, Raymond."

He was pointing at a big long rip in the material covering the right shoulder. He pushed the cloth aside with his fingertips. "See that?"

I saw it. I’d seen one like it a couple of weeks ago, lying on a bed of cotton in a little box on the table by the creek.

"And so," David said, "what we have here is a man in modern clothes with a ten-thousand-year-old Clovis point embedded in his shoulder. Which, of course, is flatly impossible."

"Modern is right," Maddy said. "I cut a tiny little piece from the cuff and studied it under the microscope, and it’s not any natural fiber. In fact it’s not exactly woven fiber at all, it’s more–I don’t know what the hell it is, that’s the truth, I’ve never seen anything like it and textiles are a specialty of mine."

"The boots are synthetic too," David said. "And the fasteners are some kind of hard plastic."

I thought it over for a minute. "But that’s–" I remembered, then, a story in a science fiction magazine I’d had, before Daddy took it away from me and told me he’d whip me if he ever caught me reading that crap again.

I said, "You think he was a time traveler."

"Did I say that?" David made a big show of looking around. "I didn’t hear anybody say that, did you?"

"Now you see," Maddy said, "why we’re having to keep this secret for now. David’s got to be careful how he handles this, because a lot of people are sure to call it a fake. It could destroy his career."

There was something sticking out of the ground just behind the skeleton’s lower back, a dark object about the size of a kid’s book satchel. Or that was my guess, though you really couldn’t see much of it. I said, "What’s this?"

"Once again," David said, "I’m damned if I know. Looks like some kind of pack he was carrying, but what’s in it I couldn’t tell you. Maybe his lunch, maybe his spare socks, maybe something we wouldn’t even recognize."

"Like," Maddy said, "whatever got him here. From wherever–whenever –he came from."

"I didn’t hear that either," David said. "Anyway, I haven’t looked inside and I’m not going to. Not even going to dig it out so it can be opened. If and when it gets opened, it’s going to be by somebody of absolutely impeccable professional standing, with a bunch of other respected paragons on hand for witnesses."

"Have you got anyone yet?" Mr. Donovan asked.

David shook his head. "Everybody’s out on digs right now. Most of all I want Dr. Hoban of the University of Pennsylvania, but he’s in Iraq for the rest of the summer."

"That old bastard," Maddy said. "You know damn well he’ll steal all the credit for himself."

"I wish I had your optimism," David said. "More likely he’ll denounce the whole thing as a fraud and me as a lunatic or worse."

"Of course," Mr. Donovan said, "if the government gets wind of this, and somebody thinks there might be something in that pack with possible military applications–"

"Oh, my God," David said. He put his hands up to his face. "I hadn’t even thought of that. Marvelous."

I was looking at the skull. It wasn’t "grinning," as they say. The jaws were open and it look like it was screaming in pain. I shivered. It really was cold in there.

I said, "It was the spear that killed him, wasn’t it?"

"Looks that way," Maddy said. "Looks as if he dragged himself in here–maybe for shelter, maybe trying to hide–and simply bled to death. That’s got to have been a terrible wound."

"Wonder what happened," Mr. Donovan said. "To cause them to kill him, I mean."

"Maybe he broke some local taboo," Maddy said. "We found a few small objects, that apparently fell out of his pockets–another point like that one you saw, a bone scraping tool, a kind of awl made from deer horn. Evidently he was doing some collecting. Maybe he picked up something he shouldn’t."

"Or maybe they just killed him because he was a stranger." David looked down at the skeleton. "Poor bastard, you sure wound up a long way from home, didn’t you?"

"How’d he get buried?" I asked.

"Flooding," Maddy said. "Silt and sand washing in. This cave’s been flooded several times in the distant past."

"The floor of the hollow would have been a lot higher back then," Mr. Donovan added. "Say, that’s another possible dating clue, isn’t it?"

"Maybe." David shrugged. "When you get right down to it, the date doesn’t really matter now. If this burial is even a hundred years old, we’re looking at the impossible. Christ, fifty."

He stood up. "Come on. Raymond’s seen enough. Probably wondering by now if we’re crazy or he is."

By the time I got home it was nearly supper time. Daddy came in a little bit later, while I was sitting on the couch in the living room trying to think, and right away he said, "Raymond, you been hanging around with them college people, down at the creek? Don’t lie to me," he added before I could answer. "Two different people said they saw you on your bicycle headed that way."

I said, "Tobe Nelson said it was all right, Daddy. I asked him and he said it was all right, long as I close the gate."

"That’s Mister Nelson to you," Mama said from the doorway.

Daddy said, "I don’t care if General MacArthur told you it was all right for you to go down there. I’m the one says what you can and can’t do, and I’m telling you to stay away from them people. I don’t want you having nothing to do with them and I don’t want you going down there as long as they’re there."

I said, "Why?"

"Because I say so," he said, starting to get red in the face, "and you’re not so big I can’t still whip your ass if you don’t mind me." I started to speak and he said, "Or I can do it right now if you keep talking back."

So I didn’t say any more. I wasn’t really afraid of him–he hadn’t laid a hand on me since I was six, he just liked to talk tough–but I knew he’d get all mad and stomp and holler around, and Mama would start crying, and I didn’t feel like going through all that right now. I had enough on my mind.

I did stay away, though, for the next couple of days. I figured David and Maddy didn’t need me coming around, with all they had to do and think about.

Wednesday, I decided to go into town to the library and see if they had some books about archaeology. I told Mama where I was going and she said, "You’re not going down to the creek, are you, to see those people? You know what your daddy said."

"Just to the library," I said. "Promise."

"You be careful, then," she said. "I don’t really like you riding that thing down the road."

It was only a couple of miles into town, but the weather was still hot, so by the time I got there I was pretty sweaty. Going by the Texaco station I slowed down, thinking about getting me a cold drink, and then I saw the red Mercury parked out front.

David Sloane came out of the side door as I pulled up. "Raymond," he said, raising a hand. He looked at my bike and said, "Hm. You get around pretty well on that bike, don’t you? Wonder if you’d consider doing me a big favor."

He got out his wallet. "Five bucks," he said, "if you’ll go tell Maddy that I’m stuck in town with car trouble, and I’ll probably be coming in pretty late."

I hesitated for a second. Daddy would be really mad if I went down there again. I was taking a big enough chance just standing here talking to David.

But I was too embarrassed to tell David about Daddy, and I really did want to see Maddy again. And if it came down to it, I could say I was doing a Christian duty by helping someone. There wouldn’t be much Daddy could say to that.

Besides, there was a lot I could do with five dollars. I said, "Sure," and took the five and stuck it in my pocket and off I went, back up the road, standing on the pedals to get up speed.

When I got down to the creek things looked funny, somehow, and then I realized it was because I was used to seeing the red car sitting there by the trailer. Mr. Donovan’s jeep was there, though. Good, I thought, maybe he’d give me a ride back to town.

But I didn’t see him or Maddy anywhere, so I figured they must be up at the cave. I leaned the bike on its stand and started toward the creek, but then I stopped and looked back at the trailer. I really was dry from riding in the hot sun, and I knew Maddy wouldn’t mind if I got myself a nice cold Coke first.

The generator motor was rattling away as I walked toward the trailer. I went up the little metal steps and saw that the door wasn’t quite shut. I pushed it open and started to go in, but then I caught something moving out of the corner of my eye and I turned my head and saw them on the bed.

Mr. Donovan was lying on top of Maddy. Her legs were sticking up in the air and they were both sort of thrashing around. Neither of them had any clothes on.

I stood there for a minute or so, standing on the top step with my head and shoulders inside the door, just staring with my mouth open. They didn’t look around. I don’t think they were noticing much just then.

Finally I got myself unstuck and jumped down off the steps and ran, up the creek bank, not really looking where I was going, just getting away from that trailer. I felt sick and angry and ashamed and yet kind of excited too. My skin felt hot and not just from the sun.

I mean, I knew about what they were doing. I was thirteen, after all. But it just didn’t look at all like I’d imagined.

I got my bike and wobbled off up the road, nearly falling a couple of times. At the top of the hill I remembered David’s message, and the five dollars. So now he was going to think I’d cheated him, but I couldn’t help that. I wouldn’t have gone back down there for all the money in the United States.

Saturday night I woke up in the middle of a dream about Maddy and the skeleton–I don’t want to tell about it, it was pretty awful–and sat up in bed, listening, the way you do when you don’t know what woke you. It seemed like I could hear the echo of a big loud boom, and then a rumbling sound dying away. In the next room, Mama’s voice said, "What was that?"

"Thunder," Daddy said. "Go back to sleep."

Next morning as we left for church I saw a lot of dust hanging over the road across Tobe Nelson’s pasture, and what looked like a police car heading toward the creek. The dust was still there when we came home, but I didn’t see any more cars.

Late in the afternoon while we were sitting on the porch Sheriff Cowan came by. "Afternoon," he said to Daddy. "Wonder if I could ask your boy a couple of questions. Don’t worry, he’s not in any trouble," he added, smiling at Mama.

Daddy said, "Raymond, answer the sheriff’s questions."

Sheriff Cowan sat down on the edge of the porch and looked up at me. "I understand you’ve been spending a lot of time down by the creek lately. Been friendly with those friends of Mr. Donovan’s?"

"He was," Daddy said, not giving me a chance to answer. "That’s over."

"That right?" Sheriff Cowan raised one eyebrow. "Well, then I’m probably wasting my time. You haven’t been down there in the last couple of days?"

"No, sir," I said.

"Oh, well." He let out a big loud sigh. "So much for that. Sorry to bother you folks."

Daddy said, "Mind if I ask what this is about?"

Sheriff Cowan turned his head and looked off across the valley. "Night before last, somebody broke into Huckaby’s Feed and Supply and stole half a case of dynamite. Last night they used it to blow up that cave."

I said, "What?" and Mama made little astonished noises. Daddy said, "Well, I’ll be damned."

Sheriff Cowan nodded. "Yep, did a pretty thorough job, too. The whole bluff’s all busted up and caved in, great big chunks of rock every which way."

He took off his hat and scratched his head. "Tell you the truth, I can’t hardly believe somebody did that much damage with half a case of DuPont stump-blower. It’s strange," he said. "Tobe Nelson claimed there were two explosions, too, a little one and then a big one, but nobody else heard it that way." He shrugged. "Maybe some kind of gas in the ground there? Who knows?"

Mama said, "My Lord. Who would do such a thing?"

"Oh," Sheriff Cowan said, "there’s no doubt in my mind who did it. But I don’t expect I’ll ever prove it."

Daddy said, "Floyd Haney."

"Yep. Nobody else around here that crazy and mean," Sheriff Cowan said. "And he was sure nursing a grudge about that land."

He stood up and put his hat back on. "But like I say, I’ll never prove it. I thought maybe Raymond might have seen or heard something, but I should have known that was too much to hope for."

He chuckled down deep in his throat. "You know the funny part? He had all that work and risk for nothing. Those two scientists already pulled out."

"They’re gone?" I said, louder than I meant to.

"Yep," Sheriff Cowan said. "Drove right through town, late yesterday afternoon, pulling that trailer. So they must have found out there wasn’t anything important there after all. Probably just some old animal bones or something."

"Probably," Daddy said. "Bunch of foolishness."

And that’s about all there is to tell. David and Maddy never came back, and nobody else ever tried to find that cave again. Not that it would have done them any good. I went up into Moonshine Hollow once, a long time later, and the whole place was smashed up so bad you couldn’t even tell where you were.

Mr. Donovan left too, that summer. He went back into the Marines and I heard he got killed in Korea, but I don’t really know.

Wendell’s daddy got caught with a stolen truck, later on that year, and got sent off to the penitentiary, where everybody said he belonged. Sheriff Cowan never did charge him with blowing up the cave, but he didn’t make any secret of believing he did it.

And maybe he was right, but I wasn’t so sure. My cousin Larry was working the evening shift at the Texaco station when David and Maddy stopped for gas on their way out of town, and he said Maddy was crying and it looked like she’d been roughed up some. And Aunt Ethel mentioned to Mama that David had been in the store on Saturday buying an alarm clock. But I never said anything to anybody.

People talked, for a while there, about that strange business in Moonshine Hollow. But it didn’t last long. Everybody’s mind was on the news from Korea, which was mostly bad, and then by next year all anybody wanted to talk about was the election. I guess by now I’m the only one who even remembers.

And sometimes I sure wish I didn’t.