If the size of the fortune troubled him, Dr.Boomer would dig him up the whole African Sahara from Alexandria to Morocco, and ask for more.
But if Destiny held all this for Tomlinson in its outstretched palm before it, it concealed stranger things still beneath the folds of its toga.
There were enough surprises there to turn the faces of the whole directorate of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated as yellow as the gold they mined.
For at this very moment, while the president of Plutoria University drew nearer and nearer to the Grand Palaver Hotel, the senior professor of geology was working again beside the blue flames in his darkened laboratory.

And this time there was no shaking excitement over him.

Nor were the labels that he marked, as sample followed sample in the tests, the same as those of the previous marking.

Not by any means.
And his grave face as he worked in silence was as still as the stones of the post-tertiary period..