Free Cemetery World by Clifford D. Simak Page A

was a lonely and a savage sound and I shivered as I listened to it and moved closer to the fire.
    “They are after something,” Elmer said. “Maybe coon or possum. The hunters are back there somewhere, listening to the dogs.”
    “But what are they hunting for?” asked Cynthia. “The men, I mean, the men who sent out the dogs.”
    “For sport and meat,” said Elmer.
    I saw her wince.
    “This is no Alden planet,” Elmer told her. “No planet soft and full of pinkness. The people who live back here in the woods are probably one-half savage.”
    We sat listening and the baying of the dogs seemed to move away.
    “On this treasure business,” Elmer said, “leave us try to figure out what we have. Somewhere in this country to the west of us someone came fleeing out of Greece and hid out a bunch of boxes, some of which probably contained treasure. We know one of them did and some of the others may have. But the location might be a little hard to come by. It’s indefinite. A river flowing from the north into the old Ohio. There might be quite a lot of streams coming from the north …”
    “There was a hut,” said Cynthia.
    “That was ten thousand years ago. The hut must be long gone. We’d be looking for a hole, a tunnel, and that might be covered over.”
    “What I want to know,” I said, “is why Thorney should have thought this strange character out of Greece might be Anachronian.”
    “I asked him that,” said Cynthia, “and he said that : Greece or somewhere in that area of the planet would most likely be the place an alien observer would have set up his observation post. The first settled communities of the human race were established in what once was known as Turkey. An observer would not have set up a post too close to what he wished to study. He’d want to be in a position to do some observation and then get out of there. Greece would be logical, Professor Thorndyke said. Such an observer would have had some means of rather rapid transportation and the distance between the first settlements and Greece would have been no problem.” 
    “It doesn’t sound logical to me.” said Elmer, bluntly.
    “Why Greece? Why not the Sinai? Or the Caspian? Or a dozen other places?”
    “Thorney goes on hunches as much as evidence or logic,” I told them. “He has a well-developed hunch sense. He is very often right. If he says Greece I’d go along with him. Although it would seem this hypothetical observer of ours could have moved location time and time again.”
    “Not if he were picking up loot all the time,” said Elmer. “He’d get weighed down with it. It would be quite a job to move. He probably brought along several tons of it when he moved to the Ohio.”
    “But it wasn’t loot,” cried Cynthia. “You have to understand that it wasn’t loot. Not loot in terms of money, or in terms of whatever value the Anachronians might employ. Whatever he picked up were cultural artifacts.”
    “Cultural artifacts,” said Elmer, “running very heavily to gold and precious stones.”
    “Let’s be fair about it,” I said to Elmer. “It might just have happened that the broken box was filled with that kind of stuff. Some of the other boxes might have been filled with arrowheads or spear points, early woven stuffs, mortars and pestles.”
    “Dr. Thorndyke thought,” said Cynthia, “that the boxes my old ancestor saw contained only a small fraction of what the observer had collected. Probably only a few of the more significant items. Back somewhere in Greece, perhaps in other caverns carved into the rock, there may be a hundred times as much as was in the boxes.”
    “Whatever it may be it spells out treasure,” Elmer said. “Artifacts of any sort, command a price and I suppose they’d be worth even more if they were artifacts from Earth. But Earth or not, there is a booming trade in them. A lot of wealthy men, and they have to be wealthy to pay the prices asked, have collections of them. But