"Here we are then," said their hurried waitress, and laid the pints of bitter they’d ordered on the table. Julie and Gideon clinked the heavy glass mugs in a wordless toast.

"Why ‘ better stop in’?" Julie asked. "And who’s Nate Marcus? An old friend of yours?"

Gideon nodded. "I haven’t seen him a few years, but we were both graduate students at Wisconsin, under Abe Goldstein. He’s head of the anthro department at some place called Gelden College in Missouri. When Abe heard you and I were thinking of coming this way, he suggested I stop by and see if I couldn’t keep him out of trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

Gideon sipped the cool, soothing bitter. "The same as always," he said. "Nate rubs a lot of people the wrong way. He can be pretty…well, abrasive."

"Abrasive? You mean rude?"

"Yes, rude. And flip and sarcastic, and aggressive and thin-skinned. Know-it-all…arrogant…"

"This is one of your old friends? I’d love to hear you describe an enemy."

Gideon laughed. "To tell the truth, I do like him-most of the time anyway-even if I’m not exactly sure why. He and I sat up a lot of nights, over a lot of pitchers of beer, at the old Student Union in Madison, arguing anthropological trivia until four in the morning. Those are good memories."

"Well, he still sounds awful. What’s he doing in charge of a dig?"

"For one thing, his excavating technique is impeccable. For another, the Stonebarrow Fell site is his personal discovery. As I understand it, he took one sharp-eyed look at the place-undug, mind you; just a grassy hilltop-and announced there was a Bronze Age burial mound there, even though the mound itself had weathered away. And on top of that, he said it was Wessex culture, to be exact; circa 1700 b.c."

"And was he right?"

"He was this time-which, as you can imagine, irritated a lot of people. You can guess how the Wessex Antiquarian Society, which is a very sober, professional group of archaeologists, feels about some brash, belligerent American-which Nate is, I’m afraid-stomping in and finding the mound in their backyard."