Hearts of Three

CHAPTER XIII

A WEEK later, out of San Antonio on a single day, three separate expeditions started for the Cordilleras. The first, mounted on mules, was composed of Henry, Francis, the peon and his ancient parent, and of several of the Solano peons, each leading a pack-mule, burdened with supplies and outfit. Old Enrico Solano, at the last moment, had been prevented from accompanying the party because of the bursting open of an old wound received hi the revolutionary fighting of his youth.

Up the main street of San Antonio the cavalcade proceeded, passing the jail, the wall of which Francis had dynamited, and which was only even then being tardily rebuilt by the Jefe's prisoners. Torres, sauntering down the street, the latest wire from Regan tucked in his pocket, saw the Morgan outfit with surprise. "Whither away, senors?" he called.

So spontaneous that it might have been rehearsed, Francis pointed to the sky, Henry straight down at the earth, the peon to the right, and his father to the left. The curse from Torres at such impoliteness, caused all to burst into laughter, in which the mule-peons joined as they rode along.

Within the morning, at the time of the siesta hour, while all the town slept, Torres received a second surprise. This time it was the sight of Leoncia and her youngest brother, Ricardo, on mules', leading a third that was evidently loaded with a camping outfit.

The third expedition was Torres' own, neither more nor less meager than Leoncia's, for it was composed only of himself and one, Jose Mancheno, a notorious murderer of the place whom Torres, for private reasons, had saved from the buzzards of San Juan. But Torres' plans, in the matter of an expedition, were more ambitious than they appeared. Not far up the slopes of the Cordilleras dwelt the strange tribe of the Caroos. Originally founded by runaway negro slaves of Africa and Carib slaves of the Mosquito Coast, the renegades had perpetuated themselves with stolen women of the tierra caliente and with fled women slaves like themselves. Between the Mayas beyond, and the government of the coast, this unique colony had maintained itself in semi-independence. Added to, in later days, by run-away Spanish prisoners, the Caroos had become a hotchpotch of, bloods and breeds, possessing a name and a taint so bad that the then governing power of Colombia, had it not been too occupied with its own particular political grafts, would have sent armies to destroy the pest-hole. And in this pest-hole of the Caroos Jose" Mancheno had been born of a Spanish — murderer father and a mestizamurderess mother. And to this pest-hole Jose Mancheno was leading Torres in order that the commands of Thomas Kegan of Wall Street might be carried out.

"Lucky we found him when we did," Francis told Henry, as they rode at the rear of the last Maya priest.

"He's pretty senile," Henry nodded. "Look at him."

The old man, as he led the way, was forever pulling out the sacred tassel and mumbling and muttering as he fingered it.

"Hope the old gentleman doesn't wear it out," was Henry's fervent wish. "You'd think he'd read the directions once and remember them for a little while instead of continually pawing them over."

They rode out through the jungle into a clear space that looked as if at some time man had hewn down the jungle and fought it back. Beyond, by the vista afforded by the clearing, the mountain called Blanco Kovalo towered high in the sunny sky. The old Maya halted his mule, ran over certain strings in the tassel, pointed at the mountain, and spoke in broken Spanish:

"It says: In the foot-steps of the God wait till the eyes of Chia flash."

He indicated the particular knots of a particular string as the source of his information.

"Where are the foot-steps, old priest?" Henry demanded, staring about him at the unbroken sward.

But the old man started his mule, and, with a tattoo of bare heels on the creature's ribs, hastened it on across the clearing and into the jungle beyond.

"He's like a hound on the scent, and it looks as if the scent is getting hot," Francis remarked.

At the end of half a mile, where the jungle turned to grass-land on swift-rising slopes the old man forced his mule into a gallop which he maintained until he reached a natural depression in the ground. Three feet or more in depth, of area sufficient to accommodate a dozen persons in comfort, its form was strikingly like that which some colossal human foot could have made.

"The foot-step of the God," the old priest proclaimed solemnly, ere he slid off his mule and prostrated himself in prayer. "In the foot-step of the God must we wait till the eyes of Chia flash so say the sacred knots."

"Pretty good place for a meal," Henry vouchsafed, looking down into the depression. While waiting for the mumbo— jumbo foolery to come oft, we might as well stay our stomachs."

"If Chia doesn't object," laughed Francis. And Chia did not object, at least the old priest could not find any objection written in the knots.

While the mules were being tethered on the edge of the first break of woods, water, was fetched from a nearby spring and a fire built in the foot-step. The old Maya seemed oblivious of everything, as he mumbled endless prayers and ran the knots over and over.

"If only he doesn't blow up," Francis said. "I thought he was wild-eyed the first day we met him up in Juchitan," concurred Henry. "But it's nothing to the way his eyes are now."

Here spoke the peon, who, unable to understand a word of their English, nevertheless sensed the drift of it.

"This is very religious, very dangerous, to have anything to do with the old Maya sacred things. It is the death-road. My father knows. Many men have died. The deaths are sudden and horrible. Even Maya priests have died. My father's father so died. He, too, loved a woman of the tierra caliente. And for love of her, for gold, he sold the Maya secret and by the knot-writing led tierra caliente men to the treasure. He died. They all died. My father does not like the women of the tierra caliente now that he is old. He liked them too well in his youth, which was his sin. And he knows the danger of leading you to the treasure. Many men have sought during the centuries. Of those who found it, not one came back. It is said that even conquist adores and pirates of the English Morgan have won to the hiding-place and decorated it with their bones."

"And when your father dies," Francis queried, "then, being his son, you will be the Maya high priest?"

"No, senor," the peon shook his head. "I am only half — May a. I cannot read the knots. My father did not teach me because I was not of the pure Maya blood."

"And if he should die, right now, is there any other Maya who can read the knots?"

"No, senor. My father is the last living man who knows that ancient language."

But the conversation was broken in upon by Leoncia and Kicardo, who, having tethered their mules with the others, were gazing sheepishly down from the rim of the depression. The faces of Henry and Francis lighted with joy at the sight of Leoncia, while their mouths opened and their tongues articulated censure and scolding. Also, they insisted on her returning with Eicardo.

"But you cannot send me away before giving me something to eat," she persisted, slipping down the slope of the depression with pure feminine cunning in order to place the discussion on a closer and more intimate basis.

Aroused by their voices, the old Maya came out of a trance of prayer and observed her with wrath. And in wrath he burst upon her, intermingling occasional Spanish words and phrases with the flood of denunciation in Maya.

"He says that women are no good," the peon interpreted in the first pause. "He says women bring quarrels among men, the quick steel, the sudden death. Bad luck and God's wrath are ever upon them. Their ways are not God's ways, and they lead men to destruction. He says women are the eternal enemy of God and man, forever keeping God and man apart. He says women have ever cluttered the footsteps of God and have kept men away from travelling the path of God to God. He says this woman must go back."

With laughing eyes, Francis whistled his appreciation of the diatribe, while Henry said:

"Now will you be good, Leoncia? You see what a Maya thinks of your sex. This is no place for you. California's the place. Women vote there."

"The trouble is that the old man is remembering the woman who brought misfortune upon him in the heyday of his youth," Francis said. He turned to the peon. "Ask your father to read the knot-writing and see what it says for or against women traveling in the foot-steps of God."

In vain the ancient high priest fumbled the sacred writing. There was not to be found the slightest authoritative objection to woman.

"He's mixing his own experiences up with his mythology," Francis grinned triumphantly. "So I guess it's pretty near all right, Leoncia, for you to stay for a bite to eat. The coffee's made. After that…"

But "after that" came before. Scarcely had they seated themselves on the ground and begun to eat, when Francis, standing up to serve Leoncia with tortillas, had his hat knocked off.

"My word!" he said, sitting down. "That was sudden. Henry, take a squint and see who tried to pot-shoot me."

The next moment, save for the peon's father, all eyes were peeping across the rim of the foot-step. What they saw, creeping upon them from every side, was a nondescript and bizarrely clad horde of men who seemed members of no particular race but composed of all races. The breeds of the entire human family seemed to have moulded their lineaments and vari-colored their skins.

"The mangiest bunch I ever laid eyes on," was Francis' comment.

"They are the Caroos," the peon muttered, betraying fear.

"And who in," Francis began. Instantly he amended. "And who in Paradise are the Caroos?"

"They come from hell," was the peon's answer. "They are more savage than the Spaniard, more terrible than the Maya. They neither give nor take in marriage, nor does a priest reside among them. They are the devil's own spawn, and their ways are the devil's ways, only worse."

Here the Maya arose, and, with accusing finger, denounced Leoncia for being the cause of this latest trouble. A bullet creased his shoulder and half-whirled him about.

"Drag him down!" Henry shouted to Francis. "He's the only man who knows the knot-language; and the eyes of Chia, whatever that may mean, have not yet flashed."

Francis obeyed, with an out-reach of arm to the old fellow's legs, jerking him down in a crumpled, skeleton-like fall.

Henry loosed his rifle, and elicited a fusillade in response. Next, Ricardo, Francis, and the peon joined in. But the old man, still running his knots, fixed his gaze across the far rim of the foot-step upon a rugged wall of mountain beyond.

"Hold on!" shouted Francis, in a vain attempt to make himself heard above the shooting.

He was compelled to crawl from one to another and shake them into ceasing from firing. And to each, separately, he had to explain that all their ammunition was with the mules, and that they must be sparing with the little they had in their magazines and belts.

"And don't let them hit you," Henry warned. "They've got old muskets and blunderbuses that will drive holes through you the size of dinner-plates."

An hour later, the last cartridge, save several in Francis' automatic pistol, was gone; and to the irregular firing of the Caroos the pit replied with silence. Jose Mancheno was the first to guess the situation. He cautiously crept up to the edge of the pit to make sure, then signaled to the Caroos that the ammunition of the besieged was exhausted and to come on.

"Nicely trapped, senors," he exulted down at the defenders, while from all around the rim laughter arose from the Caroos.

But the next moment the change that came over the situation was as astounding as a transformation scene in a pantomime. With wild cries of terror the Caroos were fleeing. Such was their disorder and haste that numbers of them dropped their muskets and machetes.

"Anyway, I'll get you, Senor Buzzard," Francis pleasantly assured Mancheno, at the same time flourishing his pistol at him.

He leveled his weapon as Mancheno fled, but reconsidered and did not draw trigger.

"I've only three shots left," he explained to Henry, half in apology. "And in this country one can never tell when three shots will come in handiest, as I've found out, beyond a doubt, beyond a doubt."

"Look!" the peon cried, pointing to his father and to the distant mountainside. "That is why they ran away. They have learned the peril of the sacred things of Maya."

The old priest, running over the knots of the tassel in an ecstasy that was almost trance-like, was gazing fixedly at the distant mountainside, from which, side by side and close together, two bright flashes of light were repeating themselves.

"Twin mirrors could do it in the hands of a man," was Henry's comment.

"They are the eyes of Chia," the peon repeated. "It is so written in the knots as you have heard my father say. 'Wait in the foot-steps of the God till the eyes of Chia flash.'"

The old man rose to his feet and wildly proclaimed: "To find the treasure we must find the eyes!"

"All right, old top," Henry soothed him, as, with his small traveler's compass he took the bearings of the flashes.

"He's got a compass inside his head," Henry remarked an hour later of the old priest, who led on the foremost mule. "I check him by the compass, and, no matter how the natural obstacles compel him to deviate, he comes back to the course as if he were himself a magnetic needle."

Not since leaving the foot-step, had the flashings been visible. Only from that one spot, evidently, did the rugged landscape permit the seeing of them. Rugged the country was, broken into arroyos and cliffs, interspersed with forest patches and stretches of sand and of volcanic ash.

At last the way became impassable for their mounts, and Ricardo was left behind to keep charge of the mules and mule-peons and to make, a camp. The remainder of the party continued on, scaling the jungle-clad steep that blocked their way by hoisting themselves and one another up from root to root. The old Maya, still leading, was oblivious to Leoncia's presence.

Suddenly, half a mile farther on, he halted and shrank back as if stung by a viper. Francis laughed, and across the wild landscape came back a discordant, mocking echo. The last priest of the Mayas ran the knots hurriedly, picked out a particular string, ran its knots twice, and then announced:

"When the God laughs, beware! so say the knots."

Fifteen minutes were lost ere Henry and Francis succeeded in only partly convincing him, by repeated trials of their voices, that the thing was an echo.

Half an hour later, they debouched on a series of abruptrolling sand-dunes. Again the old man shrank back. From the sand in which they strode, arose a clamor of noise. When they stood still, all was still. A single step, and all the sand about them became vocal.

"When the God laughs, beware!" the old Maya warned.

Drawing a circle in the sand with his finger, which shouted at him as he drew it, he sank down within it on his knees, and as his knees contacted on the sand arose a very screaming and trumpeting of sound. The peon joined his father inside the noisy circle, where, with his fore-finger, the old man was tracing screeching cabalistic figures and designs.

Leoncia was overcome, and clung both to Henry and Francis. Even Francis was perturbed.

"The echo was an echo," he said. "But here is no echo. I don't understand it. Frankly, it gets my goat."

"Piffle!" Henry retorted, stirring the sand with his foot till it shouted again. "It's the barking sand. On the island of Kauai, down in the Hawaiian Islands, I have been across similar barking sands quite a place for tourists,

I assure you. Only this is a better specimen, and much noisier. The scientists have a score of high-brow theories to account for the phenomenon. It occurs in several other places in the world, as I have heard. There's only one thing to do, and that is to follow the compass bearing which leads straight across. Such sands do bark, but they have never been known to bite."

But the last of the priests could not be persuaded out of his circle, although they succeeded in disturbing him from his prayers long enough to spout a ilood of impassioned Maya speech.

"He says," the son interpreted, "that we are bent on such sacrilege that the very sands cry out against us. He will go no nearer to the dread abode of Chia. Nor will I. His father died there, as is well known amongst the Mayas. He says he will not die there. He says he is not old enough to die."

"The miserable octogenarian!" Francis laughed, and was startled by the ghostly, mocking laugh of the echo, while all about them the sand-dunes bayed in chorus. "Too youthful to die! How about you, Leoncia? Are you too young to die yet a while?"

"Say," she smiled back, moving her foot slightly so as to bring a moan of reproach from the sand beneath it. "On the contrary, I am too old to die just because the cliffs echo our laughter back at us and because the sandhills bark at us. Come, let us go on. We are very close to those flashings. Let the old man wait within his circle until we come back."

She cast off their hands and stepped forward, and as they followed, all the dunes became inarticulate, while one, near to them, down the sides of which ran a slide of sand, rumbled and thundered. Fortunately for them, as they were soon to learn, Francis, at abandoning the mules, had equipped himself with a coil of thin, strong rope.

Once across the sands they encountered more echoes. On trials, they found their halloes distinctly repeated as often as six or eight times.

"Hell's bells," said Henry. "No wonder the natives fight shy of such a locality!"

Wasn't it Mark Twain who wrote about a man whose hobby was making a collection of echoes? "Francis queried.

"Never heard of him. But this is certainly some fine collection of Maya echoes. They chose the region wisely for a hiding place. Undoubtedly it was always sacred, even before the Spaniards came. The old priests knew the natural causes of the mysteries, and passed them over to the herd as mystery with a capital "M "and supernatural in origin."

Not many minutes afterward they emerged on an open, level space, close under a crannied 'and ledge-ribbed cliff, and exchanged their single-file mode of progression to threeabreast. The ground was a hard, brittle crust of surface, so crystalline and dry as never to suggest that it was aught else but crystalline and dry all the way down. In an ebullition of spirits, desiring to keep both men on an equality of favor, Leoncia seized their hands and started them into a run. At the end of half a dozen strides the disaster happened. Simultaneously Henry and Francis broke through the crust, sinking to their thighs, and Leoncia was only a second behind them in breaking through and sinking almost as deep.

"Hell's bells!" Henry muttered. "It's the very devil's own landscape."

And his low-spoken words were whispered back to him from the near-by cliffs on all sides and endlessly and sibilantly repeated.

Not at first did they fully apprehend their danger. It was when', by their struggles, they found themselves waistdeep and steadily sinking, that the two men grasped the gravity of the situation. Leoncia still laughed at the predicament, for it seemed no more than that to her.

"Quicksand," Francis gasped.

"Quicksand!" all the landscape gasped back at him, and continued to gasp it in fading ghostly whispers, repeating it and gossiping about it with gleeful unction.

"It's a pot-hole filled with quicksand," Henry corroborated.

"Maybe the old boy was right in sticking back there on the barking sands," observed Francis.

The ghostly whispering redoubled upon itself and was a long time in dying away.

By this time they were midway between waist and arm-pits and sinking as methodically as ever.

"Well, somebody's got to get out of the scrape alive," Henry remarked.

And, even without discussing the choice, both men began to hoist Leoncia up, although the effort and her weight thrust them more quickly down. When she stood, free and clear, a foot on the nearest shoulder of each of the two men she loved, Francis said, though the landscape mocked him:

"Now, Leoncia, we're going to toss you out^of this. At the word "Go! "let yourself go. And you must strike full length and softly on the crust. You'll slide a little. But don't let yourself stop. Keep on going. Crawl out to the solid land on your hands and knees. And, whatever you do, don't stand up until you reach the solid land. Beady, Henry?"

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, shs 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 hundred-weight.

"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.