Hearts of Three 37

Hearts of Three 37

“It is the Valley of Lost Souls,” Torres utterly solemnly. “I have heard

of it, but never did I believe.”

 

“So have I heard of it and never believed,” Leoncia gasped.

 

“And what of it?” demanded Francis. “We’re not lost souls, but good

flesh-and-blood persons. We should worry.”

 

“But Francis, listen,” Leoncia said. “The tales I have heard of it, ever

since I was a little girl, all agreed that no person who ever got into

it ever got out again.”

 

“Granting that that is so,” Francis could not help smiling, “then how

did the tales come out? If nobody ever came out again to tell about it,

how does it happen that everybody outside knows about it?”

 

“I don’t know,” Leoncia admitted. “I only tell you what I have heard.

Besides, I never believed. But this answers all the descriptions of the

tales.”

 

“Nobody ever got out,” Torres affirmed with the same solemn utterance.

 

“Then how do you know that anybody got in?” Francis persisted.

 

“All the lost souls live here,” was the reply. “That is why we’ve never

seen them, because they never got out. I tell you, Mr. Francis Morgan,

that I am no creature without reason. I have been educated. I have

studied in Europe, and I have done business in your own New York. I know

science and philosophy; and yet do I know that this is the valley, once

in, from which no one emerges.”

 

“Well, we’re not in yet, are we?” retorted Francis with a slight

manifestation of impatience. “And we don’t have to go in, do we?” He

crawled forward to the verge of the shelf of loose soil and crumbling

stone in order to get a better view of the distant object his eye had

just picked out. “If that isn’t a grass-thatched roof——”

 

At that moment the soil broke away under his hands. In a flash, the

whole soft slope on which they rested broke away, and all three were

sliding and rolling down the steep slope in the midst of a miniature

avalanche of soil, gravel, and grass-tufts.

 

The two men picked themselves up first, in the thicket of bushes which

had arrested them; but, before they could get to Leoncia, she, too, was

up and laughing.

 

“Just as you were saying we didn’t have to go into the valley!” she

gurgled at Francis. “Now will you believe?”

 

But Francis was busy. Reaching out his hand, he caught and stopped a

familiar object bounding down the steep slope after them. It was Torres’

helmet purloined from the chamber of mummies, and to Torres he tossed

it.

 

“Throw it away,” Leoncia said.

 

“It’s the only protection against the sun I possess,” was his reply, as,

turning it over in his hands, his eyes lighted upon an inscription on

the inside. He showed it to his companions, reading it aloud:

 

“DA VASCO.”

 

“I have heard,” Leoncia breathed.

 

“And you heard right,” Torres nodded. “Da Vasco was my direct ancestor.

My mother was a Da Vasco. He came over the Spanish Main with Cortez.”

 

“He mutinied,” Leoncia took up the tale. “I remember it well from my

father and from my Uncle Alfaro. With a dozen comrades he sought the

Maya treasure. They led a sea-tribe of Caribs, a hundred strong

including their women, as auxiliaries. Mendoza, under Cortez’s

instructions, pursued; and his report, in the archives, so Uncle Alfaro

told me, says that they were driven into the Valley of the Lost Souls

where they were left to perish miserably.”

 

“And he evidently tried to get out by the way we’ve just come in,”

Torres continued, “and the Mayas caught him and made a mummy of him.”

 

He jammed the ancient helmet down on his head, saying:

 

“Low as the sun is in the afternoon sky, it bites my crown like acid.”

 

“And famine bites at me like acid,” Francis confessed. “Is the valley

inhabited?”

 

“I should know, Senor,” Torres replied. “There is the narrative of

Mendoza, in which he reported that Da Vasco and his party were left

there ‘to perish miserably.’ This I do know: they were never seen again

of men.”

 

“Looks as though plenty of food could be grown in a place like this——”

Francis began, but broke off at sight of Leoncia picking berries from a

bush. “Here! Stop that, Leoncia! We’ve got enough troubles without

having a very charming but very much poisoned young woman on our hands.”

 

“They’re all right,” she said, calmly eating. “You can see where the

birds have been pecking and eating them.”

 

“In which case I apologize and join you,” Francis cried, filling his

mouth with the luscious fruit. “And if I could catch the birds that did

the pecking, I’d eat them too.”

 

By the time they had eased the sharpest of their hunger-pangs, the sun

was so low that Torres removed the helmet of Da Vasco.

 

“We might as well stop here for the night,” he said. “I left my shoes in

the cave with the mummies, and lost Da Vasco’s old boots during the

swimming. My feet are cut to ribbons, and there’s plenty of seasoned

grass here out of which I can plait a pair of sandals.”

 

While occupied with this task, Francis built a fire and gathered a

supply of wood, for, despite the low latitude, the high altitude made

fire a necessity for a night’s lodging. Ere he had completed the supply,

Leoncia, curled up on her side, her head in the hollow of her arm, was

sound asleep. Against the side of her away from the fire, Francis

thoughtfully packed a mound of dry leaves and dry forest mould.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XVII

 

 

Daybreak in the Valley of the Lost Souls, and the Long House in the

village of the Tribe of the Lost Souls. Fully eighty feet in length was

the Long House, with half as much in width, built of adobe bricks, and

rising thirty feet to a gable roof thatched with straw. Out of the house

feebly walked the Priest of the Sun——an old man, tottery on his legs,

sandal-footed, clad in a long robe of rude home-spun cloth, in whose

withered Indian face were haunting reminiscences of the racial

lineaments of the ancient conquistadores. On his head was a curious cap

of gold, arched over by a semi-circle of polished golden spikes. The

effect was obvious, namely, the rising sun and the rays of the rising

sun.

 

He tottered across the open space to where a great hollow log swung

suspended between two posts carved with totemic and heraldic devices. He

glanced at the eastern horizon, already red with the dawning, to

reassure himself that he was on time, lifted a stick, the end of which

was fiber-woven into a ball, and struck the hollow log. Feeble as he

was, and light as was the blow, the hollow log boomed and reverberated

like distant thunder.

 

Almost immediately, while he continued slowly to beat, from the

grass-thatched dwellings that formed the square about the Long House,

emerged the Lost Souls. Men and women, old and young, and children and

babes in arms, they all came out and converged upon the Sun Priest. No

more archaic spectacle could be witnessed in the twentieth-century

world. Indians, indubitably they were, yet in many of their faces were

the racial reminiscences of the Spaniard. Some faces, to all appearance,

were all Spanish. Others, by the same token, were all Indian. But

betwixt and between, the majority of them betrayed the inbred blend of

both races. But more bizarre was their costume——unremarkable in the

women, who were garbed in long, discreet robes of home-spun cloth, but

most remarkable in the men, whose home-spun was grotesquely fashioned

after the style of Spanish dress that obtained in Spain at the time of

Columbus’ first voyage. Homely and sad-looking were the men and women—as

of a breed too closely interbred to retain joy of life. This was true of

the youths and maidens, of the children, and of the very babes against

breasts——true, with the exception of two, one, a child-girl of ten, in

whose face was fire, and spirit, and intelligence. Amongst the sodden

faces of the sodden and stupid Lost Souls, her face stood out like a

flaming flower. Only like hers was the face of the old Sun Priest,

cunning, crafty, intelligent.

 

While the priest continued to beat the resounding log, the entire tribe

formed about him in a semi-circle, facing the east. As the sun showed

the edge of its upper rim, the priest greeted it and hailed it with a

quaint and medieval Spanish, himself making low obeisance thrice

repeated, while the tribe prostrated itself. And, when the full sun

shone clear of the horizon, all the tribe, under the direction of the

priest, arose and uttered a joyful chant. Just as he had dismissed his

people, a thin pillar of smoke, rising in the quiet air across the

valley, caught the priest’s eye. He pointed it out, and commanded

several of the young men.

 

“It rises in the Forbidden Place of Fear where no member of the tribe

may wander. It is some devil of a pursuer sent out by our enemies who

have vainly sought our hiding-place through the centuries. He must not

escape to make report, for our enemies are powerful, and we shall be

destroyed. Go. Kill him that we may not be killed.”

 

* * * * *

 

About the fire, which had been replenished at intervals throughout the

night, Leoncia, Francis, and Torres lay asleep, the latter with his

new-made sandals on his feet and with the helmet of Da Vasco pulled

tightly down on his head to keep off the dew. Leoncia was the first to

awaken, and so curious was the scene that confronted her, that she

watched quietly through her down-dropped lashes. Three of the strange

Lost Tribe men, bows still stretched and arrows drawn in what was