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.”
The old man, as he led the way, was forever pulling out the sacred
tassel and mumbling and muttering as he fingered it.
“Hope the old gentleman doesn’t wear it out,” was Henry’s fervent wish.
“You’d think he’d read the directions once and remember them for a
little while instead of continually pawing them over.”
They rode out through the jungle into a clear space that looked as if at
some time man had hewn down the jungle and fought it back. Beyond, by
the vista afforded by the clearing, the mountain called Blanco Rovalo
towered high in the sunny sky. The old Maya halted his mule, ran over
certain strings in the tassel, pointed at the mountain, and spoke in
broken Spanish:
“It says: _In the foot-steps of the God wait till the eyes of Chia
flash._”
He indicated the particular knots of a particular string as the source
of his information.
“Where are the foot-steps, old priest?” Henry demanded, staring about
him at the unbroken sward.
But the old man started his mule, and, with a tattoo of bare heels on
the creature’s ribs, hastened it on across the clearing and into the
jungle beyond.
“He’s like a hound on the scent, and it looks as if the scent is getting
hot,” Francis remarked.
At the end of half a mile, where the jungle turned to grass-land on
swift-rising slopes the old man forced his mule into a gallop which he
maintained until he reached a natural depression in the ground. Three
feet or more in depth, of area sufficient to accommodate a dozen persons
in comfort, its form was strikingly like that which some colossal human
foot could have made.
“The foot-step of the God,” the old priest proclaimed solemnly, ere he
slid off his mule and prostrated himself in prayer. “_In the foot-step
of the God must we wait till the eyes of Chia flash_——so say the sacred
knots.”
“Pretty good place for a meal,” Henry vouchsafed, looking down into the
depression. “While waiting for the mumbo-jumbo foolery to come off, we
might as well stay our stomachs.”
“If Chia doesn’t object,” laughed Francis.
And Chia did not object, at least the old priest could not find any
objection written in the knots.
While the mules were being tethered on the edge of the first break of
woods, water was fetched from a nearby spring and a fire built in the
foot-step. The old Maya seemed oblivious of everything, as he mumbled
endless prayers and ran the knots over and over.
“If only he doesn’t blow up,” Francis said.
“I thought he was wild-eyed the first day we met him up in Juchitan,”
concurred Henry. “But it’s nothing to the way his eyes are now.”
Here spoke the peon, who, unable to understand a word of their English,
nevertheless sensed the drift of it.
“This is very religious, very dangerous, to have anything to do with the
old Maya sacred things. It is the death-road. My father knows. Many men
have died. The deaths are sudden and horrible. Even Maya priests have
died. My father’s father so died. He, too, loved a woman of the tierra
caliente. And for love of her, for gold, he sold the Maya secret and by
the knot-writing led tierra caliente men to the treasure. He died. They
all died. My father does not like the women of the tierra caliente now
that he is old. He liked them too well in his youth, which was his sin.
And he knows the danger of leading you to the treasure. Many men have
sought during the centuries. Of those who found it, not one came back.
It is said that even conquistadores and pirates of the English Morgan
have won to the hiding-place and decorated it with their bones.”
“And when your father dies,” Francis queried, “then, being his son, you
will be the Maya high priest?”
“No, senor,” the peon shook his head. “I am only half-Maya. I cannot
read the knots. My father did not teach me because I was not of the pure
Maya blood.”
“And if he should die, right now, is there any other Maya who can read
the knots?”
“No, senor. My father is the last living man who knows that ancient
language.”
But the conversation was broken in upon by Leoncia and Ricardo, who,
having tethered their mules with the others, were gazing sheepishly down
from the rim of the depression. The faces of Henry and Francis lighted
with joy at the sight of Leoncia, while their mouths opened and their
tongues articulated censure and scolding. Also, they insisted on her
returning with Ricardo.
“But you cannot send me away before giving me something to eat,” she
persisted, slipping down the slope of the depression with pure feminine
cunning in order to place the discussion on a closer and more intimate
basis.
Aroused by their voices, the old Maya came out of a trance of prayer and
observed her with wrath. And in wrath he burst upon her, intermingling
occasional Spanish words and phrases with the flood of denunciation in
Maya.
“He says that women are no good,” the peon interpreted in the first
pause. “He says women bring quarrels among men, the quick steel, the
sudden death. Bad luck and God’s wrath are ever upon them. Their ways
are not God’s ways, and they lead men to destruction. He says women are
the eternal enemy of God and man, forever keeping God and man apart. He
says women have ever cluttered the foot-steps of God and have kept men
away from travelling the path of God to God. He says this woman must go
back.”
With laughing eyes, Francis whistled his appreciation of the diatribe,
while Henry said:
“Now will you be good, Leoncia? You see what a Maya thinks of your sex.
This is no place for you. California’s the place. Women vote there.”
“The trouble is that the old man is remembering the woman who brought
misfortune upon him in the heyday of his youth,” Francis said. He turned
to the peon. “Ask your father to read the knot-writing and see what it
says for or against women traveling in the foot-steps of God.”
In vain the ancient high priest fumbled the sacred writing. There was
not to be found the slightest authoritative objection to woman.
“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.
“He says,” the son interpreted, “that we are bent on such sacrilege that
the very sands cry out against us. He will go no nearer to the dread
abode of Chia. Nor will I. His father died there, as is well known
amongst the Mayas. He says he will not die there. He says he is not old
enough to die.”
“The miserable octogenarian!” Francis laughed, and was startled by the
ghostly, mocking laugh of the echo, while all about them the sand-dunes
bayed in chorus. “Too youthful to die! How about you, Leoncia? Are you
too young to die yet a while?”
“Say,” she smiled back, moving her foot slightly so as to bring a moan
of reproach from the sand beneath it. “On the contrary, I am too old to
die just because the cliffs echo our laughter back at us and because the
sandhills bark at us. Come, let us go on. We are very close to those
flashings. Let the old man wait within his circle until we come back.”
She cast off their hands and stepped forward, and as they followed, all
the dunes became inarticulate, while one, near to them, down the sides
of which ran a slide of sand, rumbled and thundered. Fortunately for
them, as they were soon to learn, Francis, at abandoning the mules, had
equipped himself with a coil of thin, strong rope.
Once across the sands they encountered more echoes. On trials, they
found their halloes distinctly repeated as often as six or eight times.
“Hell’s bells,” said Henry. “No wonder the natives fight shy of such a
locality!”
“Wasn’t it Mark Twain who wrote about a man whose hobby was making a
collection of echoes?” Francis queried.
“Never heard of him. But this is certainly some fine collection of Maya
echoes. They chose the region wisely for a hiding place. Undoubtedly it
was always sacred, even before the Spaniards came. The old priests knew
the natural causes of the mysteries, and passed them over to the herd as
mystery with a capital ‘M’ and supernatural in origin.”
Not many minutes afterward they emerged on an open, level space, close
under a crannied and ledge-ribbed cliff, and exchanged their single-file
mode of progression to three-abreast. The ground was a hard, brittle
crust of surface, so crystalline and dry as never to suggest that it was
aught else but crystalline and dry all the way down. In an ebullition of
spirits, desiring to keep both men on an equality of favor, Leoncia
seized their hands and started them into a run. At the end of half a
dozen strides the disaster happened. Simultaneously Henry and Francis
broke through the crust, sinking to their thighs, and Leoncia was only a
second behind them in breaking through and sinking almost as deep.
“Hell’s bells!” Henry muttered. “It’s the very devil’s own landscape.”
And his low-spoken words were whispered back to him from the nearby
cliffs on all sides and endlessly and sibilantly repeated.
Not at first did they fully apprehend their danger. It was when, by
their struggles, they found themselves waist-deep and steadily sinking,
that the two men grasped the gravity of the situation. Leoncia still
laughed at the predicament, for it seemed no more than that to her.
“Quicksand,” Francis gasped.
“Quicksand!” all the landscape gasped back at him, and continued to gasp
it in fading ghostly whispers, repeating it and gossiping about it with
gleeful unction.
“It’s a pot-hole filled with quicksand,” Henry corroborated.
“Maybe the old boy was right in sticking back there on the barking
sands,” observed Francis.
The ghostly whispering redoubled upon itself and was a long time in
dying away.
By this time they were midway between waist and arm-pits and sinking as
methodically as ever.
“Well, somebody’s got to get out of the scrape alive,” Henry remarked.
And, even without discussing the choice, both men began to hoist Leoncia
up, although the effort and her weight thrust them more quickly down.
When she stood, free and clear, a foot on the nearest shoulder of each
of the two men she loved, Francis said, though the landscape mocked him:
“Now, Leoncia, we’re going to toss you out of this. At the word ‘Go!’
let yourself go. And you must strike full length and softly on the
crust. You’ll slide a little. But don’t let yourself stop. Keep on
going. Crawl out to the solid land on your hands and knees. And,
whatever you do, don’t stand up until you reach the solid land.—Ready,
Henry?”
Between them, though it hastened their sinking, they swung her back and
forth, free in the air, and, the third swing, at Francis’ “Go!” heaved
her shoreward.
Her obedience to their instructions was implicit, and, on hands and
knees, she gained the solid rocks of the shore.
“Now for the rope!” she called to them.
But by this time Francis was too deep to be able to remove the coil from
around his neck and under one arm. Henry did it for him, and, though the
exertion sank him to an equal deepness, managed to fling one end of the
rope to Leoncia.
At first she pulled on it. Next, she fastened a turn around a boulder
the size of a motor car, and let Henry pull. But it was in vain. The
strain or purchase was so lateral that it seemed only to pull him
deeper. The quicksand was sucking and rising over his shoulders when
Leoncia cried out, precipitating a very Bedlam of echoes:
“Wait! Stop pulling! I have an idea! Give me all the slack! Just save
enough of the end to tie under your shoulders!”
The next moment, dragging the rope after her by the other end, she was
scaling the cliff. Forty feet up, where a gnarled and dwarfed tree
rooted in the crevices, she paused. Passing the rope across the
tree-trunk, as over a hook, she drew in the slack and made fast to a
boulder of several hundredweight.
“Good for the girl!” Francis applauded to Henry.
Both men had grasped her plan, and success depended merely on her
ability to dislodge the boulder and topple it off the ledge. Five
precious minutes were lost, until she could find a dead branch of
sufficient strength to serve as a crowbar. Attacking the boulder from
behind and working with tense coolness while her two lovers continued to
sink, she managed at the last to topple it over the brink.
As it fell, the rope tautened with a jerk that fetched an involuntary
grunt from Henry’s suddenly constricted chest. Slowly, he arose out of
the quicksand, his progress being accompanied by loud sucking reports as
the sand reluctantly released him. But, when he cleared the surface, the
boulder so outweighed him that he shot shoreward across the crust until
directly under the purchase above, when the boulder came to rest on the
ground beside him.
Only Francis’ head, arms, and tops of shoulders were visible above the
quicksand when the end of the rope was flung to him. And, when he stood
beside them on terra firma, and when he shook his fist at the quicksand
he had escaped by so narrow a shave, they joined with him in deriding
it. And a myriad ghosts derided them back, and all the air about them
was woven by whispering shuttles into an evil texture of mockery.