The Yellow Hoard

CHAPTER XVII An “Indian” Makes A Find

In the pitch darkness of that underground river, Benson was carried at least a dozen yards before he came up to the surface again. When he did rise at last, with powerful strokes, he bleakly expected that there would be no surface to rise to — that the water would fill entirely the underground natural tunnel through which it silently raced.

His life was saved, though he did not realize it for a while, by just one thing — it was the dry season, and the subterranean river was not swollen to capacity.

He came up to free air, and when he reached up with his arms he felt about a two-foot space over his head.

Treading water, he let himself be borne swiftly along in an upright position. He kept his arms stretched up. Now and then the roof of the tunnel raised till he felt nothing. Now and then it narrowed till he had to duck under water so that his head could clear it.

As he moved, chill things touched his legs, coiled around them with slimy and eyeless tenacity till he could kick them loose.

The current suddenly slowed, showing that, ahead, the river bed was much wider. At first, Benson took the slowing as a good sign. But in a moment it became clear that it was a bad one. The roof over him rapidly dipped down, not in any short intervals, but inexorably and endlessly.

He had six inches clear, then four, then no more than two. But now the current was slow enough so that he could stay his forward rush with his hands. He held himself motionless for a moment, with just the tip of his nose between water and roof, breathing in air.

The pitch blackness seemed mysteriously to have lifted just a little. You could feel the faint relief of it more than actually see it. Taking a deep breath, Benson dipped beneath the surface to try to locate it.

Ahead, an unguessable distance, there was a vague light spot. A very small spot, in the top of the watery tunnel. Benson raised again, with his nose out for air.

He could hang on there, alive, for several hours. But there was no hope in the end. He could go forward toward the light with a fractional chance of getting to upper air again. Ninety-nine chances of drowning, to one of escape.

The bleak, colorless eyes hardly changed expression. Benson had been up against hundred-to-one odds many times, and hadn’t hesitated. He didn’t hesitate now. He drew as deep a breath as his capacious lungs would hold, ducked down and began sliding through black water toward the faint patch.

In the jungle above, a stolid-faced Indian was squatting beside a small pool whose surface, mysteriously, was never still. Things appeared on that surface continually, moved to the other side, bobbed down and were never seen again. But the Indian was not concerned with this. He was getting a drink, scooping up ice-cold water in his hands.

In the black depths of the pool something moved. The Indian darted back. Two hands came up from the water, then a head and face. The Indian stared in a mixture of horror and superstitious awe.

The face was as white and still and dead as something carved from limestone. In the face were awful, colorless eyes that transfixed the Indian like lances of light. A god! An evil god! Or a monster!

Yelling, the Indian clubbed down toward the head with a length of wood his hands touched at random. And then the Indian knew it was a god. No man could have moved so fast.

White, steely fingers caught the descending club easily, jerked. The Indian toppled forward toward the pool, and the figure drew itself dripping from the water with the same move. A right hand clubbed against the side of his jaw, and the white, steely fingers of the dripping figure’s left hand caught him by the throat.

The Indian consigned himself to his fathers as he felt consciousness leave him. A monster had arisen in the Pool-to-the-heart-of-the-world, and killed him.

Dick Benson released the nerve pressure at the Indian’s throat that should hold him unconscious for several hours but would mercifully not kill him. He looked around. He was in a shadow caused by something other than the trees. In a moment he saw that it was caused by a rock wall shutting off the sun. A rock ridge that was like, and yet unlike, the ridge they had seen when he set the plane down.

He was at the foot of the ridge on which the huge natural statue was set — but on the other side. The underground river had borne him clear under it.

Off a little distance, Benson could see the spiral of smoke marking a fire. That would be the camp of Borg and his men.

Benson stared at the unconscious Indian. He was one of the seedy modern descendants of the once lordly Aztecs. He wore the ragged remnants of pants he had gotten long ago from some village store, and an even more ragged jacket of cotton. He carried with him an ancient rifle.

Benson didn’t seem to think out his next move at all, so instantly did he set to work. Yet the plan was suddenly in his mind to the last detail.

The red-barked trees were plentiful nearby. He stripped yards of the shaggy bark from the trunks, soaked them in the water of the pool. Hot water would have been better, but he didn’t dare build a fire. And enough of the cold suffice. It softened the inner layer of bark to a sort of slimy skin.

Looking into the pool, Benson rubbed the softened bark on his white, still face and tanned body. He got the color fairly well, reddish-brown. Then he appropriated the Indian’s pants and jacket and the ancient gun.

A native of the poorest nomad sort, he started toward the fire of Borg’s camp. As he went, he had recourse to a trick that had saved him once in Tibet among dark-eyed people. He jabbed his eyes with his thumbnail till they were bleared and reddened and their pale flares were a little disguised.

Across the ridge, he could hear the spatter of machine-gun fire. It was puzzling, quite out of place here. Where would several machine guns come from? Brought with Borg in his plane? Benson didn’t think so. He knew most pieces of ordnance by ear; and he spotted these, not as sub-machine guns, but the full-grown army variety, six hundred or more shots to the minute.

He gave up the puzzle. Those guns were being turned against Smitty and Mac and Nellie and Chandler, of course. But there was nothing Benson could do about that just then.

The camp showed before him — a plane camouflaged as his own had been; a clearing with a fire in it, and three men. Two of the men were at a distance from it because of the heat. The third was sweltering and cursing as he made coffee.

One of the three was Borg. Another was the man with the reddish hair. The third, near the fire, was one of the ratlike brothers.

Borg was saying: “How they got outta that rat hole I bottled them in, I can’t figure out. One of these natives said he saw a tree fall down, and they came up from the roots. Baloney! Anyhow, they got out. But we’ll get ’em with the guns and gas.”

“We better!” snarled the man with the reddish hair. “Hey — visitors—”

Benson walked calmly and evenly across the little clearing and up to them. There was an Indian with them, vicious-looking, squatting on his hams near the fire and seeming impervious to the heat. Benson kept his gaze on the Indian. It was from him that the greatest danger lay.

Benson directed a stream of native dialect at Borg, gesturing with his hands as he did so. The squatting Indian stared hard and listened harder.

“What’s he tryin’ to say?” Borg snapped impatiently. “Who is he? What’s he want?”

As Benson had said, he had charted the territory all through here for the Mexican government. He had done it when just out of school. At the time, he had picked up some of the language, but it was a dialect in use farther south, in Yucatan. It seemed all right here, however.

The squatting Indian said:

“Him want job. From south five days. Saw fire and white men and came to see.”

“Tell him to beat it!” snapped Borg.

The Indian interpreted. Benson burst into even more volubility.

“Him say saw you blow up dirt. Bang! Blow up white man’s sky bird. Bang! Want food and an ax or maybe tell what him see.”

“Why, the coffee-colored stool pigeon!” flared the man with the reddish hair. “I’ll—”

His gun was in his hand. Borg caught his arm.

“Wait, Pete. Not so good to bump him off. We got four working for us, and they might get sore if we drill a brother Indian. Let him hang around if he wants, till we beat it. Then we’ll see.”

Pete put the gun up reluctantly. Borg said with an oily smile:

“Tell him okay. Make himself useful. Get some firewood first.”

The Indian relayed the message. Benson grunted, laid the ancient rifle down carefully, and collected dry wood. He brought it back, and squatted on his hams near the Indian. The native disdained speaking to him. Natives are no more apt to do a brother act with strangers than white men.

The afternoon deepened. A shaft of shadow from the great statute on the ridge began to lengthen into the jungle as, in the morning on the other side, it had shortened with the climbing sun.

Benson got up and moved a little way into the jungle. No one was paying any attention to him. He went off, in the shadow of the shaft.

He walked slowly, as the shaft advanced, with his pale, all-seeing eyes on the ground. He saw that there were no prints on the soft earth, and no broken twigs. None from the camp had investigated through here.

The shadow lengthened before him like a pointing finger. It touched a tangle of branches formed by half a dozen trees leaning inward on each other around a small sunken ring, as if space in the center had collapsed a little, letting the rimming trees sag together.

Benson glanced back. There was no one in view. He investigated the small sunken spot. There was a crude arc of metal in the center. He scraped around it, and found it was a ring of massive copper, oxidized greenish-black.

The ring was set in a stone slab, he saw, as he scraped a little more. Benson put his two hands in the ring and heaved.

Only an average-sized man, weighing little more than a hundred and sixty. But there was that mysterious explosive quality to his muscles.

The stone slab weighed at least four hundred pounds. But it came slowly, steadily up in Benson’s steel hands till it could be slid to one side.

Rough stairs were revealed. Benson went down them.

Every step convinced him that no one had been in here from the time the steps had been carved until now. The stone was rough from ancient chisels, and had not been worn smooth by many feet. And at the foot of the steps, lying almost in the center, was a rough circle that glittered dim yellow. He picked it up.

It was a carved, heavy plaque of solid gold.

With his stained face as expressionless as something carved from mahogany, Benson went on. The tunnel from the stairs was not long. It ended in a blank wall. But in the wall was another copper ring.

Benson pulled. There was a tremor. He leaped back.

The ring opened up the tunnel, all right; but in a way to trap an ordinary man. It was another of the ancient Aztec death traps. For a tug on it brought the whole wall down on whoever pulled — several tons of stone. Only one knowing the secret — or a man able to move like light itself with the first faint rock tremor — could escape death.

The fall of wall bared a cave or chamber beyond. But it was pitch dark. Daylight from the rock stairs carried barely to the mouth of the chamber and did not penetrate inside.

Benson had felt flint and steel in the tattered jacket he wore. He got them out, ripped a strip from the already ragged pants, and struck sparks. There was a smolder that leaped to a small, reluctant flame when he blew on it. He held up the flaming strip of cotton like a torch.

The average man would have gone stark mad with what the flame revealed. Benson merely stood a little more still than usual, and stared with pale and deadly eyes at stuff that had no meaning to him since the tragic loss of his wife and daughter, for whose sake alone he might have been excited about this. But it was a startling sight just the same.

The cave was some twenty feet wide and ten high, and went back farther than the light from the cloth strip could penetrate. The stuff that was piled in the cave from wall to wall and almost to the ceiling, with one narrow aisle in the middle, went back out of sight, too.

Gold! The stuff that had brought the Spaniards to Mexico. The stuff for which they had murdered the gold’s owners, the Aztecs.

To the end, the Spaniards had insisted that the huge quantities of gold they took back home in galleons was a fraction of the total. To the end, they had maintained that the great central hoard, the real wealth of the tribe, had been hidden from them and was untapped.

They had been right. Because here it was.

There were piles of gold slabs an inch thick by six to ten square. The legends of temples and priestly courtyards floored with solid gold had been correct. Here were the slabs, torn up and hidden to protect them from the invaders.

There were crude statues of gold several feet high and apparently solid. There were disks and plaques and bas-relief slabs of gold, ponderous in size. There were countless gold bells and rough ingots from which more of the plaques had been destined to be hammered. There were sheets of gold.

It was probably the greatest single mass of the yellow stuff that any human eyes had looked on at one time, barring a national mint. The yellow hoard of the Aztecs. Wealth uncountable.

“So you’re not quite the harmless coffee bean you made out to be!” a voice snapped behind Benson. “You knew where this was — which is more than we knew. Thanks for leading me to it, pal. Your bones can guard it—”

Benson had whirled, like light, strip of cloth still burning in his hands. At the entrance of the treasure room stood the man called Pete, gun leveled.

Pete never finished his sentence. From the “Indian’s” immobile face were glaring deadly, almost colorless eyes. In their menace they seemed actually to send out little sparks. There was only one pair of eyes on earth like that.

“You!” croaked the man. And fired.