Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/208

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A WILD-GOOSE CHASE

again. He brought up another stone and then he found something different. It was frozen so hard into the ground that he broke it as he jerked it away. He brushed the snow and dirt away from it, staring as he tried to make out what it could have been. It was a queer little implement of copper and wood, a round wooden bit about two inches long with a wheel of copper at one end.

For a moment Koehler and Geoff studied if with bewilderment, trying to identify the little implement with some use that it might have had in the hands of the builders of the lonely stone house. Then Koehler took it and holding it in his hands pointed out its use.

"Geoff, it's half an empty spool of a film camera!"

"What?"

Koehler repeated. Geoff still gazed dazedly. With his mind filled with thoughts of the ancient people of Greenland he was slow to recognise his find. His senses came to him and he knew that any bit of wood not left recently must have decayed; he saw the object was what Koehler had said, half of the spool upon