Hearts of Three 30

Hearts of Three 30

“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?”