Coming back laden with the loot of Loma, the four tall men looked
earnestly to the right; to the left they durst not, for the precipice
there that had been with them so long went sickly down on to a bank of
clouds, and how much further below that only their fears could say.
Loma lay smoking, a city of ruin, behind them, all its defenders dead;
there was no one left to pursue them, and yet their Indian instincts
told them that all was scarcely well. They had gone three days along
that narrow ledge: mountain quite smooth, incredible, above them, and
precipice as smooth and as far below. It was chilly there in the
mountains; at night a stream or a wind in the gloom of the chasm below
them went like a whisper; the stillness of all things else began to
wear the nerve--an enemy's howl would have braced them; they began to
wish their perilous path were wider, they began to wish that they had
not sacked Loma.
Had that path been any wider the sacking of Loma must indeed have been
harder for them, for the citizens must have fortified the city but
that the awful narrowness of that ten-league pass of the hills had
made their crag-surrounded city secure. And at last an Indian had
said, "Come, let us sack it." Grimly they laughed in the wigwams. Only
the eagles, they said, had ever seen it, its hoard of emeralds and its
golden gods; and one had said he would reach it, and they answered,
"Only the eagles."
It was Laughing Face who said it, and who gathered thirty braves and
led them into Loma with their tomahawks and their bows; there were
only four left now, but they had the loot of Loma on a mule. They had
four golden gods, a hundred emeralds, fifty-two rubies, a large silver
gong, two sticks of malachite with amethyst handles for holding
incense at religious feasts, four beakers one foot high, each carved
from a rose-quartz crystal; a little coffer carved out of two
diamonds, and (had they but known it) the written curse of a priest.
It was written on parchment in an unknown tongue, and had been slipped
in with the loot by a dying hand.
From either end of that narrow, terrible ledge the third night was
closing in; it was dropping down on them from the heights of the
mountain and slipping up to them out of the abyss, the third night
since Loma blazed and they had left it. Three more days of tramping
should bring them in triumph home, and yet their instincts said that
all was scarcely well. We who sit at home and draw the blinds and shut
the shutters as soon as night appears, who gather round the fire when
the wind is wild, who pray at regular seasons and in familiar shrines,
know little of the demoniac look of night when it is filled with
curses of false, infuriated gods. Such a night was this. Though in the
heights the fleecy clouds were idle, yet the wind was stirring
mournfully in the abyss and moaning as it stirred, unhappily at first
and full of sorrow; but as day turned away from that awful path a very
definite menace entered its voice which fast grew louder and louder,
and night came on with a long howl. Shadows repeatedly passed over the
stars, and then a mist fell swiftly, as though there were something
suddenly to be done and utterly to be hidden, as in very truth there
was.
And in the chill of that mist the four tall men prayed to their
totems, the whimsical wooden figures that stood so far away, watching
the pleasant wigwams; the firelight even now would be dancing over
their faces, while there would come to their ears delectable tales of
war. They halted upon the pass and prayed, and waited for any sign.
For a man's totem may be in the likeness perhaps of an otter, and a
man may pray, and if his totem be placable and watching over his man a
noise may be heard at once like the noise that the otter makes, though
it be but a stone that falls on another stone; and the noise is a
sign. The four men's totems that stood so far away were in the
likeness of the coney, the bear, the heron, and the lizard. They
waited, and no sign came. With all the noises of the wind in the
abyss, no noise was like the thump that the coney makes, nor the
bear's growl, nor the heron's screech, nor the rustle of the lizard in
the reeds.
It seemed that the wind was saying something over and over again, and
that that thing was evil. They prayed again to their totems, and no
sign came. And then they knew that there was some power that night
that was prevailing against the pleasant carvings on painted poles of
wood with the firelight on their faces so far away. Now it was clear
that the wind was saying something, some very, very dreadful thing in
a tongue that they did not know. They listened, but they could not
tell what it said. Nobody could have said from seeing their faces how
much the four tall men desired the wigwams again, desired the
camp-fire and the tales of war and the benignant totems that listened
and smiled in the dusk: nobody could have seen how well they knew that
this was no common night or wholesome mist.
When at last no answer came nor any sign from their totems, they
pulled out of the bag those golden gods that Loma gave not up except
in flames and when all her men were dead. They had large ruby eyes and
emerald tongues. They set them down upon that mountain pass, the
cross-legged idols with their emerald tongues; and having placed
between them a few decent yards, as it seemed meet there should be
between gods and men, they bowed them down and prayed in their
desperate straits in that dank, ominous night to the gods they had
wronged, for it seemed that there was a vengeance upon the hills and
that they would scarce escape, as the wind knew well. And the gods
laughed, all four, and wagged their emerald tongues; the Indians saw
them, though the night had fallen and though the mist was low. The
four tall men leaped up at once from their knees and would have left
the gods upon the pass but that they feared some hunter of their tribe
might one day find them and say of Laughing Face, "He fled and left
behind his golden gods," and sell the gold and come with his wealth to
the wigwams and be greater than Laughing Face and his three men. And
then they would have cast the gods away, down the abyss, with their
eyes and their emerald tongues, but they knew that enough already they
had wronged Loma's gods, and feared that vengeance enough was waiting
them on the hills. So they packed them back in the bag on the
frightened mule, the bag that held the curse they knew nothing of, and
so pushed on into the menacing night. Till midnight they plodded on
and would not sleep; grimmer and grimmer grew the look of the night,
and the wind more full of meaning, and the mule knew and trembled, and
it seemed that the wind knew, too, as did the instincts of those four
tall men, though they could not reason it out, try how they would.
And though the squaws waited long where the pass winds out of the
mountains, near where the wigwams are upon the plains, the wigwams and
the totems and the fire, and though they watched by day, and for many
nights uttered familiar calls, still did they never see those four
tall men emerge out of the mountains any more, even though they prayed
to their totems upon their painted poles; but the curse in the
mystical writing that they had unknown in their bag worked there on
that lonely pass six leagues from the ruins of Loma, and nobody can
tell us what it was.