He shoved her away. She stumbled backward and there was a glassy tinkling sound.

"Ooh, your glasses!" cried Fayette, making a grab for them. He grabbed, too, suddenly convinced he had gone blind. "They're broken, Ralph, honey!" she said. "You look so much better without them." She flung her arms around him again, pressing him back to the wall. Her lips drooped disappointedly.

"I—I'm fond of you," she said unhappily. "But you're so darned peculiar. You fell all over yourself kissing me. Now you're backing off. What's wrong?"

Unterzuyder was scared. It came as a shock to him that the extreme emergency of the situation had given him, by some hypnotic process, better vision than he'd ever had. In spite of the darkness of the hall, he could see that Fayette was ravishing. She could make a strong man weak. Well, he would not give her that opportunity.

Besides, something she'd said just now, something he couldn't put his finger on, had subconsciously frightened him. What?

These treacherous Beechers!

Maybe she was using her indomitable weapon to win him over. To what?

Perhaps to cut him in on the map. X marks the spot, indeed! X was a moving asteroid. It had been moving for some eighty-odd years since the map was made. To find its present location was a problem in celestial mechanics. The map would have to be deciphered. Not only that, the original maker of the map, being an Unterzuyder, had undoubtedly confused the issue by making the job hard even for a mathematician.

Naturally, the Beechers hadn't dared take the map to anybody for deciphering. To do so, might have brought the whole criminal element in the Solar System after them. That of course, was a little thing Unterzuyder himself had arranged—when he anonymously gave the details of the story to the press.

The Beechers had been boxed in.

Now, in desperation, the Beechers probably figured that if Fayette could make Carruthers Straley fall in love with her, that he, being a lawyer, might have a devious enough mind to think like an Unterzuyder and decipher the map! And not betray them.

They did not understand that Ralph Unterzuyder, alias Carruthers Straley, worked alone.

They would find it out. And so would Bigger Bailes.

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