BEASTS OF BURDEN
Their dungeon was dark and it had the smell of an underground place,
musty, damp, stuffy. When it seemed to Cliff that hours must have passed
since they had all been flung into the single unlighted cubicle he
looked at the radiumited face of the watch on his wrist: hardly half an
hour had elapsed.
“This is truly a terrible situation,” said Mr. Gray. “I feel very badly
when I think that in coming here to help me you have all fallen into a
worse situation.”
“Please don’t feel that way, Father,” Cliff begged, touching the hand
that trembled a little on his knee. “You always taught me that no good
intention and no act done with a good motive could ever bring anything
but good.”
“It does not seem to work, this time,” said his father.
“But it will!” Tom said. “Didn’t you notice the soldier who walked with
me? No, you didn’t: I remember, we were behind you. Well, it was Caya’s
brother and he whispered to me to give him the quipu supposed to be the
Inca’s token.”
“I didn’t know that,” Mr. Whitley spoke through the darkness. “He may
try to help us.”
“Mr. Whitley,” said Nicky, “why can’t we all push on that big stone
across the door? It is on some sort of a pivot: we could all push
together and move it.”
“Yes, two of us could move it—the soldiers did,” Bill took a part in the
talk. “But the guards are outside. By the time we could get the stone
moved they could use their swords.”
“I guess we are helpless,” Mr. Whitley said remorsefully. “And it is all
my fault for letting you lads come here: you should have camped on the
ledge: Bill and I should have taken the risks of danger.”
“I still have faith that an Almighty Power watches over us,” Cliff
declared. “We have gone through a great deal of danger and not one of us
has been hurt.”
“I am proud of you, my son,” said Mr. Gray. “And it is a rebuke to us
who are older. I know, deep down in my heart, that you are right. After
years among these people, unharmed, made nearly well when I thought my
feebleness would destroy me, I should be thankful to that Great
Power—and I am!”
“Let’s all think ‘we are going to get out all right,’” Nicky suggested.
“Think as hard as we can.”
No one replied. Perhaps, with all other help apparently denied them,
they all had a mind to do as Nicky urged: at any rate the black room,
with its air rapidly growing more stale and heavy, was so silent that
they heard, through the place where the upper end of the barrier failed
to touch the door frame, the muttering of several guards in the tunnel.
Ages passed, or so it seemed. In fact, hours did go slowly into the
past, and nothing happened.
“Listen!” whispered Tom, finally, when the air had become so oppressive
that they all began to feel heavy and dull. “Did I hear somebody
walking?”
“Yes,” answered Bill. “They are changing the guard, I guess.”
“Poor Caya,” said Cliff. “I feel sorry for her. She is all alone, in
some hole as dark as this: and all on account of us.”
“Yes,” said Tom. “But she is alive—and so is her sister—because of us.”
“I wonder where her brother is,” Nicky mused.
“Sh-h-h!” warned Bill. “Be quiet and if the stone moves, let’s all make
a rush. I hear somebody fumbling at the stone.”
He had moved close to the barricaded doorway in the dark. But as the
stone began to move and they all gathered their muscles for a dash, they
were chained with surprise.
“I am Pizzara,” came the unmistakable voice of the Spaniard. “I come to
help. Push there, you!”
The stone moved more and even the faint light from a torch jammed into a
place made for it nearby in the tunnel wall was brilliant to their
widened pupils. They blinked as they saw two figures, in the garb of the
Inca’s soldiers.
“It is Caya’s brother and the stranger who spoke,” said one of the
figures, in quichua dialect. “Come forth quickly!”
They filed out; Nicky and Bill and Cliff helped support Mr. Gray who was
stiff and tottering from his long inactivity. They saw Caya’s brother
tapping at several other door stones; finally he called to Tom and Cliff
and the three managed to move a great barricade slowly a little way
aside. Had it not been swung on a rude pivot this would have been
impossible. As it was they got it far enough opened to allow Caya,
shaking with excitement and eagerness, to come from her black prison.
“I meet this soldier,” explained Pizzara. “I have watch him and I think
he is friend. I ask him and it is yes. Now we go quick’.”
“I certainly do beg your pardon,” said Mr. Whitley. “I thought you were
an enemy and you have liberated us.”
The Spaniard showed his teeth in a curious grin.
“It is all a part of my plan,” he said mysteriously as they went hastily
along the passage, the young Peruvian carrying the single torch in the
rear with his sister. “When you are sleeping in the lake bottom I steal
away with my men. I think then we get here before you. But the Indians
fling stones upon us in the white pass and my natives know it is
danger’.”
They kept careful watch but it seemed that no one was in the tunnels:
the guards whom the Spaniard and the Indian had replaced had gone home
or to their barracks and no one else was on guard, it seemed.
“All but one,” the Spaniard went on. “My men are escape. I have gun and
I make them go forward, but we go in old water way.” The same one, Cliff
mused, that they had used to get around the ambush; then he listened as
Pizzara continued, “We find the ledge as it is on the map and there is
your camp where you have leave some thing and the cord to haul the rope.
It is very clever, _si_.”
“You left your natives there,” Bill said. “That’s my guess. Then you
came down into this valley. But how did you expect to get any gold—or
much!—all alone?”
“Ah!” grinned Pizzara, “this one is clever, as you. I plan all this and
as I plan so it is come out—just exactly.”
“Plan?——” Cliff was puzzled. “How could you expect we would get into a
dungeon and that you would save us—and what has that to do with your
plan to get gold?”
“It is all simple,” Pizzara grinned. “I come and see that you are here:
then I find ways to make Inca suspect you, and high priest to make you
prisoner. You help that by what you do. So then I have you where I wish
to have you! It is good fortune of my patron Saint that this soldier and
his sister are mix up with you. It make two more to carry for me.”
“To carry?” demanded Mr. Whitley. “What do you mean?”
They had come to the place where the tunnel branched away in the
direction of the break where the aqueduct used to flood the tunnels was
situated: by common impulse they all swung after Tom who had memorized
that way.
“Halt!” snapped Pizzara. They all stopped and looked at him. In the
torchlight his face was a leering, triumphant mask of lustful delight.
In his hand was the very “magic stick”—the small revolver—which he had
caused the high priest to take from Bill when they were captured: Bill
had not been able to use it, even in self rescue, for fear of shooting
his friends; he had surrendered it with a scowl for his rifle, as he now
knew, was in the hands of Pizzara’s natives, waiting, at the camp on the
ledge.
“We can’t stop,” Mr. Whitley said. “Some one may discover us.”
“You stop when I say!” Pizzara gloated, lifting the shining muzzle. “If
I shoot you will be capture. I will escape and come another time to take
the gold. If you do what I say you get way and I may give you one little
bit of gold as a—a souvenir.”
“You expect us to carry gold!—when we are trying to escape with Mr. Gray
who is feeble?” Bill snapped at Pizzara.
“Yes!” replied Pizzara. “I have select gold that is carve very pretty:
it is not too heavy with so many. It will sell very high for the art and
not for the gold, as your scholar will say when he see what I have
choose.”
He lifted the revolver as Bill’s fists doubled.
“You are a beast!” said Mr. Whitley. “A beast who——”
“Who drive beast of burden! Come and I load your backs!”