Hearts of Three 31

Hearts of Three 31

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.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XIV

 

 

“We can’t be a million miles away from it,” Henry said, as the trio came

to pause at the foot of a high steep cliff. “If it’s any farther on,

then the course lies right straight over the cliff, and, since we can’t

climb it and from the extent of it it must be miles around, the source

of those flashes ought to be right here.”

 

“Now could it have been a man with looking-glasses?” Leoncia ventured.

 

“Most likely some natural phenomenon,” Francis answered. “I’m strong on

natural phenomena since those barking sands.”

 

Leoncia, who chanced to be glancing along the face of the cliff farther

on, suddenly stiffened with attention and cried, “Look!”

 

Their eyes followed hers, and rested on the same point. What they saw

was no flash, but a steady persistence of white light that blazed and

burned like the sun. Following the base of the cliff at a scramble, both

men remarked, from the density of vegetation, that there had been no

travel of humans that way in many years. Breathless from their

exertions, they broke out through the brush upon an open-space where a

not-ancient slide of rock from the cliff precluded the growth of

vegetable life.

 

Leoncia clapped her hands. There was no need for her to point. Thirty

feet above, on the face of the cliff, were two huge eyes. Fully a fathom

across was each of the eyes, their surfaces brazen with some white

reflecting substance.

 

“The eyes of Chia!” she cried.

 

Henry scratched his head with sudden recollection.

 

“I’ve a shrewd suspicion I can tell you what they’re composed of,” he

said. “I’ve never seen it before, but I’ve heard old-timers mention it.

It’s an old Maya trick. My share of the treasure, Francis, against a

perforated dime, that I can tell you what the reflecting stuff is.”

 

“Done!” cried Francis. “A man’s a fool not to take odds like that, even

if it’s a question of the multiplication table. Possibly millions of

dollars against a positive bad dime! I’d bet two times two made five on

the chance that a miracle could prove it. Name it? What is it? The bet

is on.”

 

“Oysters,” Henry smiled. “Oyster shells, or, rather, pearl-oyster

shells. It’s mother-of-pearl, cunningly mosaicked and cemented in so as

to give a continuous reflecting surface. Now you have to prove me wrong,

so climb up and see.”

 

Beneath the eyes, extending a score of feet up and down the cliff, was a

curious, triangular out-jut of rock. Almost was it like an excrescence

on the face of the cliff. The apex of it reached within a yard of the

space that intervened between the eyes. Rough inequalities of surface,

and cat-like clinging on Francis’ part, enabled him to ascend the ten

feet to the base of the excrescence. Thence, up to the ridge of it, the

way was easier. But a twenty-five-foot fall and a broken arm or leg in

the midst of such isolation was no pleasant thing to consider, and

Leoncia, causing an involuntary jealous gleam to light Henry’s eyes,

called up:

 

“Oh, do be careful, Francis!”

 

Standing on the tip of the triangle he was gazing, now into one, and

then into the other, of the eyes. He drew his hunting knife and began to

dig and pry at the right-hand eye.

 

“If the old gentleman were here he’d have a fit at such sacrilege,”

Henry commented.

 

“The perforated dime is yours,” Francis called down, at the same time

dropping into Henry’s outstretched palm the fragment he had dug loose.

 

Mother-of-pearl it was, a flat piece cut with definite purpose to fit in

with the many other pieces to form the eye.

 

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” Henry adjudged. “Not for nothing did

the Mayas select this God-forsaken spot and stick these eyes of Chia on

the cliff.”

 

“Looks as if we’d made a mistake in leaving the old gentleman and his

sacred knots behind,” Francis said.

 

“The knots should tell all about it and what our next move should be.”

 

“Where there are eyes there should be a nose,” Leoncia contributed.

 

“And there is!” exclaimed Francis. “Heavens! That was the nose I just

climbed up. We’re too close up against it to have perspective. At a

hundred yards’ distance it would look like a colossal face.”

 

Leoncia advanced gravely and kicked at a decaying deposit of leaves and

twigs evidently blown there by tropic gales.

 

“Then the mouth ought to be where a mouth belongs, here under the nose,”

she said.

 

In a trice Henry and Francis had kicked the rubbish aside and exposed an

opening too small to admit a man’s body. It was patent that the

rock-slide had partly blocked the way. A few rocks heaved aside gave

space for Francis to insert his head and shoulders and gaze about with a

lighted match.

 

“Watch out for snakes,” warned Leoncia.

 

Francis grunted acknowledgment and reported:

 

“This is no natural cavern. It’s all hewn rock, and well done, if I’m

any judge.” A muttered expletive announced the burning of his fingers by

the expiring match-stub. And next they heard his voice, in accents of

surprise: “Don’t need any matches. It’s got a lighting system of its

own——from somewhere above——regular concealed lighting, though it’s

daylight all right. Those old Mayas were certainly some goers. Wouldn’t

be surprised if we found an elevator, hot and cold water, a furnace, and

a Swede janitor.—Well, so long.”

 

His trunk, and legs, and feet disappeared, and then his voice issued

forth:

 

“Come on in. The cave is fine.”

 

“And now aren’t you glad you let me come along?” Leoncia twitted, as she

joined the two men on the level floor of the rock-hewn chamber, where,

their eyes quickly accustoming to the mysterious gray-percolation of

daylight, they could see about them with surprising distinctness.

“First, I found the eyes for you, and, next, the mouth. If I hadn’t been

along, most likely, by this time, you’d have been half a mile away,

going around the cliff and going farther and farther every step you

took.

 

“But the place is bare as old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard,” she added, the

next moment.

 

“Naturally,” said Henry. “This is only the antechamber. Not so sillily

would the Mayas hide the treasure the conquistadores were so mad after.

I’m willing to wager right now that we’re almost as far from finding the

actual treasure as we would be if we were not here but in San Antonio.”

 

Twelve or fifteen feet in width and of an unascertainable height, the

passage led them what Henry judged forty paces, or well over a hundred