“Neck broken,” he sighed. “Poor old fellow! You could save my life, but in that fleeting second you could not save your own.”
Rising, he gathered green leaves and covered the faithful creature’s body. Then, seizing the jaguar by its hind legs, he prepared to drag it to camp.
“Show ’em!” he muttered. “Guess this will satisfy ’em!”
Since the spot on the bank at which he had set his strange river trap was not far away, he dragged his burden in that direction.
Arrived at the spot, he turned the carcass of the “killer” over to one of his Caribs. Having told him to drag it into camp, he sat down beneath a cocoanut tree that hung over the river.
“Wait here and see what happens,” he said.
There is no time so still as night on a tropical river. Shut off by dense virgin forests from every breath of air, damp, oppressive tropical heat seems to place a blanket of silence over all. The great river, with its sweep of waters, is as silent as the stars in the heavens. The whole universe appears to sleep.
Pant felt all this as he sat there listening and watching by the river. This was an eventful night. Would they come? Would the trap serve the purpose for which it was intended? So he questioned as the silence hung over all.
Now that vast silence was broken by the bark of an alligator. Did that mean that they were coming?
Of a sudden, as he waited, there rose out of the silence a strange sound. Pant was all action at once.
With a look of mingled joy, determination and anxiety on his face, Pant seized his axe and lifting it high, severed at one blow the rope which held that end of the long trailer that now spanned the river. Instantly, caught by the current, the whole long streak of brown swung toward midstream. Even as it did so, between it and the other shore there appeared a long black shadow.
“They come! It will work!” whispered Pant, dropping on his knees to watch.
The black shadow which Pant had seen making its way up the river under cover of night, was a pit-pan, electrically driven. In his conclusions regarding this he had not been mistaken.
The thing which Pant had launched against the black shadow was a log boom. It was in this very boom that he hoped later to carry his 50,000 feet of mahogany down the river to the sea. Now he had set it to an unusual task. A log boom consists of a hundred or more logs, ten inches in diameter and twelve to twenty feet long, joined at the ends by steel chains until the whole affair is several hundred feet in length.
So dark was the night that the crew of the pit-pan did not see the approaching string of logs until it was right upon them.
Of the five men on board, two, by the sudden compact, were thrown into the river. It was with the utmost difficulty that the remaining three were able to prevent their unwieldy craft from capsizing. In the end it swung about until it lay full length against the log boom which, tugged at by the current, was rapidly swinging toward the Mexican shore, where waited ten officers of the law.
After giving way to wild burst of anger, the men began tumbling chests of goods into the river.
Before this task was half completed, they were interrupted by the occupants of a dugout, who, swinging alongside, commanded them in the name of the law to desist.
Pant was now sure that he had not been mistaken in the mission of the black shadow.
“If they were on some lawful business why should they pitch their goods into the river?” he asked himself.
“Yes, we have them now. We are giving Daego some of the trouble he so richly deserves. This night’s work will do much for Quintanaroo. But what won’t Daego do to us!” he said, wrinkling his brow as he pushed his dory from its place of hiding. “He knows well enough whose log boom that is. There is not another on the river save his own.”
For some time as he drove his dory across the stream toward the spot where his boom was fastened, the boy reflected upon the cost of doing the right thing, the thing that in the end would result in the most good to the greatest number. Surely one does not engage in the battle for right without placing himself in a place of great peril.
“Ah, well!” he exclaimed, strong-hearted at last, “as someone has said, one may trust God for the outcome. The only question we need to ask, moment by moment, is: ‘This thing I do, is it right?’”
Arrived at the end of the boom, he cut it away and allowed it to drift toward the mouth of the creek where his Caribs awaited it.
At the camp he found great excitement. The same words were on every lip: “The killer has been taken! Pant is a great hunter. He has killed the man-eater with a machete! Surely there was never such a boy before!”
As for Pant, he divided his time between good-naturedly disclaiming any bravery or skill on his part, and mourning for his burro.
An hour passed. The Caribs settled down for the night. Then Pant and his Carib captain sat beneath their mosquito bar netting, with a candle between them, talking low and earnestly.
“The killer is dead,” said Pant.
“He is.”
“Open warfare has been declared.”
“It has.”
“Will there be a fight?”
“There will.”
“When?”
The Carib shrugged his shoulders. “Who can tell?”
“From now on,” said Pant slowly, “our men will be divided into two companies; those who work and those who watch, ready to fight.”
“That will be wise,” said the Carib.
At that they blew out the candle and went to sleep.
Next evening the Spanish girl’s dugout was again bumping the shore at the mouth of the creek trail. Her father was with her this time. Pant showed them down the trail to a palm-thatched cabin. There, seated around a table of roughly hewn mahogany slabs, they talked of the previous night’s doings.
The deputy, a short, solid looking man, with small, twinkling eyes, assured Pant that he was profoundly grateful for the part he had played in the affair.
“They were Daego’s men,” he went on. “When we had fished the two who went overboard out of the water, we identified them, every one.
“That is not all,” he smiled. “Someone was careless. On a case of ammunition we found the shipping tag assigning it to Daego. So, the case is quite complete.”
“Has Daego been arrested?” asked Pant.
“No. Truth is, no one seems to know where he is gone.”
“But he will be arrested?”
“Probably not,” the deputy spoke slowly.
“What! Not arrested!”
“He is a British subject. The relations between Mexico and Honduras have not always been the best. It would be a hazard. To arrest and try him would be a danger.”
For a moment Pant felt like repenting the action he had thought of as being done for the good of all. To risk one’s happiness, perhaps one’s very life, and then to have nothing come of it, that was bitterness indeed.
The deputy, having read the look on Pant’s face, was speaking again: “Do not worry; your work was not in vain. He shall be punished. And for one so greedy as he, his punishment will be severe indeed. His concessions shall be taken from him. Within thirty days he must remove his wagons, his tractors, his chicle kettles, everything that belongs to him. His mahogany, which is at the river’s bank, will be held in bond by the Government.”
Pant’s chair, which had been tilted back, came down with a thump. Concessions revoked! He had not thought of that. Those concessions were so vast in extent that his mind could scarcely take them in. Someone had told him that Daego had made a quarter of a million dollars the previous year on chicle.
“And that is the price he pays for his paltry gains from illicit traffic. Surely one pays heavily for the steps that make him a law-breaker.”
“My friend,” said the deputy, “you are alone here with this boy, Johnny Thompson, and your Caribs?”
“Yes, sir. Johnny’s been away for some time. But, trust me, he’ll be back! He always comes back.”
“Have you much money?”
“Very little.” Pant wondered what the deputy was driving at now. “But we represent a man who is rich,” he added as an afterthought.
“Ah!” the man breathed. “And he is interested, perhaps, in industrial development?”
“He wishes to develop his mahogany interests here. We came here to prove it can be done.”
“You are right. It can be done,” the other said decidedly. “Much more can be done than that. His tract, though very fine,—the very best,—is small. Across the river, far up as you can go, we are rich in forests, mahogany that has scarcely been touched; sapodillas that will yield a million, two million pounds of chicle a year. With chicle at fifty cents a pound at the dock, that should yield a profit.
“Our province needs developing. Our people need the work and the pay that it brings. We have not the capital. We have the forests.
“In a word,”—the man leaned forward, his eyes sparkling eagerly, “in a word, if you two boys can find us a man with money who is as honest as you, and who has at heart the good of all people, as you have, it will be possible for him to secure in Quintanaroo concessions which in time will bring him as much gold as Cortez hoped to win when he invaded Mexico. The question is: have you the man?”
For a moment Pant sat there silent, like one in a trance. So sudden was this proposal, so vast the possibilities, that his mind refused to grasp it.
“I—I think we can find the man,” he stammered at last. “You—you will give us time?”
“If only Johnny were here!” he said to himself.
“How much time?”
“Sixty days.”
“Ninety, if you need it. Quintanaroo can wait long; any land can afford to wait a long time for an honest man.
“And now,” he said, rising, “I think we must go.”
He shook hands solemnly with the boy. His daughter gave Pant a friendly smile. Then they were away over the trail to their boat.
Two hours later Pant might have been found still sitting before his rough slab table, and still he appeared to be in a trance.
He was fighting, fighting an impulse to run away, to dash down the river in his motor boat and away to the Belize radio to flash the tremendous news to a man who had financed their little enterprise up Rio Hondo.
Then, into his mind there came a picture in an old book of fables; a picture of a dog standing on a bridge over a river. In his mouth was a piece of meat. In the river was a reflection of the meat much larger than the meat itself.
“The dog dropped the meat to snap at its reflection, and lost all,” Pant mused. “I hope these concessions are not mere reflections of possible wealth; but I know that our fifty thousand feet of red mahogany logs are not. To-morrow we must get out another five thousand feet.”
Even at that, while he made his way to his bunk, his heart all but failed him. He dreaded the fight he was sure would come, the fight to a finish with Daego’s men.
“If only Johnny were here!” he again repeated. “Where can he be? That black man over in Daego’s camp said Daego had driven him into the jungle. Surely no jungle can hold Johnny Thompson!”
Of this last he could not be sure. A Central American jungle is an awesome and terrible place.
“If he were here,” he went on, “I could tell him the good news of Daego’s undoing and of those wonderful concessions that are all but within our grasp.
“And if only he could lead in the fight that’s sure to come! Daego will fight. It will be a battle to the bitter end. Some have gone down the river, but there are plenty still.
“Oh, well!” he sighed at last. “Johnny may not be here, but his ghost is. He’ll throw terror into the hearts of those blacks yet.”
That night the ghost of the air did strange things; very strange indeed.
Johnny was still in the land of the lost Mayas. The city he and Jean had discovered was not the city of Jean’s dreams, the golden metropolis of long ago, yet there were signs of past glory all about them. Massive ruins that had once been a pyramid, elaborately carved shafts reaching toward the sky, great squares and slabs of stone, all told of the glory that had departed.
“Think what it must have been!” said Jean as, on their third day among the Mayas, she sat high upon a carved rock and allowed her eyes to roam over the ruins of what must have been a majestic temple. “Just think what it was! Such a labyrinth of corridors! Such chambers! Such secret recesses. One might have been lost among them for hours!”
There was a rocky wall running along one side of the city. This merely suggested a prison. But for all that, it might as well have been a prison wall. They were prisoners. They had learned this on the second day. With the vision of the red lure burning brightly in his eyes, Johnny had proposed that they find the way over which they had come, and try following it back. They had experienced little difficulty in finding the trail, but once they came to the spot where it entered the jungle, they had found it completely blocked by grim little brown men. These offered no violence, but neither would they move aside and allow them to pass. They blocked the way and shook their heads.
“Orders of the Chief,” Roderick had said. “I expected that.”
So their first attempt at escape had failed.
Prisoners though they were, they had been given the range of the city and the surrounding open spaces where corn waved in the bright sun, where banana plants reared themselves to the sky and cocoanut palms waved long plumes in air.
No guests could have been treated more royally. The best of food, wild turkey, deer, armadillo, the best of meats, the finest of corn cakes, the most delicious of fruits were served to them. At night they lay upon beds that rivaled the couches of kings. For all this, they were made to know that they were not to leave the land of the Mayas.
“Not ever?” said Jean with a wrinkled brow.
“Perhaps never,” Johnny said solemnly.
“Johnny, we were mad.”
“You are right. We were quite out of our heads when we came here. But what’s the fun of living if you can’t have some adventure?”
“Yes, there is joy in it!” exclaimed the girl, springing down from her perch on the carved rock. “And to-day, since we can’t leave, we will discover something wonderful in the midst of these ruins.”
They did. Something came of it, too, I assure you.
It was in the midst of an all but impenetrable growth of palms and vines which, spreading over a crumbling heap of ruins seemed to wish to hide a secret, that they made the discovery, and having made it, entered upon one of the strangest and weirdest adventures any of them had ever known.
As they crawled on hands and knees, here forcing their way between the spreading leaves of a nut palm, there tearing away a wild fig vine, they came at last upon an opening. Before this opening sagged an old, decayed door. There was scarcely room to crawl between the heaps of rocks that blocked the way, but once one was inside he found that he had entered a damp, dark hallway that, extending far as his electric torch would reach, suggested mystery and romance.
Johnny was the first to enter. Jean and Roderick followed. There was a moment of hushed silence as they stood there breathing silently as if listening for voices that had long been stilled forever.
“I’ll wager the place hasn’t been visited except by bats since the year one,” said Johnny.
As if to prove that at least part of his prophecy was true, there came a whirring of wings and one of those great vampire bats, terror to all living things in Central America, flew by so close that the current of damp air stirred by his flight lifted their hair.
“The secret corridor,” Johnny said. There was a solemn note of mystery in his voice. “To what chambers of treasure does it lead? We may yet be the richest Mayas in all this little hidden kingdom.”
“Yes, and I’d take a broken sixpence for my share, could I but return to my father’s camp,” said Roderick, disconsolately.
However downcast her brother might be, Jean was still game. “Come on!” she exclaimed. “We will find the god of the rising sun, the god of the noonday sun and all the other gods with the gold and jewels that enrich their chambers. We’ll find the chamber of the ancient princess. What shall we not find. Come on. C’mon! C’mon!” Seizing her brother by the arm, she fairly dragged him down the corridor which, to those who came from the hot dryness of tropical day, seemed to possess the chill dampness of perpetual night.
On tip-toe, lest perchance they might waken the spirits of other centuries, they began their march down the wide corridor. Only the diffident snap-snap of great bats disturbed the silence of the place. Walking in deep, age-old dust, they made no sound. So, awed into silence, gripping one another by the arm, they marched on until, having covered some two hundred feet, they came to a sudden halt before what appeared to be a solid stone wall. Certainly it was stone, and it looked as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.
“Well!” Jean exclaimed.
“The end,” muttered Johnny.
“Now,” said Roderick in a relieved tone, “I hope we may go back to the sunlight. I don’t like these beastly vampire bats. I’ve been told they can kill an ox by sucking his blood. They’ve been known to drive the entire population of a village from their homes. What would you do if one of the bally rascals made a grab at your throat?”
“Take him by the ear and give a good sound scolding,” said Johnny.
“Hold on a bit,” he said as Roderick started back, “let’s have a look.”
He began flashing his torch from floor to ceiling, from corner to corner of the dungeon-like place.
“Not an opening,” he sighed. “Not a suggestion of an—wait! How does it happen that this stone at the end is fully a yard square, while all the rest of the wall is made up of small rocks?”
Taking a heavy cane which Roderick had insisted upon bringing into the place, he struck the broad stone a resounding blow. At once the place was alive with echoes and whirring wings.
“Sounds hollow,” he muttered.
He pressed the end of the stick against the top of the stone and gave it a shove. To their surprise the stone, which to all appearances was a door, dropped slowly and noiselessly downward until it formed a sort of threshold over which they who dared might walk.
“Oh! Ah!” Jean murmured.
As if expecting a million vampires to spring at him from the dark, Roderick started back.
As soon as she could recover from her surprise Jean set one small foot on the stone threshold.
“No,” said Johnny, placing a restraining hand upon her shoulder, “let me go in and look about a little. Not that I wish to be first, but it might—might not be quite—quite safe. You are a girl. In a way, I’m your protector.”
“I—I understand,” said the girl as she favored him with a smile that was altogether new to him.
In spite of all his efforts at self-control, Johnny’s knees trembled a little as he stepped upon the rock. It was strange to be moving forward alone into a subterranean chamber which, to all appearances, had not been visited for centuries. What would he discover there? Was this the secret hiding place of princes, a temple of worship or a dungeon prison? What would he discover there; rare old furniture, moulding to decay; gold, jewels, or only skeletons?
“Probably nothing,” he told himself as he moved forward.
After he had taken three steps he halted for a second. There was something strange about the rock upon which he stood. It appeared to have a greenish cast, but being eager to discover the contents of the chamber, he pressed on without investigating further.
The electric torch which he carried had an adjustment which enabled one to throw about him a dim light or a bright one. At the present time it shone but dimly. As he attempted to flash it to full brilliancy the catch stuck and the lamp continued to shine but dimly.
Still impatient, he pressed forward down this more deeply mysterious corridor, which appeared somewhat broader and shorter, almost to its end before he discovered anything of interest. Then of a sudden he found himself all but upon some object which, sending forth a dull yellow lustre, appeared to hang in air. Most mysterious of all, from the center of this there came a tiny but peculiarly brilliant light.
“It can’t be,” he told himself, starting back. “A light burning through all these centuries! That would be to discover the origin of light itself. That—”
He broke short off. His hand trembled so he could scarcely hold the torch; his knees shook violently. The room had suddenly blazed forth with an intense green light. At the same time there came to his startled ears a piercing scream.
The thing that had happened to Johnny Thompson was absurdly simple; at least part of it was. Unconsciously, as he moved forward in the dimly lighted room, he had continued to fumble with the catch of his flashlight. Suddenly, as he stood before the mysterious thing of yellow glow and a tiny light, his torch had flashed on in all its strength.
So much was very simple. The explanation of the green glow was simple, too, once he read the secret of it. But who had screamed, and why? That was not so easy to answer.
The reason for the peculiar green glow was to be found in the composition of the walls and ceiling of the room. They were of a peculiar green which had great reflective power.
“Jade!” Johnny exclaimed after his first surprise was over. “Solid green jade. At least the walls are set with jade.”
Who had screamed? This was the problem which concerned him most. To his utter astonishment, as he flashed the light about he failed to at once discover the entrance through which he had come.
“Turned around a bit,” he told himself as coolly as he could. “Take a point and circle about until I am looking at that point again. In that way I’ll see all the walls.”
In choosing his starting point his eye fell upon the thing of the yellow glow. He discovered at a glance that this was not suspended in air as he had thought, nor was there a miniature light burning in it. It was a statue or an image of a god; a rather hideous god with a hooked nose, a large stomach and hands on which were fingers like an eagle’s tallons. In one of these hands rested a stone of some sort that reflected light in a peculiarly brilliant manner.
“Gold, and perhaps a huge diamond,” Johnny speculated in spite of his anxiety.
Then he began to make the circle of the walls with his light. First the wall to the right of him was slowly and carefully surveyed, then the wall which had been to his back. No opening. His breath came short and quick. A third side was covered. In his agitation he set the light zig-zagging up and down. Was he somehow trapped? Who had screamed?
Half the last wall was covered, two-thirds. The suspense seemed unbearable. Then, with a sudden sigh of relief, he started forward.
Before him was an opening. It did not seem quite the same, but it must be the one. In his eagerness and anxiety he fairly ran.
Now he was half way across the room, and now at the wall. He was about to step forward and out to freedom and friends when, to his astonishment, his foot splashed down into water. It was with the utmost difficulty that he avoided plunging head foremost into a deep pool that lay just before him.
Once he had recovered from this shock he cast his light over the pool only to discover that the back side of the pool, which was some ten feet across, was solidly walled in, as was the room itself.
Obeying some unknown instinct, he dropped upon his knees and directed his powerful light straight down into the pool. For a moment he gazed intently downward, then started back in horror.
The thing he had seen almost made him faint. At the bottom of that pool he had caught the gleam of gold and the green light of jade ornaments, and in the midst of these a horrible, grinning human skull.
“This,” he told himself after he had control of himself again, “is a sacrificial pool. The gold and jade were a sacrifice. When? Who can tell? And the owner of that head? The door is closed. I am trapped. When will my time come?”
At that very moment there came, faint and indistinct, but unmistakable, the notes of a call:
“Whoo-hoo-hoo,Whoo-hoo-hoo,Whoo-hoo-hoo.”
“Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo.”
As in a dream he recalled the day they had practiced that call, he and Jean, back there in the jungle.
Alert, straining his ears for the next note, telling himself that when it came he would locate the singer and thus begin the task of finding a way out, he waited.
A moment passed; another and yet another. The silence became unbearable. He stamped his feet to break the awful spell. Then he became conscious of another sound—a slow tap-tap-tap-tap. Always a second apart, never any louder, never coming more softly, this mysterious tap-tap-tap in time became more maddening than the silence. Still at strained attention he waited for Jean’s call which did not come.
“What can have happened?” he murmured at last. “Can other ears than mine have heard that call and silenced it, perhaps forever?”
He found himself filled with sudden anger, a raging hate of the Mayas.
“What manner of treatment is this,” he asked himself, “after I saved their princess from a terrible death?”
This anger lasted but for a moment. He next found his mind filled with wonderings. In the deep dust of the outer corridor there had been not a single footprint. How could the living Mayas have set such a trap as this without leaving traces of their coming and going?
“They couldn’t,” he reasoned. “I have been trapped by that ancient god, or at least by those who, centuries ago, set him there.”
Again he listened, and again he caught that endless tap-tap-tap.
“Water falling,” he said. “But where?”
He began a careful search of the chambers. He examined every nook and corner with elaborate care, but aside from the pool, found not so much as a spot of dampness.
“And yet,” he told himself, “the sound is unmistakable. There is dripping water somewhere. Must be within the walls.”
Once more he set himself listening for Jean’s call. A quarter of an hour, a half hour he waited and listened, but it did not come.
“What can have happened?” he muttered at last. Then he thought of the flashlight. The battery was good for just so long, then would come complete darkness. When would that be? He could not tell. Shuddering, he muttered:
“Might better be now.”
With that he threw off the catch. Sudden darkness followed, but the after image remained. Sitting on the damp floor, staring into the dark, he seemed still to catch the greenish glow of the walls, the yellow gleam of the god and the white flash of jewels.
Have you never attempted to fall asleep while from some distant spot there came with maddening regularity the drip-drip-drip of water? If you have, then perhaps you can share in a degree at least the feeling of Johnny Thompson as he sat there alone, a prisoner of other centuries, listening to that baffling sound within the walls.
Yet, impossible as it may seem, he was able for whole moments to forget the entire situation. In those moments he saw again his camp on the Rio Hondo. He talked with Pant and laughed with him at his ridiculous donkey. He urged his Caribs on to more splendid efforts, saw the piles of magnificent timber, mahogany, the red lure, piling up, and counted the days that must pass before they would send these logs plunging in the river, fill their boom and go drifting silently away.
Yes, there were blessed moments of relief; but always the haunting darkness, the nerve-racking drip-drip came pressing its way once more into his consciousness.
* * * * * * * *
What was happening during all this time outside the door that had so mysteriously closed? The scream which Johnny had heard was Jean’s. Anxious for his safety, she had watched that hole in the wall from the time he disappeared. The green flash of light which appeared at the moment when his torch flashed on had alarmed her; but this was nothing to the thing she saw a moment later. Slowly, silently, as if impelled by a powerful invisible force, the stone, which for centuries had closed the opening, was slowly rising. The opening was half closed before she could recall her scattered senses. Then, without a thought for her own safety, she sprang for the entrance. It was Roderick who, with cooler judgment, had pulled her back. Then it was that she gave forth that piercing scream.
After the scream, white-faced and silent, she had stood watching until with an almost inaudible thud the massive rock dropped into place.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Roderick said reassuringly. “I’ll push it open as Johnny did.”
Seizing the heavy walking stick, he pushed it against the door just as Johnny had done. But, though he heaved away at it with all his might, he did not move it so much as a fraction of an inch. Nor did the girl’s slight, but frantic strength, added to his, avail. The door was closed, closed and sealed for all eternity so far as they could tell.
After many futile efforts they sank weakly down upon a great flat rock, Roderick to sulk and to remind Jean, as is a brother’s right, that this whole affair from the time they found Johnny in the hut was a piece of foolishness. Jean sat in sad silence. This silence did not last.
The picture of that morning in the jungle, the rocks, the wild turkey, came back to her and she suddenly remembered the call.
“We—we agreed on a call we’d use in case we were lost from one another,” she said to Roderick. “I—I guess that was meant for now. If he hears it and locates us by the sound he may find a way to open the door from the inside.”
Standing to her full height and directing her voice against the unfeeling walls, she sang their call:
“Whoo-hoo-hoo,Whoo-hoo-hoo,Whoo-hoo-hoo.”
“Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo.”
The echoes of that call had died away and she was parting her lips for another when, of a sudden, her brother seized her arm.
“Hist! Listen!” he whispered.
Faint, indistinct, but unmistakable, there came the silent pit-pat of footsteps on the dust-padded corridor. Jean’s call had brought someone. But who?
In strained silence the brother and sister stood listening, waiting in the dark. Roderick had snapped off the small pocket light which he carried.
The sounding footsteps in the distance became hesitant, uncertain.
“Sounds as if the person, whoever he may be, were a stranger to the place,” whispered Jean.
“Why shouldn’t he be? Place hasn’t been visited for hundreds of years. Look at the dust.”
“But he followed us.”
“Yes. I wonder why.”
For a long time after that they waited in breathless silence. All the time the person, who now halted, now moved a few steps forward, was coming closer and closer. Who could it be? What did he want? Did he know the secrets of this mysterious place, of the magic door? He might. There was hope in that.
“Oh, switch on your light,” Jean whispered impatiently. “What’s the use? He’s bound to find us in the end.”
Realizing the truth of this, Roderick snapped on his light and sent its rays gleaming straight down the corridor. As it fell full upon the face of the one who had followed them there came a half-suppressed, shrill cry of a child. It was none other than the daughter of the great chief, the one whose life Johnny had saved.
“Wianda!” exclaimed Jean, calling the girl’s name as she started forward to embrace her.
Unfortunately, this name was the only word they had in common.
For a moment the Indian girl’s eyes roamed from one to the other, then with a sudden gesture she held up first three fingers, then only two, as much as to say:
“There were three of you. Now there are but two. Where is the other?”
For answer, Jean took up the heavy walking stick, and after pointing at the stone door, made as if to push it back.
The girl’s eyes opened wide in surprise. Then as her face became thoughtful she backed away to sit down upon the flat rock. There, for five minutes, with head bent low, hands pressing her temples, she sat perfectly still.
“Thinking it out,” whispered Roderick. “I wonder what she will do.”
In spite of her fears for Johnny’s safety, Jean felt a certain great confidence in this child’s ability to solve the puzzle and set her hero free. Why not? Was she not a native of the place? Did she not know the secrets of the land?
“And yet,” she thought with a sinking heart, “why should she? She is little more than a child, while the secrets of this place, if one is to judge by the dust and crumbling decay of rocks, are old as time itself.”
Suddenly the Indian girl leaped to her feet. With a swift movement she crossed the corridor and pressed her ear against the stone door.
As she stood there listening, across her face there spread such a smile of joy as it had seldom been Jean’s privilege to see.
Then the Indian girl motioned for Jean to put her ear against the stone door as she had done.
What she heard was a faint tick-tick-tick, or the drip-drip-drip of water. She could not tell what it was, the sound was so very faint.
Her heart beat wildly. What could it mean? Why had the Indian girl become so suddenly joyous? Was it a token, this ticking or dripping? Was it a sign that all would be well? It was all very strange, all so unreal that she found herself all but overcome.
On her wrist Jean wore a small watch. In her idle hours she had amused herself by teaching the Indian girl to tell the time of morning, noon or evening by it. Now, to her astonishment, she found the girl alternately pointing to the three o’clock mark on the dial, then away at the stone door.
“It’s one o’clock,” said Jean. “What can she mean?”
“Probably means that at three the door will open of its own free will,” said Roderick, who with his usual skepticism placed little faith in the native girl.
“I’m starved,” he grumbled. “Let’s get out of this vile place and find something to eat. Thompson’ll get out of that hole some way. Leave it to him. Any way, we can’t help any.”
“We can’t be sure of that,” said Jean soberly.
“You may leave if you wish. As for me, I will stay here as long as this native girl does. I’m not going to be shamed by such a little brown one as she.”
Roderick sauntered sulkily up and down the corridor for a moment, then sank down upon a rock with a sigh.
As for the Indian girl, after listening once more at the door, with the look of joyous satisfaction on her face she sat down in composure to wait. Wait for what? What was to happen in two hours? Jean could not so much as guess. So, without trying, she sat down beside the native girl.
To her surprise she found after a time that by listening intently she could catch the faint tap-tap-tap. It was weird, mysterious, fascinating, that steady continuous sound that was so much like the ticking of a clock, yet somehow so different.
“What can it mean?” she asked herself. “Can it be that those ancient people held some secrets of motion and power of which we know nothing? Does that door, like the door to a bank vault, open and close to a time schedule? And could it be working after all these years?
“How—how impossible!” she breathed.
The Indian girl heard the sound of her whisper and, as if understanding the meaning of it, put a hand upon her knee as much as to say:
“All things are possible.”
“And yet,” Jean went on to assure herself, “it is impossible. Even were it all true, how could this child know the secret of it all?”
At that moment there flashed through her mind things Johnny had told her about the ancient Maya civilization, of their culture, their sculpture, their architecture, their art expressed in the working of precious metals and polishing of jewels.
“They had mastered the art of writing, too,” she told herself, “and had great libraries. Many of these were destroyed, but some remain. Who knows but these, their descendants, have read from these scrolls the secrets of this strange underground cavern?”
So she reasoned, hoped and waited. A half hour passed, an hour, an hour and a half. As the hour of three approached even the skeptical Roderick grew restless. He rose and paced the floor. Jean pulled him down.
“I can’t hear the tap-tap when you are walking,” she said.
“Listen!” she exclaimed in an awed whisper. “It—it’s stopped!”
That was a dramatic moment. The Indian girl knew, too, for her face had suddenly become animated with some great emotion. Gliding swiftly to the white girl’s side, she placed her fingers on her lips.
Instantly Jean read her meaning. She sprang to her feet, and at once there came from her throat the clear notes of their call:
“Whoo-hoo-hoo,Whoo-hoo-hoo,Whoo-hoo-hoo.”
“Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo.”
Johnny Thompson, sitting alone in the dark, heard and sprang to his feet. The next moment as the call was repeated again and again, he found himself feeling his way by following the sound closer and closer to the singer.