“Hold on!” Francis cried, pulling out his check book and beginning to write. “Wait a moment. I must settle for this peon now. Next, before you depart, I have a favor to ask of you.”
He passed the check to the haciendado, saying:
“I have allowed ten pesos for the exchange.”
The haciendado glanced at the check, folded it away in his pocket, and placed the end of the rope around the wretched creature’s neck in Francis’ hand.
“The peon is now yours,” he said.
Francis looked at the rope and laughed.
“Behold! I now own a human chattel. Slave, you are mine, my property now, do you understand?”
“Yes, Senor,” the peon muttered humbly. “It seems, when I became mad for the woman I gave up my freedom for, that God destined me always afterward to be the property of some man. The Cruel Just One is right. It is God’s punishment for mating outside my race.”
“You made a slave of yourself for what the world has always considered the best of all causes, a woman,” Francis observed, cutting the thongs that bound the peon’s hands. “And so, I make a present of you to yourself.” So saying, he placed the neck-rope in the peon’s hand. “Henceforth, lead yourself, and put not that rope in any man’s hand.”
While the foregoing had been taking place, a lean old man, on foot, had noiselessly joined the circle. Maya Indian he was, pure-blooded, with ribs that corrugated plainly through his parchment-like skin. Only a breech-clout covered his nakedness. His unkempt hair hung in dirty-gray tangles about his face, which was high-cheeked and emaciated to cadaverousness. Strings of muscles showed for his calves and biceps. A few scattered snags of teeth were visible between his withered lips. The hollows under his cheek-bones were prodigious. While his eyes, beads of black, deep-sunk in their sockets, burned with the wild light of a patient in fever.
He slipped eel-like through the circle and clasped the peon in his skeleton-like arms.
“He is my father,” proclaimed the peon proudly. “Look at him. He is pure Maya, and he knows the secrets of the Mayas.”
And while the two re-united ones talked endless explanations, Francis preferred his request to the sackcloth leader to find Enrico Solano and his two sons, wandering somewhere in the mountains, and to tell them that they were free of all claims of the law and to return home.
“They have done no wrong?” the leader demanded.
“No; they have done no wrong,” Francis assured him.
“Then it is well. I promise you to find them immediately, for we know the direction of their wandering, and to send them down to the coast to join you.”
“And in the meantime shall you be my guests while you wait,” the haciendado invited eagerly. “There is a freight schooner at anchor in Juchitan Inlet now off my plantation, and sailing for San Antonio. I can hold her until the noble Enrico and his sons come down from the Cordilleras.”
“And Francis will pay the demurrage, of course,” Henry interpolated with a sly sting that Leoncia caught, although it missed Francis, who cried joyously:
“Of course I will. And it proves my contention that a checkbook is pretty good to have anywhere.”
To their surprise, when they had parted from the sackcloth men, the peon and his Indian father attached themselves to the Morgans, and journeyed down through the burning oil-fields to the plantation which had been the scene of the peon’s slavery. Both father and son were unremitting in their devotion, first of all to Francis, and, next, to Leoncia and Henry. More than once they noted father and son in long and earnest conversations; and, after Enrico and his sons had arrived, when the party went down to the beach to board the waiting schooner, the peon and his Maya parent followed along. Francis essayed to say farewell to them on the beach, but the peon stated that the pair of them were likewise journeying on the schooner.
“I have told you that I was not a poor man,” the peon explained, after they had drawn the party aside from the waiting sailors. “This is true. The hidden treasure of the Mayas, which the conquistadores and the priests of the Inquisition could never find, is in my keeping. Or, to be very true, is in my father’s keeping. He is the descendant, in the straight line, from the ancient high priest of the Mayas. He is the last high priest. He and I have talked much and long. And we are agreed that riches do not make life. You bought me for two hundred and fifty pesos, yet you made me free, gave me back to myself. The gift of a man’s life is greater than all the treasure in the world. So are we agreed, my father and I. And so, since it is the way of Gringos and Spaniards to desire treasure, we will lead you to the Maya treasure, my father and I, my father knowing the way. And the way into the mountains begins from San Antonio and not from Juchitan.”
“Does your father know the location of the treasure?—just where it is?” Henry demanded, with an aside to Francis that this was the very Maya treasure that had led him to abandon the quest for Morgan’s gold on the Calf and to take to the mainland.
The peon shook his head.
“My father has never been to it. He was not interested in it, caring not for wealth for himself. Father, bring forth the tale written in our ancient language which you alone of living Mayas can read.”
From within his loin-cloth the old man drew forth a dirty and much-frayed canvas bag. Out of this he pulled what looked like a snarl of knotted strings. But the strings were twisted sennit of some fibrous forest bark, so ancient that they threatened to crumble as he handled them, while from under the touch and manipulation of his fingers a fine powder of decay arose. Muttering and mumbling prayers in the ancient Maya tongue, he held up the snarl of knots, and bowed reverently before it ere he shook it out.
“The knot-writing, the lost written language of the Mayas,” Henry breathed softly. “This is the real thing, if only the old geezer hasn’t forgotten how to read it.”
All heads bent curiously toward it as it was handed to Francis. It was in the form of a crude tassel, composed of many thin, long strings. Not alone were the knots, and various kinds of knots, tied at irregular intervals in the strings, but the strings themselves were of varying lengths and diameters. He ran them through his fingers, mumbling and muttering.
“He reads!” cried the peon triumphantly. “All our old language is there in those knots, and he reads them as any man may read a book.”
Bending closer to observe, Francis and Leoncia’s hair touched, and, in the thrill of the immediately broken contact, their eyes met, producing the second thrill as they separated. But Henry, all eagerness, did not observe. He had eyes only for the mystic tassel.
“What d’you say, Francis?” he murmured. “It’s big! It’s big!”
“But New York is beginning to call,” Francis demurred. “Oh, not its people and its fun, but its business,” he added hastily, as he sensed Leoncia’s unuttered reproach and hurt. “Don’t forget, I’m mixed up in Tampico Petroleum and the stock market, and I hate to think how many millions are involved.”
“Hell’s bells!” Henry ejaculated. “The Maya treasure, if a tithe of what they say about its immensity be true, could be cut three ways between Enrico, you and me, and make each of us richer than you are now.”
Still Francis was undecided, and, while Enrico expanded on the authenticity of the treasure, Leoncia managed to query in an undertone in Francis’ ear:
“Have you so soon tired of ... of treasure-hunting?”
He looked at her keenly, and down at her engagement ring, as he answered in the same low tones:
“How can I stay longer in this country, loving you as I do, while you love Henry?”
It was the first time he had openly avowed his love, and Leoncia knew the swift surge of joy, followed by the no less swift surge of mantling shame that she, a woman who had always esteemed herself good, could love two men at the same time. She glanced at Henry, as if to verify her heart, and her heart answered yes. As truly did she love Henry as she did Francis, and the emotion seemed similar where the two were similar, different where they were different.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to connect up with the Angelique, most likely at Bocas del Toro, and get away,” Francis told Henry. “You and Enrico can find the treasure and split it two ways.”
But the peon, having heard, broke into quick speech with his father, and, next, with Henry.
“You hear what he says, Francis,” the latter said, holding up the sacred tassel. “You’ve got to go with us. It is you he feels grateful to for his son. He isn’t giving the treasure to us, but to you. And if you don’t go, he won’t read a knot of the writing.”
But it was Leoncia, looking at Francis with quiet wistfulness of pleading, seeming all but to say, “Please, for my sake,” who really caused Francis to reverse his decision.
CHAPTER XIII
A week later, out of San Antonio on a single day, three separate expeditions started for the Cordilleras. The first, mounted on mules, was composed of Henry, Francis, the peon and his ancient parent, and of several of the Solano peons, each leading a pack-mule, burdened with supplies and outfit. Old Enrico Solano, at the last moment, had been prevented from accompanying the party because of the bursting open of an old wound received in the revolutionary fighting of his youth.
Up the main street of San Antonio the cavalcade proceeded, passing the jail, the wall of which Francis had dynamited, and which was only even then being tardily rebuilt by the Jefe’s prisoners. Torres, sauntering down the street, the latest wire from Regan tucked in his pocket, saw the Morgan outfit with surprise.
“Whither away, senors?” he called.
So spontaneous that it might have been rehearsed, Francis pointed to the sky, Henry straight down at the earth, the peon to the right, and his father to the left. The curse from Torres at such impoliteness, caused all to burst into laughter, in which the mule-peons joined as they rode along.
Within the morning, at the time of the siesta hour, while all the town slept, Torres received a second surprise. This time it was the sight of Leoncia and her youngest brother, Ricardo, on mules, leading a third that was evidently loaded with a camping outfit.
The third expedition was Torres’ own, neither more nor less meager than Leoncia’s, for it was composed only of himself and one, José Mancheno, a notorious murderer of the place whom Torres, for private reasons, had saved from the buzzards of San Juan. But Torres’ plans, in the matter of an expedition, were more ambitious than they appeared. Not far up the slopes of the Cordilleras dwelt the strange tribe of the Caroos. Originally founded by runaway negro slaves of Africa and Carib slaves of the Mosquito Coast, the renegades had perpetuated themselves with stolen women of the tierra caliente and with fled women slaves like themselves. Between the Mayas beyond, and the government of the coast, this unique colony had maintained itself in semi-independence. Added to, in later days, by runaway Spanish prisoners, the Caroos had become a hotchpotch of bloods and breeds, possessing a name and a taint so bad that the then governing power of Colombia, had it not been too occupied with its own particular political grafts, would have sent armies to destroy the pest-hole. And in this pest-hole of the Caroos José Mancheno had been born of a Spanish-murderer father and a mestiza-murderess mother. And to this pest-hole José Mancheno was leading Torres in order that the commands of Thomas Regan of Wall Street might be carried out.
“Lucky we found him when we did,” Francis told Henry, as they rode at the rear of the last Maya priest.
“He’s pretty senile,” Henry nodded. “Look at him.”
