Gold of the Gods

Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
There's something weird and mysterious about the robbery, Kennedy. They took the very thing I treasure most of all, an ancient Peruvian dagger.
Professor Allan Norton was very much excited as he dropped into Craig's laboratory early that forenoon.
Norton, I may say, was one of the younger members of the faculty, like Kennedy. Already, however, he had made for himself a place as one of the foremost of South American explorers and archaeologists.
How they got into the South American section of the Museum, though, I don't understand, he hurried on. But, once in, that they should take the most valuable relic I brought back with me on this last expedition, I think certainly shows that it was a robbery with a deep-laid, premeditated purpose.
Nothing else is gone? queried Kennedy.
Nothing, returned the professor. That's the strangest part of it—to me. It was a peculiar dagger, too, he continued reminiscently. I say that it was valuable, for on the blade were engraved some curious Inca characters. I wasn't able to take the time to decipher them, down there, for the age of the metal made them almost illegible. But now that I have all my stuff unpacked and arranged after my trip, I was just about to try—when along comes a thief and robs me. We can't have the University Museum broken into that way, you know, Kennedy.
I should say not, readily assented Craig. I'd like to look the place over.
Just what I wanted, exclaimed Norton, heartily delighted, and leading the way.
We walked across the campus with him to the Museum, still chatting. Norton was a tall, spare man, wiry, precisely the type one would pick to make an explorer in a tropical climate. His features were sharp, suggesting a clear and penetrating mind and a disposition to make the most of everything, no matter how slight. Indeed that had been his history, I knew. He had come to college a couple of years before Kennedy and myself, almost penniless, and had worked his way through by doing everything from waiting on table to tutoring. To-day he stood forth as a shining example of self-made intellectual man, as cultured as if he had sprung from a race of scholars, as practical as if he had taken to mills rather than museums.