Hearts of Three 32

Hearts of Three 32

Still the mysterious percolation of daylight guided the way for their

eyes, and Francis, in the lead, stopped so suddenly that Leoncia and

Henry, in a single file behind, collided with him. Leoncia in the

center, and Henry on her left, they stood abreast and gazed down a long

avenue of humans, long dead, but not dust.

 

“Like the Egyptians, the Mayas knew embalming and mummifying,” Henry

said, his voice unconsciously sinking to a whisper in the presence of so

many unburied dead, who stood erect and at gaze, as if still alive.

 

All were European-clad, and all exposed the impassive faces of

Europeans. About them, as to the life, were draped the ages-rotten

habiliments of the conquistadores and of the English pirates. Two of

them, with visors raised, were encased in rusty armor. Their swords and

cutlasses were belted to them or held in their shriveled hands, and

through their belts were thrust huge flintlock pistols of archaic model.

 

“The old Maya was right,” Francis whispered. “They’ve decorated the

hiding place with their mortal remains and been stuck up in the lobby as

a warning to trespassers.—Say! If that chap isn’t a real Iberian! I’ll

bet he played haia-lai, and his fathers before him.”

 

“And that’s a Devonshire man if ever I saw one,” Henry whispered back.

“Perforated dimes to pieces-of-eight that he poached the fallow deer and

fled the king’s wrath in the first forecastle for the Spanish Main.”

 

“Br-r-r!” Leoncia shivered, clinging to both men. “The sacred things of

the Mayas are deadly and ghastly. And there is a classic vengeance about

it. The would-be robbers of the treasure-house have become its

defenders, guarding it with their unperishing clay.”

 

They were loath to proceed. The garmented spectres of the ancient dead

held them temporarily spell-bound. Henry grew melodramatic.

 

“Even to this far, mad place,” he said, “as early as the beginning of

the Conquest, their true-hound noses led them on the treasure-scent.

Even though they could not get away with it, they won unerringly to

it.—My hat is off to you, pirates and conquistadores! I salute you, old

gallant plunderers, whose noses smelt out gold, and whose hearts were

brave sufficient to fight for it!”

 

“Huh!” Francis concurred, as he urged the other two to traverse the

avenue of the ancient adventurers. “Old Sir Henry himself ought to be

here at the head of the procession.”

 

Thirty paces they took, ere the passage elbowed as before, and, at the

very end of the double-row of mummies, Henry brought his companions to a

halt as he pointed and said:

 

“I don’t know about Sir Henry, but there’s Alvarez Torres.”

 

Under a Spanish helmet, in decapitated medieval Spanish dress, a big

Spanish sword in its brown and withered hand, stood a mummy whose lean

brown face for all the world was the lean brown face of Alvarez Torres.

Leoncia gasped, shrank back, and crossed herself at the sight.

 

Francis released her to Henry, advanced, and fingered the cheeks and

lips and forehead of the thing, and laughed reassuringly:

 

“I only wish Alvarez Torres were as dead as this dead one is. I haven’t

the slightest doubt, however, but what Torres descended from him——I mean

before he came here to take up his final earthly residence as a member

of the Maya Treasure Guard.”

 

Leoncia passed the grim figure shudderingly. This time, the elbow

passage was very dark, compelling Henry, who had changed into the lead,

to light numerous matches.

 

“Hello!” he said, as he paused at the end of a couple of hundred feet.

“Gaze on that for workmanship! Look at the dressing of that stone!”

 

From beyond, gray light streamed into the passage, making matches

unnecessary to see. Half into a niche was thrust a stone the size of the

passage. It was apparent that it had been used to block the passage. The

dressing was exquisite, the sides and edges of the block precisely

aligned with the place in the wall into which it was made to dovetail.

 

“I’ll wager here’s where the old Maya’s father died,” Francis exclaimed.

“He knew the secret of the balances and leverages that pivoted the

stone, and it was only partly pivoted, as you’ll observe——”

 

“Hell’s bells!” Henry interrupted, pointing before him on the floor at a

scattered skeleton. “It must be what’s left of him. It’s fairly recent,

or he would have been mummified. Most likely he was the last visitor

before us.”

 

“The old priest said his father led men of the tierra caliente here,”

Leoncia reminded Henry.

 

“Also,” Francis supplemented, “he said that none returned.”

 

Henry, who had located the skull and picked it up, uttered another

exclamation and lighted a match to show the others what he had

discovered: Not only was the skull dented with what must have been a

blow from a sword or a machete, but a shattered hole in the back of the

skull showed the unmistakable entrance of a bullet. Henry shook the

skull, was rewarded by an interior rattling, shook again, and shook out

a partly flattened bullet. Francis examined it.

 

“From a horse-pistol,” he concluded aloud. “With weak or greatly

deteriorated powder, because, in a place like this, it must have been

fired pretty close to point blank range and yet failed to go all the way

through. And it’s an aboriginal skull all right.”

 

A right-angled turn completed the elbow and gave them access to a small

but well-lighted rock chamber. From a window, high up and barred with

vertical bars of stone a foot thick and half as wide, poured gray

daylight. The floor of the place was littered with white-picked bones of

men. An examination of the skulls showed them to be those of Europeans.

Scattered among them were rifles, pistols, and knives, with, here and

there, a machete.

 

“Thus far they won, across the very threshold to the treasure,” Francis

said, “and, from the looks, began to fight for its possession before

they laid hands on it. Too bad the old man isn’t here to see what

happened to his father.”

 

“Might there not have been survivors who managed to get away with the

loot?” suggested Henry.

 

But at that moment, casting, his eyes from the bones to a survey of the

chamber, Francis saw what made him say:

 

“Without doubt, no. See those gems in those eyes. Rubies, or I never saw

a ruby!”

 

They followed his gaze to the stone statue of a squat and heavy female

who stared at them red-eyed and open-mouthed. So large was the mouth

that it made a caricature of the rest of the face. Beside it, carved

similarly of stone, and on somewhat more heroic lines, was a more

obscene and hideous male statue, with one ear of proportioned size and

the other ear as grotesquely large as the female’s mouth.

 

“The beauteous dame must be Chia all right,” Henry grinned. “But who’s

her gentleman friend with the elephant ear and the green eyes?”

 

“Search me,” Francis laughed. “But this I do know: those green eyes of

the elephant-eared one are the largest emeralds I’ve ever seen or

dreamed of. Each of them is really too large to possess fair carat

value. They should be crown jewels or nothing.”

 

“But a couple of emeralds and a couple of rubies, no matter what size,

should not constitute the totality of the Maya treasure,” Henry

contended. “We’re across the threshold of it, and yet we lack the key——”

 

“Which the old Maya, back on the barking sands, undoubtedly holds in

that sacred tassel of his,” Leoncia said. “Except for these two statues

and the bones on the floor, the place is bare.”

 

As she spoke, she advanced to look the male statue over more closely.

The grotesque ear centered her attention, and she pointed into it as she

added: “I don’t know about the key, but there is the key-hole.”

 

True enough, the elephantine ear, instead of enfolding an orifice as an

ear of such size should, was completely blocked up save for a small

aperture that not too remotely resembled a key-hole. They wandered

vainly about the chamber, tapping the walls and floor, seeking for

cunningly-hidden passageways or unguessable clues to the hiding place of

the treasure.

 

“Bones of tierra caliente men, two idols, two emeralds of enormous size,

two rubies ditto, and ourselves, are all the place contains,” Francis

summed up. “Only a couple of things remain for us to do: go back and

bring up Ricardo and the mules to make camp outside; and bring up the

old gentleman and his sacred knots if we have to carry him.”

 

“You wait with Leoncia, and I’ll go back and bring them up,” Henry

volunteered, when they had threaded the long passages and the avenues of

the erect dead and won to the sunshine and the sky outside the face of

the cliff.

 

* * * * *

 

Back on the barking sands the peon and his father knelt in the circle so

noisily drawn by the old man’s forefinger. A local rain squall beat upon

them, and, though the peon shivered, the old man prayed on oblivious to

what might happen to his skin in the way of wind and water. It was

because the peon shivered and was uncomfortable that he observed two

things which his father missed. First, he saw Alvarez Torres and José

Mancheno cautiously venture out from the jungle upon the sand. Next, he

saw a miracle. The miracle was that the pair of them trudged steadily

across the sand without causing the slightest sound to arise from their

progress. When they had disappeared ahead, he touched his finger

tentatively to the sand, and aroused no ghostly whisperings. He thrust

his finger into the sand, yet all was silent, as was it silent when he

buffeted the sand heartily with the flat of his palm. The passing shower had rendered the sand dumb.