“The order is forged,” said the manager, throwing the letter on the table. “My master would have no part in such nonsense. Twenty thousand defective bunches!”
“Six hand bunches,” corrected Johnny quietly. “The order is not forged. You know it is not. Ignore it at your own risk. Your position as manager is at stake. You will send your men into the field at once.”
“Manana. To-morrow,” said the manager after several moments spent in thought.
“To-day,” said Johnny.
“It is impossible. The men are scattered. We have on hand no more loading for ten days.”
“All right, then to-morrow. To-morrow evening we will be at this dock ready to load. We can load at night.”
To this the Spaniard made no answer. After waiting a respectable time for a reply, Johnny left the office.
As he walked out into the warm tropical sunshine his head was in a whirl. The feeling of dark shadows creeping up from behind him was so strong that he involuntarily turned to look back. There was no one. The dusty street was empty.
“Strange,” he thought, “that he should seem to hate me and want to thwart my plans. He seems to be a friend of Kennedy. He must know I am working only for Kennedy’s good. Why then should he behave as he does?”
He was destined to ask that question many times before he discovered the real answer.
Just then as he thrust his hand deep in his pocket, a habit he had when engrossed in thought, he felt a crumpled bit of paper.
“Pant’s message,” he said to himself as he drew it forth.
“Wonder what it’s all about?” His brow wrinkled in puzzled thought. “Wish I knew. Wish I had the key to it. It might mean a lot. Wish I knew where he is, and what’s happening to him.”
Finding a grassy spot in the shadow of the dock, he sat puzzling over that jumble of figures and signs which he felt sure was meant to convey an important message to him, but which in reality meant nothing to him.
“The key!” he exclaimed at last in disgust. “If only I had the key to it!”
The key to this riddle, if only he could have known it, lay back there in the little bamboo office where Pant had left the note. He had expected Johnny to sit right down beside the portable typewriter and study out the meaning of his strange cipher message.
As it happened, there had not been time for this; a great pity, too, for the message was an important one. Its solving at that moment might have saved Johnny many a heartache. Without the typewriter, however, it was going to be difficult, very difficult indeed. In the end he pocketed the message still unread.
* * * * * * * *
There is only one silence more complete than the silence of the jungle at mid-day. That is the silence to be experienced at the heart of a great banana plantation in the heat of the day. There not a twig drops but its fall is heard. The march of a thousand ants going and coming over their tiny paths gives forth as definite and distinct a sound as the tramp of an army.
Johnny was hearing and watching these toiling ants. He got scant comfort from these observations. Their actions reminded him of three days of painful failure. TheNorth Starwas at loading dock No. 1, had been for three days, yet her hold was as empty as the day she had tied up there. There were no bananas at the dock.
“Here there are plenty,” Johnny told himself, glancing up at the three great bunches that hung directly over his head, and away at hundreds on every hand.
Again his attention was drawn by the rustle of rushing ants.
“How strange,” he thought. “It would take a million of these ants to weigh as much as I do, yet they are getting on with the thing they wish done. I have failed.”
He started. The thing the ants were doing was quite like the work he wished to do. They were tearing bits of leaves from a vine and were carrying them away beneath the ground.
“Just as a hundred men should be carrying bunches of bananas to our ship,” he thought.
“Yes, we have no bananas,” he grinned in spite of himself. All about him were bananas, a vast unending sea of them, a hundred thousand bunches. He had been promised twenty thousand. That treacherous Spanish manager, Diaz, had blocked his every move. Not a bunch had he delivered.
“Manana! Manana!” He had whispered over and over. “My workmen are scattered. They have gone turtle hunting. They are not here. To-morrow they will be back. To-morrow. To-morrow.”
“To-morrow!” the boy exclaimed. “When I get back to the States I shall have that word removed from the dictionary.”
Suddenly his lips parted, but no sound came forth. Rising upon one knee, he crouched there poised like some wild creature ready for a spring.
“Was that a voice?”
He felt reasonably sure of it, yet in this land of monkeys, parrots and mocking birds one could never be quite sure.
“If it is,” he told himself, “if they are that crafty Spaniard’s men sent to hunt me down, there may be a fight.
“And yet,” he thought, “why should he wish to hunt me down, to have me killed? He’s having his own sweet way. What more could he wish?”
He thought of the man sitting there on the veranda with Kennedy, thought too of Madge Kennedy. Madge Kennedy of the golden hair and frank freckled face, the bright, alert, clean Scotch girl of the jungle, and for some reason or another his brow clouded.
“If it’s a fight they want,” he said, clenching his fists tight, “they’re quite welcome to it, though I’d be the last to start it.”
Having caught no further sound, he settled back to his task of watching the ants stowing away bits of leaves, and of thinking over his own problems.
“It’s as if they were hurrying through with an important task,” he told himself, watching the tiny workers with renewed interest, “as if they were preparing for some great change, perhaps some gigantic natural catastrophe, an earthquake, a storm, a—
“I wonder—” his brow wrinkled as he gazed away toward the western sky. But no, there were no clouds, only a faint haze that spread over all the sky, faintly obscuring the sun.
“Nothing much I guess. Getting superstitious,” he told himself. “Must be going back. But not just yet.”
He had come to the heart of this banana plantation for two reasons. He had wanted to carry on a little investigation of his own, and to think his problems through.
The investigation had confirmed his suspicions. There were no workmen in this field. Diaz had said there were fifty men here gathering bananas. He had promised that the fruit would be at the dock, a train load of it next morning.
“A plain out-and-out lie!” Johnny told himself bitterly. “He knows he has me defeated. Any untruth will do. To-morrow my option on theNorth Starexpires. Then she will steam away. After that Kennedy’s grapefruit may rot on the dock. He will be worse off than before. His Caribs have gathered and packed the fruit and there will be no money to pay them. What a blunderer I am!”
It was all quite true. The sleek, soft spoken Spanish manager of the plantation had, after that first stormy meeting, seemed to suddenly become quite friendly. He had invited Johnny to lunch and had feasted him quite royally. He had promised that his men who were out setting nets for turtles would be called in. Johnny should dock his ship. The bananas would be ready next evening.
That had been the first day. At the end of the second day no bananas had appeared. Johnny had sought out the Spaniard. He had treated the boy to a sumptuous dinner and had assured him that to-morrow the men would go for bananas. “Manana, manana,” he had repeated, wringing the boy’s hand.
If only Johnny had been able to read Pant’s note! But he had not.
Captain Jorgensen had waited patiently for three days; then, having been offered a cargo of chicle and cocoanuts in Belize, he had given Johnny notice that if bananas were not coming aboard by the evening of the next day, his option would expire and he would be obliged to steam away.
He had said all this in the kindest tone possible. He liked Johnny. He liked Kennedy and his granddaughter, and would do anything within his power, but the company that owned his ship would stand for no further delay.
“It’s all right, quite all right. Very fine, Senor, very fine,” Diaz had said when, in despair, Johnny had sought him out once more. “To-day my men are among the bananas. To-morrow morning you shall have a train load.”
Johnny had doubted his word. He had trudged away up the narrow gauge railway track to see. He had tramped for miles in the shade of great spreading banana plants and had not seen a workman.
“They are not here, will not be here. We will have no bananas. To-morrow theNorth Starsails away. My plan fails. I have been worse than useless to my friends.
“And yet,” he said doggedly, “there must be some way out. There must!”
Again his eyes followed the long procession of ants. Once more he glanced toward the sky. The veil over the sun had grown a shade deeper.
“They are hurrying faster than ever,” he said as he again watched the interesting procession. “It is as if—”
Once more his thoughts broke short off. This time from just behind the second row of banana plants he felt sure he had caught the low murmur of voices.
Strangely enough, at this moment when he crouched there, nerves tense, eyes and ears alert, watching for the mysterious unknown ones, there flashed before his mind the picture of a short stout white man standing at the foot of a dock. He had seen that man only the day before.
There was a mystery about that man. Who was he? Whence had he come and how? No steamers had arrived from the States. Yet he was unmistakably American. His clothes were well tailored. He had the air of one who is prosperous and who finds himself often in a position of authority. What could be his business in Central America?
The first time Johnny had seen him he had been standing at the foot of the dock.
“For all the world as if some strange magic had sent him, bone dry and all spick and span right up out of the sea,” the boy told himself.
This mysterious American had gone directly to the office of Diaz. When he left that office a half hour later Diaz had accompanied him as far as the door. There had been a smile on the crafty Spaniard’s face; not the sort of smile one loves to see.
“That smile,” Johnny now told himself, “should have been enough to warn me.”
There was a rumor afloat that the prosperous looking American was some high official of the Fruit Company.
“If that is true, he may be behind my defeat,” he told himself. “But one never can tell. I—”
He paused. His heart skipped a beat. From close at hand there sounded a heavy footstep.
“Diaz’s men,” he thought, slipping his machete half out of its scabbard. “They’ll find I can fight if that must be.”
The next instant a figure loomed before him, a great black giant with the face of a south sea cannibal, and a smile—well, such a smile as one sees only in tropical lands.
As the man saw Johnny, he turned half about to speak to some one behind him. The language he used was strange to the boy.
“Two of them,” he thought.
But somehow his fear was gone. That smile was disarming. The next instant Johnny smiled. He laughed out loud, then leaped to his feet to stretch forth both hands in greeting. For the person who moved up to a position beside the towering black Indian was none other than Madge Kennedy.
“How, how did you find me?” Johnny exclaimed when greetings had been exchanged.
Madge turned to the Carib. “These people who have lived here always know everything. He brought me here. But why did you hide?”
“I didn’t, exactly. I came here to get the truth. Having gotten it, I remained to digest it?”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“Not exactly.” His tone was dubious. “I suppose you know I’ve played my last card, and lost?”
“I—I guessed it. I’m sorry.”
The girl’s tone was deep and mellow, like the low note of a cello.
“So am I,” said Johnny, “but only sorry for you, you and your wonderful old grandfather.”
“For us?” She let forth a merry little laugh. “We shall get on, one way or another. One always does down here you know.”
“It is rather bad, though,” she admitted, sitting down upon the ground. “You see—”
She paused to glance away at the sun. Where the sun should have been, there was no sun, only a dull, veiled sky. Her brow wrinkled, but she did not comment upon it.
“It is bad,” she went on. “We may have to sell the orchard.”
“Sell the orchard!” Johnny was surprised. “To whom?”
“Diaz.” She leaned far forward as she answered. “He wishes to buy it. That was what he and grandfather were talking about when you came the other night.”
“Diaz!” Johnny took in a long breath. The picture of the stout, prosperous American and the crafty Spaniard passed before him. “So that’s his game,” he thought. “He’s got Kennedy in a hole. The sale of his grapefruit would let him out. Diaz is determined to block the shipment, and is in the position to do it. The scoundrel!”
“The Spaniards down here don’t love us, the English and Scotch, too much,” Madge Kennedy went on. “The trouble goes clear back to the days of buccaneers and the Spanish Main. The English and Scotch logwood gatherers drove the Spaniards from the mouth of the Belize River. They have never forgiven us.
“Oh yes,” she laughed, “they trade with us when there is a profit to be made, but after all their knife is always near our throats. Diaz thinks he has us and he means to do his worst.
“I suppose,” she said, “we’ll have to sell to the Spaniards. It will break grandfather’s heart. He wouldn’t mind if it went to a fellow countryman.
“You know,” she reminisced, “that’s been our land longer than I can remember, much longer. It’s our home. Don’t you see, Johnny? It’s the only home I’ve ever known. You don’t like to see your home sold to some one you don’t like, do you? Your home is part of you. When you sell it, you sell part of yourself.
“It would have been all right if it hadn’t been for the Panama disease. Our land was all in bananas then, and grandfather was getting rich. We had bananas like these.” She spread her arms wide. “Better than these. Then the disease came. Plants wilted like flowers before a hot wind. It wasn’t long before there were no bananas. Along the Stann Creek railroad they used to gather twenty-five thousand bunches a week. Now they don’t get twenty-five hundred.” She sighed.
“Grandfather was cheerful even then. He always will be. He’s a sport, a great big good sport with a soul.” The tones of her voice grew mellow and deep.
“He planted grapefruit. You know the rest. And now, now I guess we—” Her voice broke. “I guess we’re done.”
Suddenly Johnny sprang to his feet. There came a roar as of rushing water.
“Look! Only look!” There was awe in Johnny’s voice.
Madge turned pale. The top of a palm tree, left for some unknown reason to grow among the bananas, was writhing and twisting as if in mortal agony.
At the same instant the entire broad sweep of banana plants moved forward to bow low as if in obeisance to some god and, caught by a terrific onrush of air, the three of them, Johnny, Madge Kennedy and the Indian, were thrown in a heap against a stump.
Madge scrambled to her knees, rubbed her eyes, stared away at the sky, then said in a tense, scarcely audible whisper:
“May God protect us! It is to be a tornado!”
Banana land is never fully cleared before planting. Great giants of the forest, mahogany, nargusta, black tamarind, Santa Maria, and many other great trees are girdled and left standing to rattle their dry and leafless limbs like bones on a gibbet to every wind that blows. In the time of a great wind such as often sweeps across the Caribbean Sea, dead limbs of girdled trees and the ponderous fronds of palms come crashing down upon the less stalwart banana plants.
It was on such a half cleared plantation that Johnny Thompson, Madge Kennedy and the giant black Carib Indian found themselves when the storm came tearing in from the sea.
That they were in a tight place Johnny knew right well. He had heard of these tropical storms. Many an old timer had told him of braving them upon sea and land. Travelers in this land are told in awed tones strange tales of terrific gales.
Johnny shuddered as he heard the crack and crash of giant trees torn and tortured by the wind.
“What shall we do?” he said to the girl. “Can we get out of this?”
“No.” She spoke slowly, deliberately, as one may who knows her land and its storms. “The tossing banana plants will shut off the roads. Some will fall, blocking the way. The wind will increase in violence. The storm will last for hours.”
“Then we must find shelter.”
“Yes.”
“But where?”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t know.” As if determined to destroy them, the palm sent a second discarded frond sailing toward them. It fell with a crash that brought down a dozen banana plants with it.
Madge shuddered.
The currents of winds above them seemed greater than those that agitated the banana plants just over their heads. Great dead trees writhed and tossed as if in terrible agony, while from here and there at a distance there came the crash of one that had been broken off or uprooted.
Of a sudden the force of the winds appeared to double in volume. At the same instant Johnny saw a great black mass come leaping toward him. Powerless to move or speak for a second, he saw the thing leap straight at him. Giving up hope, he shut his eyes.
There came a deafening crash. A sharp quick cut across the face brought him to himself. He leaped to his feet. The wind caught him and threw him violently. His senses reeled. The thing was too monstrous. What had happened? His face was bleeding. He did not feel it. His senses were benumbed.
“I must act!” he told himself savagely. “Something must be done. There is the girl.”
He had succeeded in coming back into control of his senses when something hurtled past him.
“It’s the Carib,” he told himself. “No, the girl!” He had caught the flash of her blue dress.
“It is the Carib and the girl.” He realized that the aged black giant had seized the girl in his arms and was battling his way straight into the teeth of the storm.
“What can he hope to do?” he asked himself as, first on hands and knees, then crouching low, on his feet, he struggled forward in their wake.
Dimly, he became conscious of the thing that had happened. A great sapodilla tree, uprooted by the storm, had pitched straight at them.
“Ten feet nearer and we would have been killed,” he thought. “That’s the black bulk that leaped at us.”
The thing the Carib was doing puzzled him. He was fighting his way over broken branches and beneath threatening trees. At last, finding himself at a branchless trunk, and seeing his way blocked by a tangled mass of vegetation, he held the girl in one arm while, apelike, he climbed to the prostrate trunk, then against the terrific force of the gale battled his way to the shelter of the roots of the giant tree.
“What strength!” thought Johnny. “What magnificent power!”
He was content to creep the length of the log, to come up panting beside them. Not a word was said. The din about them was deafening. The howl of the wind, the crash of breaking, falling limbs, the groan of tortured trees, all this was enough to inspire silent awe.
A moment they rested here. A moment only. Then, at the Carib’s sign, they slid off the log to battle their way around the up-ended roots.
Johnny saw the Carib suddenly disappear. He saw a chasm yawning before him; saw the girl leap. He followed her, landing with a shock that set his teeth rattling, then became conscious of the fact that the storm was not cracking about his ears.
“Storm cellar provided by nature,” he thought. It was true. The chasm left by the tree roots was ten feet deep.
“Gabriel thought of it,” said Madge. “It is his country. He is very old. He always knows the right thing to do. Isn’t it grand?”
Johnny thought it a little more than grand.
“We British and you Americans,” she said slowly, “think we are very smart. We know many things. But the natives of other lands, they know many useful things that we never dreamed of.
“But you are hurt. Your face—it is bloody.” Her eyes grew suddenly large.
“No, I guess not. Nothing much. It must have been the branch of that fallen tree. Lucky it didn’t kill us all.”
The wound, little more than a deep scratch, was soon dressed. Then, against the sheltered side of the “storm cellar” left by the tree roots, they sat down to patiently await the passing of the storm.
“Getting worse. Listen!” Johnny whispered as the wind whipped the dead branches with increasing fury.
The girl shuddered. “The bananas,” she said. “They will all be down. Ruined. The whole plantation. There will be no more for nine months.”
“Then it’s the end of our plans.”
“I am afraid so.”
“Anyway, Diaz had us blocked.”
“Perhaps.”
“Did you ever think,” the girl said after a while, “that even had you succeeded in loading the bananas and grapefruit you might have been worse off than before?”
“Why? The ship’s all right. Isn’t she?”
“Yes, but at the other end? Did you never think that an organization like the Fruit Company, powerful enough to control the purchasing of all fruit of Central America, could control the selling market as well. Do you think a big commission merchant would dare purchase your load of bananas and grapefruit? Could you deliver to him regularly? You couldn’t. What could he do if the powerful Fruit Company should refuse to sell to him because he bought from you? Not a thing.”
Johnny was stunned. He had not thought of this.
“So you see,” said the girl in a very quiet tone, “while it was brave and generous of you to try to help grandfather and—and me, after all it was just as well that nature and Spanish trickery took a hand.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Johnny grimly. “I’d like to have the chance at it, even now. I’d risk it. I—why, I’d hunt up my old friend Tony, the push-cart man, if necessary, and I’d say, ‘Tony, I have a ship load of fruit at half price down at the dock. Go tell your pals.’
“In a half hour’s time there would be a mile of push-carts coming my way.
“But now,” he said slowly, almost despondently, “this is the end.”
In this he was mistaken. It was scarcely the beginning of what was to prove a thrilling adventure. “TheNorth Star!” he exclaimed suddenly. “She was tied to the dock. What will happen to her?”
Since the girl did not know the answer, she did not reply.
A moment later, the Carib crept up the bank of the pit to disappear into the storm. Ten minutes later, when he reappeared, his jacket was filled with cocoanuts.
“Food and drink,” smiled Madge. “We shall not fare so badly in our cave, after all.”
Still the wind raged on. Rain came and with it night.
A great flat boulder, turned half over by the uprooted tree, left a sort of narrow grotto with a stone floor. By crowding well back into this grotto, Johnny and the girl were able to escape the terrific downpour of rain. The Carib, who minded a wetting about as much as a duck, sat chuckling to himself beneath the tree’s great roots.
For a time the girl and the boy talked of many things, of their homes, of their native lands, of strange customs and stranger laws, of the sea and of the land.
The conversation turned to chicle gathering. Then it was that Johnny told of his friend Pant, how he had found his long lost grandfather and how they were, beyond doubt, at that very moment gathering chicle in the forest around Rio de Grande.
“The Rio de Grande!” exclaimed the girl. “Diaz gathers chicle there. He will stop them if he can.”
“Diaz!” came from Johnny. “He has a hand in everything down here!”
“By the way,” he said a moment later, “I have a queer sort of message from my pal here in my pocket. It’s all done in figures and signs. How he could expect me to read it is more than I know. And yet, somehow I feel that it must be important.”
“Perhaps I can help you. Let me see it.”
Johnny drew the crumpled bit of paper from his pocket, smoothed it out on his knee, then gave it to the girl.
By the light of a tiny flashlight, which Johnny always carried, she studied it for a full three minutes.
“That is queer,” she said at last, twisting her brow into a puzzled frown. “But somehow it seems easy enough if only one knew how to begin.”
For three minutes longer, as the wind sang across the top of their grotto and the rain came dashing down, she studied that bit of paper. Then of a sudden she asked:
“Johnny, how does your friend end his notes to you?”
“Why,” said Johnny thoughtfully, “he hasn’t written me many. Near as I can recall, when he comes to the end he just stops.”
The girl’s laugh rang out high and clear.
“I mean does he say, ‘Yours truly,’ ‘Your pal,’ or something like that?”
“No.” Johnny’s answer was prompt. “He always says ‘Good luck—Pant.’”
“That’s it!” The girl gave a sudden excited jump that brought a shower of small rocks down from above. “That’s it! See! Now we are making progress. See! This hyphen stands for g. Those two nines for double o, percentage sign for d, and so on. I know now. This was written on a typewriter, one of the little portable kind.”
“Oh!” said Johnny, beginning to see the light. “What a chump I am. Can you make it out?”
“I think I can,” she cried excitedly.
“Read it,” said Johnny.
“I can’t just yet. Let me think. Your typewriter is one of those small portable affairs that fold over and fit into a black case, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Let me think. I learned the touch system on one of those. Let me feel it out. Got a pencil?”
Johnny produced a stub of what had once been a pencil.
Turning the note over, the girl began drumming on it with all her fingers.
“As if she were playing a piano,” thought Johnny.
“There!” She put down a figure. “And there!” she set down a sign.
So at last she filled the back of the sheet with figures and signs.
“Now we can do it,” she said at last. “It’s all quite simple.”
“It would seem so,” said Johnny skeptically.
“It really is, only you must know the position of numbers, letters and signs on your typewriter keyboard. If you had studied it out before your typewriter it would have been simple in the extreme.
“Your typewriter has three shifts; one for letters, one for capitals and one for figures and signs. The thing Pant did was to lock his machine for figures and signs, then write his note as if the machine were set for letters. Now I have worked out the location of letters, figures and signs by memory and the touch system, it will be very simple. The figure 5 stands for t, the percent sign for d, and so on.”
For a little time longer she studied. Then on a second scrap of paper she wrote the following, which was Pant’s note to Johnny, written many days previous:
Johnny:The map is gone. The Spaniards have it. I am going into the jungle after it. I will get it, never fear. Look out for a Spaniard named Diaz. He is a Devil. Never trust nor believe him for a moment.Good Luck,Pant.
Johnny:
The map is gone. The Spaniards have it. I am going into the jungle after it. I will get it, never fear. Look out for a Spaniard named Diaz. He is a Devil. Never trust nor believe him for a moment.
Good Luck,
Pant.
“So that was it,” Johnny said thoughtfully. “They stole his chart. I only hope he got it back.”
Then after a time, “Well, I wish you had seen that note sooner. I did trust Diaz. I did believe him. That was a great mistake.”
Still the wind howled and the rain came beating down upon a plantation where thousands of banana stalks lay on the ground.
Pant’s knees trembled a little as his feet splashed in that bubbling stream that coursed its way through the dreadful Maya cave. It had been strange, the entering of this supposedly haunted cave, with companions. How much more awe inspiring to be entering it alone!
He wondered about those companions of that other adventure. Who was this son of a rich man? What had brought him into the jungle? Where was he now?
As these and many other questions crowded his mind, he made his way cautiously through the outer passages to find himself standing once more on the shore of that curious inland lake which had filled their minds with curiosity on that other visit and so inspired them with fear.
He found everything as it had been. The placid surface, sending back a glowing reflection of his light, broke into a thousand ripples as he waded knee deep in its icy waters.
“Clear,” was his mental comment. “Can see my toes. What a marvelous reservoir for supplying a city’s drinking water! What a pity there is no city near!”
He had waded back to the glistening sands of the beach when, of a sudden, he found his being vibrant to a great expectancy.
“What can it be?” he asked himself. Instantly the answer came.
“The canoe! The canoe on the shore,” he told himself. Strange how one’s nervous system responds to outer things that his mind does not recall.
“But of course,” he assured himself as he neared the spot, “the thing won’t give me the shock it once did. We know now that it has been there for two hundred years.
“But wha—”
His gaze covered a space far in advance of him, many yards beyond the spot where the canoe had stood.
“Gone!” he muttered, stopping dead in his tracks. “The canoe is gone!”
Who can say which shock was the greater, the first sudden discovery of the canoe that other time, resting on the beach of this underground lake, or the present astonishing revelation that had come to him?
For a moment he experienced great difficulty in restraining his feet. They appeared ready to carry him back to the entrance. Something within him, an echo of the ancient superstition of his ancestors perhaps, seemed to be insisting that after all this cave was haunted by the spirits of beings who perished long ago and it was they who had ridden away in the mysterious canoe.
For a moment he wavered. Then reason triumphed. “It was Kirk,” he told himself. “He has returned with his giant Carib, and for some reason or another has rowed the canoe to some other part of the lake.
“Only question is, would the thing float after all these years?
“Perhaps,” he thought, “they did not row it away. That giant of his may have put it on his back and carried it outside. What a treasure for some museum of antiquity!”
The thought that some one had been in the cave since he left it was disturbing. Could it be that Kirk and his Carib, or whoever it may have been, had made a thorough search of the place and had carried away the box of beaten silver.
His heart sank at the thought and he hurried on, reproaching himself for having waited so long before returning.
Yet he had been needed every moment at the chicle camp. It was a great season. The trees were prime, the rainfall abundant. He and his grandfather, with the faithful Caribs, had been working day and night. One long, low, palm-thatched shed was already piled high with bricks of chicle.
“By and by the season will end, then we will have won,” he told himself not realizing that the chicleros’ battle is never won until his bricks of chicle are aboard a steamer bound for the United States. Then, and not till then, are his worries at an end.
Pant had dared snatch a day for this adventure. And here he was. Hope vied with fear for a place in his heart as he hurried over the sand toward the entrance to the treasure chamber that might yield a great fortune or offer blank and broken walls to his eager searching gaze.
He climbed the water washed rocks with his heart thumping lustily against his ribs. He entered the small chamber above with the feeling of one who enters some ancient temple at night.
With one quick swing he swept the walls with his keen eyes, then with a low murmured, “Gone!” he sank upon the wet rocks.
Courage and hope conquered disappointment. Rising to his feet, he found himself ready for a more thorough search.
Back behind a tumbled pile of broken bits of rock, thrown in a heap by the earthquake, he caught the dull gleam of some object that was not rock.
With breathless eagerness he attacked the jagged pile. Ten minutes later, with a cry of triumph on his lips, he lifted the beaten silver box from its hiding place.
“Strange!” he murmured. “Still locked. Scarcely a dent in it.”
Holding it before him, he shook it vigorously. A rattling sound was the response. His heart raced wildly.
Mopping the perspiration from his brow, he began studying the fastenings that held the cover to its place. There were seven of these. Six were mere clasps that lifted in response to a pry of his clasp knife blade. The seventh, a true lock, resisted vigorously. A sharp blow from the small axe that hung from his belt, severed this and the lid flew up, to reveal such a glistening nest of pink, blue and white pearls as is given to few eyes to see.
“Pearls!” he murmured, scarcely daring to believe his eyes. “A thousand pearls. A king’s ransom!”
Then chancing to remember a story he had read as a small boy, he said, “I wonder if they will turn to rough stones and worthless leaves when I reach the sunlight.”
This thought troubled him little. The pearls were real enough. Once the six clasps were back in their places, he felt sure enough of being able to bring the box and its contents to the light of day.
“But when I have done this,” he thought to himself, “to whom will they belong? To me?”
This problem he considered long and earnestly. The land on which he had found this treasure was wild and rough. No one laid claim to it. But there was the story of the first Don and his beaten silver box of pearls. Was this the box? Were these the pearls? Did they belong by direct inheritance to that last of the Dons who lived now at the foot of the mountain?
“Seems probable,” he told himself. “But after all,” he concluded, “the real question now is not their ownership, but how are they to be brought safely from this heart of a jungle to the centers of civilization where a thousand pearls may be offered for sale in safety and with a reasonable hope that one may find a buyer. The old Don could never do this. It must be my task.”
Having come to this conclusion, he bound the box in a stout brown canvas bag he had brought for the purpose, then began retracing his steps over the way that led to the outer air and sunshine.
Hugging the treasure, he made his way into the chamber of the underground lake. Many and strange were the sensations that passed over him. At times he seemed to hear the cry of terror that escaped the giant Carib’s lips as his mind became possessed with fear for the earth god of the Mayas. Unconsciously he found himself looking back, as if expecting to be followed and overtaken by some unseen force that would wrest the treasure from him. Such was the spell of the Maya cave.
At times he fancied that the earth beneath his feet was beginning to tremble and shudder as once it had. He redoubled his speed. But in the end, he knew that this was pure fancy. The water that glimmered at his side was as still as a forest pool at midnight.
He fell to wondering about the canoe that had stood so long by the water’s brink. “Who can have been here? Who could have taken it?” he asked himself.
As he asked himself this question, his foot struck some object that, in the silence of the cave, gave off a dry and hollow sound. Leaping back, he threw his flashlight upon the spot.
“A paddle,” he murmured, “from the ancient boat.”
“Strange they didn’t take that with them,” he thought after a moment spent in examining it. “Oh well, since they did not, I will. It is elaborately carved and mounted with metal. Looks like gold. A splendid keepsake.”
Having picked up the paddle, he threw the light of his torch about him in every direction. Off to the right, further up from the beach, some other object cast dark shadows on the sand. An exclamation escaped his lips as he came close to it.
“A broken bit of a canoe!” he whispered.
Then like a flash it all came to him. “No one has been here,” he told himself. “The canoe has not been carried away. It was wrecked by the great wave caused by the earthquake.”
For a moment he stood gazing upon the bit of ancient wreckage. Then, suddenly realizing that it was growing late, that it was already dark outside the cave, he hurried on.
Darkness had indeed fallen when he reached the outer world of the jungle. This did not trouble him much. He had flashlights and a lantern. There was a trail leading directly to their camp. He would be there in two hours.