“I only wish Alvarez Torres were as dead as this dead one is. I haven’t the slightest doubt, however, but what Torres descended from him——I mean before he came here to take up his final earthly residence as a member of the Maya Treasure Guard.”
Leoncia passed the grim figure shudderingly. This time, the elbow passage was very dark, compelling Henry, who had changed into the lead, to light numerous matches.
“Hello!” he said, as he paused at the end of a couple of hundred feet. “Gaze on that for workmanship! Look at the dressing of that stone!”
From beyond, gray light streamed into the passage, making matches unnecessary to see. Half into a niche was thrust a stone the size of the passage. It was apparent that it had been used to block the passage. The dressing was exquisite, the sides and edges of the block precisely aligned with the place in the wall into which it was made to dovetail.
“I’ll wager here’s where the old Maya’s father died,” Francis exclaimed. “He knew the secret of the balances and leverages that pivoted the stone, and it was only partly pivoted, as you’ll observe——”
“Hell’s bells!” Henry interrupted, pointing before him on the floor at a scattered skeleton. “It must be what’s left of him. It’s fairly recent, or he would have been mummified. Most likely he was the last visitor before us.”
“The old priest said his father led men of the tierra caliente here,” Leoncia reminded Henry.
“Also,” Francis supplemented, “he said that none returned.”
Henry, who had located the skull and picked it up, uttered another exclamation and lighted a match to show the others what he had discovered: Not only was the skull dented with what must have been a blow from a sword or a machete, but a shattered hole in the back of the skull showed the unmistakable entrance of a bullet. Henry shook the skull, was rewarded by an interior rattling, shook again, and shook out a partly flattened bullet. Francis examined it.
“From a horse-pistol,” he concluded aloud. “With weak or greatly deteriorated powder, because, in a place like this, it must have been fired pretty close to point blank range and yet failed to go all the way through. And it’s an aboriginal skull all right.”
A right-angled turn completed the elbow and gave them access to a small but well-lighted rock chamber. From a window, high up and barred with vertical bars of stone a foot thick and half as wide, poured gray daylight. The floor of the place was littered with white-picked bones of men. An examination of the skulls showed them to be those of Europeans. Scattered among them were rifles, pistols, and knives, with, here and there, a machete.
“Thus far they won, across the very threshold to the treasure,” Francis said, “and, from the looks, began to fight for its possession before they laid hands on it. Too bad the old man isn’t here to see what happened to his father.”
“Might there not have been survivors who managed to get away with the loot?” suggested Henry.
But at that moment, casting, his eyes from the bones to a survey of the chamber, Francis saw what made him say:
“Without doubt, no. See those gems in those eyes. Rubies, or I never saw a ruby!”
They followed his gaze to the stone statue of a squat and heavy female who stared at them red-eyed and open-mouthed. So large was the mouth that it made a caricature of the rest of the face. Beside it, carved similarly of stone, and on somewhat more heroic lines, was a more obscene and hideous male statue, with one ear of proportioned size and the other ear as grotesquely large as the female’s mouth.
“The beauteous dame must be Chia all right,” Henry grinned. “But who’s her gentleman friend with the elephant ear and the green eyes?”
“Search me,” Francis laughed. “But this I do know: those green eyes of the elephant-eared one are the largest emeralds I’ve ever seen or dreamed of. Each of them is really too large to possess fair carat value. They should be crown jewels or nothing.”
“But a couple of emeralds and a couple of rubies, no matter what size, should not constitute the totality of the Maya treasure,” Henry contended. “We’re across the threshold of it, and yet we lack the key——”
“Which the old Maya, back on the barking sands, undoubtedly holds in that sacred tassel of his,” Leoncia said. “Except for these two statues and the bones on the floor, the place is bare.”
As she spoke, she advanced to look the male statue over more closely. The grotesque ear centered her attention, and she pointed into it as she added: “I don’t know about the key, but there is the key-hole.”
True enough, the elephantine ear, instead of enfolding an orifice as an ear of such size should, was completely blocked up save for a small aperture that not too remotely resembled a key-hole. They wandered vainly about the chamber, tapping the walls and floor, seeking for cunningly-hidden passageways or unguessable clues to the hiding place of the treasure.
“Bones of tierra caliente men, two idols, two emeralds of enormous size, two rubies ditto, and ourselves, are all the place contains,” Francis summed up. “Only a couple of things remain for us to do: go back and bring up Ricardo and the mules to make camp outside; and bring up the old gentleman and his sacred knots if we have to carry him.”
“You wait with Leoncia, and I’ll go back and bring them up,” Henry volunteered, when they had threaded the long passages and the avenues of the erect dead and won to the sunshine and the sky outside the face of the cliff.
Back on the barking sands the peon and his father knelt in the circle so noisily drawn by the old man’s forefinger. A local rain squall beat upon them, and, though the peon shivered, the old man prayed on oblivious to what might happen to his skin in the way of wind and water. It was because the peon shivered and was uncomfortable that he observed two things which his father missed. First, he saw Alvarez Torres and José Mancheno cautiously venture out from the jungle upon the sand. Next, he saw a miracle. The miracle was that the pair of them trudged steadily across the sand without causing the slightest sound to arise from their progress. When they had disappeared ahead, he touched his finger tentatively to the sand, and aroused no ghostly whisperings. He thrust his finger into the sand, yet all was silent, as was it silent when he buffeted the sand heartily with the flat of his palm. The passing shower had rendered the sand dumb.
He shook his father out of his prayers, announcing:
“The sand no longer is noisy. It is as silent as the grave. And I have seen the enemy of the rich Gringo pass across the sand without sound. He is not devoid of sin, this Alvarez Torres, yet did the sand make no sound. The sand has died. The voice of the sand is not. Where the sinful may walk, you and I, old father, may walk.”
Inside the circle, the old Maya, with trembling forefinger in the sand, traced further cabalistic characters; and the sand did not shout back at him. Outside the circle it was the same——because the sand had become wet, and because it was the way of the sand to be vocal only when it was bone-dry under the sun. He fingered the knots of the sacred writing tassel.
“It says,” he reported, “that when the sand no longer talks it is safe to proceed. So far I have obeyed all instruction. In order to obey further instruction, let us now proceed.”
So well did they proceed, that, shortly beyond the barking sands, they overtook Torres and Mancheno, which worthy pair slunk off into the brush on one side, watched the priest and his son go by, and took up their trail well in the rear. While Henry, taking a short cut, missed both couples of men.
CHAPTER XV
“Even so, it was a mistake and a weakness on my part to remain in Panama,” Francis was saying to Leoncia, as they sat side by side on the rocks outside the cave entrance, waiting Henry’s return.
“Does the stock market of New York then mean so much to you?” Leoncia coquettishly teased; yet only part of it was coquetry, the major portion of it being temporization. She was afraid of being alone with this man whom she loved so astoundingly and terribly.
Francis was impatient.
“I am ever a straight talker, Leoncia. I say what I mean, in the directest, shortest way——”
“Wherein you differ from us Spaniards,” she interpolated, “who must garnish and dress the simplest thoughts with all decorations of speech.”
But he continued undeterred what he had started to say.
“There you are a baffler, Leoncia, which was just what I was going to call you. I speak straight talk and true talk, which is a man’s way. You baffle in speech, and flutter like a butterfly——which, I grant, is a woman’s way and to be expected. Nevertheless, it is not fair ... to me. I tell you straight out the heart of me, and you understand. You do not tell me your heart. You flutter and baffle, and I do not understand. Therefore, you have me at a disadvantage. You know I love you. I have told you plainly. I? What do I know about you?”
With downcast eyes and rising color in her cheeks, she sat silent, unable to reply.
“You see!” he insisted. “You do not answer. You look warmer and more beautiful and desirable than ever, more enticing, in short; and yet you baffle me and tell me nothing of your heart or intention. Is it because you are woman? Or because you are Spanish?”
