[Transcriber's Notes: This etext was produced from AmazingStories April 1949. Extensive research did not uncover anyevidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication wasrenewed.
Misspellings have been corrected.]
VALLEY of the CROEN
By LEE TARBELL
There was a mysterious golden statue that always pointed oneway—and it led to sudden death in the valley where flying diskslanded.
Like a lodestone drawn to a magnet, the tiny goldenstatue leaped from his hand and darted toward its huge counterpart.
They say cross-eyed men are bad luck. He stood there, in my doorway,eyeing me up and down with those in-focused black eyes.
His face was hideous even if the eyes had been normal. He was slashedwith a wide cicatrice of livid scar tissue from one cheekbone across hisnose and down to the button of his jaw on the other side.
He was big, and he looked like bad news to me. I inadvertently moved thedoor as if to close it, then he spoke:
"You Keele, the mining man?"
I nodded, wondering at the mild voice from the huge battered figure.
"Been looking for you. I've run across something I wouldn't tell justanyone. But I've heard of you, that you are on the level. Here in Korea,you're known already."
I still didn't step back and swing the door wide. But he had aroused mycuriosity as well as my natural desire to acquire things. I had made twofortunes and lost both in mining ventures. My present not small incomecame from an emerald mine in the Andes. It had been a very dirty andvery sick Indio who had led me to that emerald mine. You never know!
"I'm pretty busy, could you give me some idea...." I hedged. It doesn'tdo to seem too anxious or eager in any business deal. Too, the sight ofhis burly figure, even without the nightmare face, was not exactlyreassuring. That bulge under the native quilted coat, I knew was nothingbut a gun too big for even his bulges to conceal completely. But a manneeded a gun, here. Especially if he had something valuable, such as thewhereabouts of gold.
He grinned, and the white, even teeth, and the wrinkles around his eyestook away the sense of impending catastrophe brought by those crossedeyes. I stepped back then, and he walked in. I sat down at my desk. Hesat down across from me, and fumbled in one pocket. He lay on the deskan object in wrappings of dirty rags. These he peeled off slowly, hiseyes seeming to dart here and there, never looking where they should. Ashe peeled, he talked:
"I just landed off a ship from Fusan, up-coast. Y' ever been in Fusan?"
I shook my head, watching his fingers work at the knots of the stringsaround his mysterious object.
"Korea is a funny place. As long as people have been living here, you'dthink it would be settled. But it isn't! There're immense forests, greatmountains, where no man has gone, places no one enters. They're so dumbthey don't even have compasses; they get lost! Think my compass ismagic, wonder how I know where to go next, and not get lost.Superstitious, scared to go into the great, dark, damp forests. Scaredof the mountains no one has ever climbed. That kind of country is aprospector's meat!"
I nodded. He had the wrappings off, and I leaned forward, a littlebreathless at the beauty of th