As he spoke, while the Lost Souls looked on eagerly, and while the three strangers looked on with no less keenness of apprehension, the priest thrust his hand into the open mouth of a large leather bag and began dropping handfuls of gold nuggets into the heated crucible of the tripod. So near were they, that they could see the gold melt into fluid and rise up in the crucible like the drink it was intended to be.
The little maid, daring on her extraordinary position in the Lost Souls Tribe, came up to the Sun Priest and spoke that all might hear.
“That is Da Vasco, the Capitan Da Vasco, the divine Capitan Da Vasco, who led our ancestors here the long long time ago.”
The priest tried to silence her with a frown. But the maid repeated her statement, pointing eloquently from the bust to Torres and back again; and the priest felt his grip on the situation slipping, while inwardly he cursed the sinful love of the mother of the little girl which had made her his daughter.
“Hush!” he commanded sternly. “These are things of which you know nothing. If he be the Capitan Da Vasco, being divine he will drink the gold and be unharmed.”
Into a rude pottery pitcher, which had been heated in the pot of fire at the base of the altar, he poured the molten gold. At a signal, several of the young men laid aside their spears, and, with the evident intention of prying her teeth apart, advanced on Leoncia.
“Hold, priest!” Francis shouted stentoriously. “She is not divine as Da Vasco is divine. Try the golden drink on Da Vasco.”
Whereat Torres bestowed upon Francis a look of malignant anger.
“Stand on your haughty pride,” Francis instructed him. “Decline the drink. Show them the inside of your helmet.”
“I will not drink!” Torres cried, half in a panic as the priest turned to him.
“You shall drink. If you are Da Vasco, the divine capitan from the sun, we will then know it and we will fall down and worship you.”
Torres looked appeal at Francis, which the priest’s narrow eyes did not fail to catch.
“Looks as though you’ll have to drink it,” Francis said dryly. “Anyway, do it for the lady’s sake and die like a hero.”
With a sudden violent strain at the cords that bound him, Torres jerked one hand free, pulled off his helmet, and held it so that the priest could gaze inside.
“Behold what is graven therein,” Torres commanded.
Such was the priest’s startlement at sight of the inscription, DA VASCO, that the pitcher fell from his hand. The molten gold, spilling forth, set the dry debris on the ground afire, while one of the spearmen, spattered on the foot, danced away with wild yells of pain. But the Sun Priest quickly recovered himself. Seizing the fire pot, he was about to set fire to the faggots heaped about his three victims, when the little maid intervened.
“The Sun God would not let the great captain drink the drink,” she said. “The Sun God spilled it from your hand.”
And when all the Lost Souls began to murmur that there was more in the matter than appeared to their priest, the latter was compelled to hold his hand. Nevertheless was he resolved on the destruction of the three intruders. So, craftily, he addressed his people.
“We shall wait for a sign.—Bring oil. We will give the Sun God time for a sign.——Bring a candle.”
Pouring the jar of oil over the faggots to make them more inflammable, he set the lighted stub of a candle in the midst of the saturated fuel, and said:
“The life of the candle will be the duration of the time for the sign. Is it well, O People?”
And all the Lost Souls murmured, “It is well.”
Torres looked appeal to Francis, who replied:
“The old brute certainly pinched on the length of the candle. It won’t last five minutes at best, and, maybe, inside three minutes we’ll be going up in smoke.”
“What can we do?” Torres demanded frantically, while Leoncia looked bravely, with a sad brave smile of love, into Francis’ eyes.
“Pray for rain,” Francis answered. “And the sky is as clear as a bell. After that, die game. Don’t squeal too loud.”
And his eyes returned to Leoncia’s and expressed what he had never dared express to her before——his full heart of love. Apart, by virtue of the posts to which they were tied and which separated them, they had never been so close together, and the bond that drew them and united them was their eyes.
First of all, the little maid, gazing into the sky for the sign, saw it. Torres, who had eyes only for the candle stub, nearly burned to its base, heard the maid’s cry and looked up. And at the same time he heard, as all of them heard, the droning flight as of some monstrous insect in the sky.
“An aeroplane,” Francis muttered. “Torres, claim it for the sign.”
But no need to claim was necessary. Above them not more than a hundred feet, it swooped and circled, the first aeroplane the Lost Souls had ever seen, while from it, like a benediction from heaven, descended the familiar:
“Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew.”
Completing the circle and rising to an elevation of nearly a thousand feet, they saw an object detach itself directly overhead, fall like a plummet for three hundred feet, then expand into a spread parachute, with beneath it like a spider suspended on a web, the form of a man, which last, as it neared the ground, again began to sing:
“Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew.”
And then event crowded on event with supremest rapidity. The stub of the candle fell apart, the flaming wick fell into the tiny lake of molten fat, the lake flamed, and the oil-saturated faggots about it flamed. And Henry, landing in the thick of the Lost Souls, blanketing a goodly portion of them under his parachute, in a couple of leaps was beside his friends and kicking the blazing faggots right and left. Only for a second did he desist. This was when the Sun Priest interfered. A right hook to the jaw put that aged confidant of God down on his back, and, while he slowly recuperated and crawled to his feet, Henry slashed clear the lashings that bound Leoncia, Francis, and Torres. His arms were out to embrace Leoncia, when she thrust him away with:
“Quick! There is no time for explanation. Down on your knees to Torres and pretend you are his slave——and don’t talk Spanish; talk English.”
Henry could not comprehend, and, while Leoncia reassured him with her eyes, he saw Francis prostrate himself at the feet of their common enemy.
“Gee!” Henry muttered, as he joined Francis. “Here goes. But it’s worse than rat poison.”
Leoncia followed him, and all the Lost Souls went down prone before the Capitan Da Vasco who received in their midst celestial messengers direct from the sun. All went down, except the priest, who, mightily shaken, was meditating doing it, when the mocking devil of melodrama in Torres’ soul prompted him to overdo his part.
As haughtily as Francis had coached him, he lifted his right foot and placed it down on Henry’s neck, incidentally covering and pinching most of his ear.
And Henry literally went up in the air.
“You can’t step on my ear, Torres!” he shouted, at the same time dropping him, as he had dropped the priest with his right hook.
“And now the beans are spilled,” Francis commented in dry and spiritless disgust. “The Sun God stuff is finished right here and now.”
The Sun Priest, exultantly signaling his spearmen, grasped the situation. But Henry dropped the muzzle of his automatic pistol to the old priest’s midrif; and the priest, remembering the legends of deadly missiles propelled by the mysterious substance called “gunpowder,” smiled appeasingly and waved back his spearmen.
“This is beyond my powers of wisdom and judgment,” he addressed his tribespeople, while ever his wavering glance returned to the muzzle of Henry’s pistol. “I shall appeal to the last resort. Let the messenger be sent to wake the Lady Who Dreams. Tell her that strangers from the sky, and, mayhap, the sun, are here in our valley. And that only the wisdom of her far dreams will make clear to us what we do not understand, and what even I do not understand.”
CHAPTER XVIII
Convoyed by the spearmen, the party of Leoncia, the two Morgans, and Torres, was led through the pleasant fields, all under a high state of primitive cultivation, and on across running streams and through woodland stretches and knee deep pastures where grazed cows of so miniature a breed that, full-grown, they were no larger than young calves.
“They’re milch cows without mistake,” Henry commented. “And they’re perfect beauties. But did you ever see such dwarfs! A strong man could lift up the biggest specimen and walk off with it.”
“Don’t fool yourself,” Francis spoke up. “Take that one over there, the black one. I’ll wager it’s not an ounce under three hundredweight.”
