AN ANCIENT CASTLE IN RUINS
The moon was still casting a golden glow over the wonders of a tropical
world when Pant and Kirk, closely followed by the giant Carib, emerging
from the jungle caught their first look at the last Don’s plantation.
With eager eyes they sought out the spot where the ancient castle had
stood.
At a first startled glance Kirk cried out in dismay. Little wonder this,
for where a noble edifice had stood a mournful sight now met their eyes.
The magnificent, century old castle was now only a crumbled pile of
broken timber, tumbled stone and crumbling mortar.
“Gone!” Kirk cried. “They are all gone!”
“It can’t be as bad as that,” said Pant. “At the first shock they would
run from the house. Come on. Let’s get down there.”
No sooner said than done. Heedless of sharp stones that cut their shoes
and sharper cacti that tore their flesh, they sprang away over the
intervening space that lay between them and the tumbled pile of debris
that had once been a very happy home.
It was with a cry of great joy that Kirk found his good friends, the
family of the last Don, gathered upon a little circle of green that lay
before the ruins.
After a quiet greeting befitting such a moment of great sadness, the boys
took their places beside them.
It was a strange and moving sight that met their eyes as they looked
about them. Even Pant, who had seen and experienced much, felt a choking
sensation about his throat. Sprawled about upon the ground in various
attitudes of sleep were the servants. Not so the family. The aged
grandmother sat rocking gently back and forth. The last of the Dons, who
had returned from a trip down the river just in time to see his home
crumble to ruins, walked slowly before them. With hands clasped behind
his back, he paced ceaselessly backward and forward in the moonlight.
Sitting beside the two boys, the dark-eyed Spanish girl, granddaughter of
the last of the Dons, stared dreamily at the moon. To her no tragedy
could be quite complete, for was she not young and beautiful? Was not all
the world fresh and new? Strong she was, too, and brave. Many the jaguar
that had known the steel of her unfaltering aim, many the wild turkey
brought in by her to be roasted before the fire.
“Now,” she said, and there was a note akin to joy in her tone, “we shall
live like the savages in a house of thatched bamboo. Through the many
cracks the morning sun shall peep at us as we awake. The rain shall fall
gently upon our roof, the breeze shall play with my hair as I sit in our
little castle of bamboo. The jaguar may look in upon us at night and the
little wild pigs go grunting about our cabin. My good friend Kirk, and my
new friend Pant, we will live like savages and life will be sweet for,
after all, what is so romantic as a little home in the midst of a vast
wilderness?”
Kirk smiled at her. He admired the courage of this child of an old, long
lost race.
As for Pant, he scarcely heard her. He was thinking of the fragments of a
tale that had come to his ears, the tale of the first Don and his box of
beaten silver filled with priceless pearls.
“It may have been hidden in the walls of that very building which the
rude shock of nature has wrecked,” he told himself. “I must have a look
over those ruins.
“And then perhaps,” he thought more soberly still, “that may have been
the box I saw on the rocky ledge just as the earthquake shook the world
down upon my head. I wonder if that passage was closed? If it is not, was
the box buried in the wreckage? Who can tell? I must know.”
His thoughts returned to the American boy who had accompanied him, who
now sat close beside him. During the previous day he had been taken to
the boy’s room. There he had seen costly toilet articles, silver backed
brushes, real tortoise shell combs, and genuine alligator skin traveling
bags.
“He must belong to a rich family,” he thought. “How then does he chance
to be here so far from the home of other Americans, with only a black man
as his companion?”
As if reading his thoughts, the other boy began to speak. “My uncle,” he
said, “has travelled much. He wishes me to know the world as he knows it.
He is especially anxious for me to know much of Central America and her
products. You see I am to be—” He paused, did not finish the sentence,
stared away at the moon for a moment, then said quietly, as if the
sentence he had not finished had really never been begun, “Uncle has had
but one rule in all his travels: wherever a native, one who has always
lived in the land he is visiting, will go, he will follow. That is the
only rule he has laid down for me. My Carib is a native of this land. You
saw how wonderfully he performed to-day.”
Pant nodded.
“Wherever the Carib will go, I may follow.”
A question leaped into Pant’s mind, “Would the Carib venture again into
the fear inspiring Maya cave?” He doubted it, yet he wished very much to
return. He did not wish to go alone, had hoped that his new found friend
might return with him. The story he heard that night as he sat before the
ruins of that ancient home greatly strengthened his determination to
revisit the cave.
No place could be better fitted for the telling of a tale of buccaneers
and Spanish gold than that scene of ruins beneath the golden moon.
It was the last Don himself who told it. He told it all in Spanish, with
many a dramatic gesture, but Kirk, who appeared to understand Spanish as
well as he did his mother tongue, interpreted so skillfully that it
seemed to Pant that the aged Don, with his venerable beard and coal black
eyes, was telling the story directly to him.
And this was the tale he told:
Soon after gold had been brought to Europe from the New World and the
rush for riches had begun, Ramon Salazar, who had amassed a comfortable
fortune as a trader in old Madrid, but in whose veins coursed the spirit
of the Crusaders, sold all his possessions and, having invested them in
trade goods, sailed for America.
He landed on the east coast of Central America, but soon made his way
over the difficult trail that led to the Pacific.
Ramon Salazar was a man of honor. He did not go in search of Aztec gold,
nor did he lend aid to those shameful robberies of natives that still lie
black on the pages of Spanish-American history.
Having made his way to the west coast, where he hoped to be forever safe
from British and Scotch buccaneers, he set up a trading post and
prospered.
Having learned of the rich pearl fisheries, he made a study of the matter
and at last fitted out a schooner for the purpose of pearl fishing.
Hiring divers and securing the protection of a Spanish man-of-war, he
lingered long over those shallow waters whose submerged sandbars were
rich with pearl bearing mussels.
He prospered again. Some pearls were sold, but the richest and choicest
were kept in a box of beaten silver beneath the berth in his own
stateroom. The room was not left unguarded night or day.
“Some bright morning,” Ramon Salazar was fond of saying, “I shall take
that box and sail away for sunny Spain. Then who cares what further
riches the New World may still hold? But first,” he always added, “I must
have more pearls, larger pearls, a great pearl of pearls.”
So he lingered, until one day a startling thing happened. The east coast
had long been infested by buccaneers. The west had been free. But now,
out of a clear sky, one day as Ramon Salazar dined with the commander of
the man-of-war, a boat load of marauders boarded the pearl fishing
schooner, overpowered those on board, hoisted sail, and firing a shot
across the bow of the man-of-war, they took to sea. And on board that
schooner was Ramon Salazar’s treasure of pearls.
“What sort of box was it that held the pearls?” Pant asked a bit
breathlessly.
“Oh, my boy,” was the old Don’s reply, “that was long ago. Who can say?
It was of beaten silver, perhaps as long as a man’s forearm, and as thick
as such a box should be.”
“It might be the box,” the boy thought to himself. “Surely I must return
to the cave to-morrow.”
“But to-morrow,” he thought a moment later, “I cannot. There are other
matters which must be attended to. I must not forget my grandfather, my
photograph, and the chicle concession.” He felt for the packet he had
preserved so carefully. It was still safe.
“The bloody marauders did not succeed.” The old Don’s voice rose high
pitched and shrill. “God confounded them. The man-of-war fired a shot
that snapped their mainmast. They were captured. The treasure was
restored.
“But my sire of many generations back fished for pearls no more. He took
his box of pearls ashore. He did not return to Spain at once. Those were
perilous times upon the sea. He would wait.
“He waited too long. Morgan came.” The Don was fairly shouting now.
“Morgan, the most bloodthirsty and cruel monster that ever sailed the
Spanish Main. He came with many ships and two thousand men.”
For a time after this he was silent. A first faint flush of light along
the fringe of palms announced a new day.
“No,” said the aged man, speaking more to himself than to them, “Morgan
did not get the beaten silver box of pearls. Had he gotten it, one must
have known. He was a great braggart.
“When my sire heard of Morgan’s approach, he put the box under his arm
and walked away into the jungle. He knew the jungle well. He could not
have gotten lost in it. Yet he never returned. Somewhere—” He arose to
fling his arms wide in a dramatic gesture, “somewhere in this jungle the
box of beaten silver with the wealth of every Salazar within, lies
hidden.”
He resumed his seat. Light came more and more. Exhausted, the ancient Don
fell asleep. But Pant stared at the dawn. He was thinking of the time
when he might return to the Maya cave, and what he might find there when
that day came.
And then, of a sudden, his thoughts took a fresh turn. He smiled as he
thought of the strange code he had improvised at the spur of the moment
before leaving his grandfather’s office to plunge in the jungle, and the
curious note he had left for Johnny Thompson. Had Johnny returned? Had he
found the note? Had he been able to read it? What had kept Johnny so
long? What was to happen? Were their paths that had run side by side so
long to diverge at last?
Had he but known it, Johnny was at this moment planning a task which was
to bring them close together, yet to keep them apart for many days to
come. Such are the strange, wild chances of fate.