“He’s mixing his own experiences up with his mythology,” Francis grinned triumphantly. “So I guess it’s pretty near all right, Leoncia, for you to stay for a bite to eat. The coffee’s made. After that....”
But “after that” came before. Scarcely had they seated themselves on the ground and begun to eat, when Francis, standing up to serve Leoncia with tortillas, had his hat knocked off.
“My word!” he said, sitting down. “That was sudden. Henry, take a squint and see who tried to pot-shoot me.”
The next moment, save for the peon’s father, all eyes were peeping across the rim of the foot-step. What they saw, creeping upon them from every side, was a nondescript and bizarrely clad horde of men who seemed members of no particular race but composed of all races. The breeds of the entire human family seemed to have moulded their lineaments and vari-colored their skins.
“The mangiest bunch I ever laid eyes on,” was Francis’ comment.
“They are the Caroos,” the peon muttered, betraying fear.
“And who in——” Francis began. Instantly he amended. “And who in Paradise are the Caroos?”
“They come from hell,” was the peon’s answer. “They are more savage than the Spaniard, more terrible than the Maya. They neither give nor take in marriage, nor does a priest reside among them. They are the devil’s own spawn, and their ways are the devil’s ways, only worse.”
Here the Maya arose, and, with accusing finger, denounced Leoncia for being the cause of this latest trouble. A bullet creased his shoulder and half-whirled him about.
“Drag him down!” Henry shouted to Francis. “He’s the only man who knows the knot-language; and the eyes of Chia, whatever that may mean, have not yet flashed.”
Francis obeyed, with an out-reach of arm to the old fellow’s legs, jerking him down in a crumpled, skeleton-like fall.
Henry loosed his rifle, and elicited a fusillade in response. Next, Ricardo, Francis, and the peon joined in. But the old man, still running his knots, fixed his gaze across the far rim of the foot-step upon a rugged wall of mountain beyond.
“Hold on!” shouted Francis, in a vain attempt to make himself heard above the shooting.
He was compelled to crawl from one to another and shake them into ceasing from firing. And to each, separately, he had to explain that all their ammunition was with the mules, and that they must be sparing with the little they had in their magazines and belts.
“And don’t let them hit you,” Henry warned. “They’ve got old muskets and blunderbusses that will drive holes through you the size of dinner-plates.”
An hour later, the last cartridge, save several in Francis’ automatic pistol, was gone; and to the irregular firing of the Caroos the pit replied with silence. José Mancheno was the first to guess the situation. He cautiously crept up to the edge of the pit to make sure, then signaled to the Caroos that the ammunition of the besieged was exhausted and to come on.
“Nicely trapped, senors,” he exulted down at the defenders, while from all around the rim laughter arose from the Caroos.
But the next moment the change that came over the situation was as astounding as a transformation scene in a pantomime. With wild cries of terror the Caroos were fleeing. Such was their disorder and haste that numbers of them dropped their muskets and machetes.
“Anyway, I’ll get you, Senor Buzzard,” Francis pleasantly assured Mancheno, at the same time flourishing his pistol at him.
He leveled his weapon as Mancheno fled, but reconsidered and did not draw trigger.
“I’ve only three shots left,” he explained to Henry, half in apology. “And in this country one can never tell when three shots will come in handiest, ‘as I’ve found out, beyond a doubt, beyond a doubt.’”
“Look!” the peon cried, pointing to his father and to the distant mountainside. “That is why they ran away. They have learned the peril of the sacred things of Maya.”
The old priest, running over the knots of the tassel in an ecstasy that was almost trance-like, was gazing fixedly at the distant mountainside, from which, side by side and close together, two bright flashes of light were repeating themselves.
“Twin mirrors could do it in the hands of a man,” was Henry’s comment.
“They are the eyes of Chia,” the peon repeated. “It is so written in the knots as you have heard my father say. Wait in the foot-steps of the God till the eyes of Chia flash.”
The old man rose to his feet and wildly proclaimed: “To find the treasure we must find the eyes!”
“All right, old top,” Henry soothed him, as, with his small traveler’s compass he took the bearings of the flashes.
“He’s got a compass inside his head,” Henry remarked an hour later of the old priest, who led on the foremost mule. “I check him by the compass, and, no matter how the natural obstacles compel him to deviate, he comes back to the course as if he were himself a magnetic needle.”
Not since leaving the foot-step, had the flashings been visible. Only from that one spot, evidently, did the rugged landscape permit the seeing of them. Rugged the country was, broken into arroyos and cliffs, interspersed with forest patches and stretches of sand and of volcanic ash.
At last the way became impassable for their mounts, and Ricardo was left behind to keep charge of the mules and mule-peons and to make a camp. The remainder of the party continued on, scaling the jungle-clad steep that blocked their way by hoisting themselves and one another up from root to root. The old Maya, still leading, was oblivious to Leoncia’s presence.
Suddenly, half a mile farther on, he halted and shrank back as if stung by a viper. Francis laughed, and across the wild landscape came back a discordant, mocking echo. The last priest of the Mayas ran the knots hurriedly, picked out a particular string, ran its knots twice, and then announced:
“When the God laughs, beware!—so say the knots.”
Fifteen minutes were lost ere Henry and Francis succeeded in only partly convincing him, by repeated trials of their voices, that the thing was an echo.
Half an hour later, they debouched on a series of abrupt-rolling sand-dunes. Again the old man shrank back. From the sand in which they strode, arose a clamor of noise. When they stood still, all was still. A single step, and all the sand about them became vocal.
“When the God laughs, beware!” the old Maya warned.
Drawing a circle in the sand with his finger, which shouted at him as he drew it, he sank down within it on his knees, and as his knees contacted on the sand arose a very screaming and trumpeting of sound. The peon joined his father inside the noisy circle, where, with his forefinger, the old man was tracing screeching cabalistic figures and designs.
Leoncia was overcome, and clung both to Henry and Francis. Even Francis was perturbed.
“The echo was an echo,” he said. “But here is no echo. I don’t understand it. Frankly, it gets my goat.”
“Piffle!” Henry retorted, stirring the sand with his foot till it shouted again. “It’s the barking sand. On the island of Kauai, down in the Hawaiian Islands, I have been across similar barking sands——quite a place for tourists, I assure you. Only this is a better specimen, and much noisier. The scientists have a score of high-brow theories to account for the phenomenon. It occurs in several other places in the world, as I have heard. There’s only one thing to do, and that is to follow the compass bearing which leads straight across. Such sands do bark, but they have never been known to bite.”
But the last of the priests could not be persuaded out of his circle, although they succeeded in disturbing him from his prayers long enough to spout a flood of impassioned Maya speech.
