The Yellow Hoard

CHAPTER VIII Death Strikes Again

The newspapers were full of it. With the death of Alec Knight, second to go on the recent expedition with Professor Gray, the lurid sheets were talking of a tomb curse. The expedition had rifled an ancient Aztec tomb. Therefore a curse would lay them all low.

Up in Benson’s headquarters, they weren’t paying much attention to the papers. Benson was examining that brick.

It was about eight inches long, five wide, and three thick. It was curiously heavy. Nellie Gray was watching his examination with veiled eyes.

Benson deliberately broke a corner off the brick. It crumbled easily. He weighed the dried clay fragment. He made rapid calculations on a sheet of paper. Then he looked at the girl.

“This brick weighs about one quarter more than it should for its size and density,” he said. “That is very curious.”

With a powerful wrench of his slim, steely fingers he broke the brick in two. Nellie gasped, and Smitty and Mac looked with intent eyes.

The inside of the brick did not seem as old as the outside. In fact, the dried clay looked quite fresh. And, protruding from the center of one of the halves was a thing that glittered with a dull yellow sheen.

Benson got it out with another twist of his hands.

Inside the clay brick had been placed an object that would have brought a yell of joy to any museum curator. It was a slightly curved plate of old gold, so pure that it could be scratched with your thumbnail. It was about seven inches long and three-and-a-half wide. It weighed nearly a pound. In the center was set an emerald.

“Look at that emerald!” breathed the giant Smitty. “Twenty carats, at least! And you don’t see many emeralds that big that aren’t flawed.”

“There’s no flaw in that one,” said Mac.

There wasn’t. Ancient, crudely cut, it was a perfect stone. The plate, obviously part of a belt composed of several other such plates, was worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars as it stood — and worth an unguessable amount as a museum piece.

“I begin to see,” Benson said, staring at Nellie Gray again. “An ancient gold belt. There are five links like this, in all. Each was baked in a clay brick that was then treated to make it look old and marked with hieroglyphs that had no meaning, but that made it look official. Professor Gray camouflaged the links in that manner to get them across the border, because the Mexican government would not allow such articles to leave the country if they knew of it. Is that right?”

Nellie Gray drew a deep breath. Her voice, when she replied, had a different note in it than had been there at any time before in her visit here.

“Yes,” she said, “that is right.”

“Care to tell me any more, now?”

“Yes,” she said, “I think I will. I think I’ve been silly to distrust you.”

“You’d have been stupid if you hadn’t.”

Nellie smiled at the dead, white face in which flamed the pale and burning eyes.

“As you know, my father went to Mexico the last time to investigate further a discovery he’d made trip before last and hadn’t had time or money to go into then. It was an entire lost city of the Aztecs, known, till then, to no one. The whole expedition dug around, and we found many new things. But dad didn’t seem very excited about any of the discoveries, and one night just before we returned home, I found out why.

“At the very first, he’d discovered what he sensed was a very important tomb. He led us to it late that night — well after midnight, when the rest of the camp was asleep.”

“Us?” echoed Benson.

“Alec Knight, Dr. Barker, and myself. He said if his discovery was half as important as he hoped, he didn’t want to trust a soul but us. He led us to the thing that had roused his curiosity. It was just a mound in the jungle. You couldn’t see a thing about it, till we got close. Then you could see a square corner of stone sticking out near the top of the tree-grown mound, at one side.

“We dug, and in less than an hour had the doorway of the tomb uncovered. It was a small, solid stone building on top of rows and rows of steps running up in a pyramid. We pried a rock slab away that must have weighed over a ton, and went in. It was in perfect condition. It was the first important tomb dad had ever found that hadn’t been looted.

“There was a sarcophagus almost like the Egyptian ones. In it was a mummy. There were dozens of little gold and copper ornaments. But the most important thing was a belt, around the middle of the mummy. A belt of five links, like the one you have there.

“Dad placed the man and the tomb from the picture writing on the walls. We had actually discovered the secret resting place of Montezuma the Second, killed when the Spaniards invaded Mexico and murdered the Aztec tribe in 1520. The belt was worth probably a hundred thousand dollars as gold and emeralds. But any big museum would have given a year’s appropriation for it. The Smithsonian would give half a million, if they could beg or steal it from someone to pay for it.

“We knew the Mexican government wouldn’t let it leave the country, so dad put the links in five bricks, as you guessed. We replaced the dirt over the tomb entrance in the night before we left, knowing that in a few months jungle growth would hide it again.”

Nellie’s eyes grew clouded, worried.

“We were replacing the dirt when we heard a branch crack, and looked around. From beyond the mound, for just an instant, we saw a man’s head silhouetted against the sky. We’d thought no one but us knew the secret of the mound. But someone from the camp had followed us. That person might have seen the whole business, including the belt as dad lifted it from the sarcophagus. We didn’t know. But as a precaution, dad kept two of the bricks, and gave one apiece to Dr. Barker, Alec Knight, and Olin Chandler, whom he knew almost as well as Knight and the doctor.”

Benson nodded.

“So the eavesdropper is now after the belt, getting it piece by piece, killing for it. He got two of the golden plates from your father, after murdering him. He got one from Chandler, without murder. He murdered Knight for the fourth — and didn’t find it. We can be sure of only one thing. There will be more deaths.”

Benson turned the massive gold plate over in slim, powerful fingers. On the curved back, which was still worn smooth from years of contact, centuries before, with the abdomen of King Montezuma the Second, were carved more ancient ideographs.

Benson stared at the hieroglyphs with icily flaring pale eyes.

“If only we had an idea who’d be next, so that we could prevent tragedy!” he said.

Though no mortal mind could have guessed it at that stage of the game, the next person was to be an old man in a storeroom at the Metropolitan Museum.

It was nearly midnight. Dr. Brunniger was reluctantly putting away the primitives he had been examining earlier in the evening. Time to go home. He reached into a locker for his hat and coat, and turned to put them on.

There was a man standing in the storeroom doorway, with his back to the west wing of one of the public display rooms. The man wore a black suit with dark-gray shirt and black hat. He was not bad-looking, very dark of hair and skin, with narrowed black eyes.

“Dr. Brunniger?”

“Why, yes,” said the old man. “But who are you, and how did you get in at this hour? The watchman—”

“I looked for the watchman, to get official permission to see you, but he wasn’t around. The door wasn’t locked, so I just came in.”

“That’s very odd,” said Brunniger. Then: “You wanted to see me? Why?”

“I’ve been told you’re the best-known authority in the country in Indian picture writing,” the dark man said. “So I came to you with some of the stuff to see if you could read it for me.”

“Queer,” said Brunniger. “Another person was in here several hours ago with the same request.”

“That is funny,” said the man. His smile grew set, stony, then was carefully made natural again. “But I wouldn’t know anything about that. Would you try the sign language for me?”

“Why, yes, I guess so,” said the old man. “Our mission is to serve the public. Let’s see it.”

The man took out a sheet of paper, covered with ideographs. But this was not like the paper Benson had had. This had the ideographs in reverse. They had been formed by inking the surface on which the hieroglyphs had originally been carved, and then pressing the paper to that surface. So the picture symbols were white on a dark background.

The old man put on glasses and took the paper to the nearest light. He peered at it, back to the man in black.

“Curious,” he said, after studying it for a time. “It seems to have some sort of topographical description in it. There is something about a great rock image on a hill or cliff. I think the rock image is a freak of nature, like a natural bridge, not carved by human hands. But I can’t be sure. These hieroglyphs have so many meanings that they can’t be accurately read except in totality of subject. And this message is incomplete.”

“Incomplete?” said the man in black.

“Oh, yes. There is obviously much more of it. This is just a fragment of a much longer message.”

The man’s smile grew more ingratiating.

“It’s swell of you to help me out,” he said. “Is there any more besides a cliff and a rock statue?”

“There’s a symbol here that has two meanings, again depending on the context of the rest of the message. One meaning is the setting sun. The other is gold.”

“It’s either a symbol for the setting sun — or gold?” said the man pleasantly.

“Yes. There’s no way to tell wh—”

The word was terminated before its conclusion. So was the kindly old man’s life.

The man in black stared, still smiling, at the body of the old expert, lying on the stone floor with red dabbling his gray hair. He wiped the barrel of his gun, which had clubbed Brunniger down, on the frock coat the old man wore, and then put the gun in its shoulder holster.

He went out, past the body of the watchman at the big front door, and strolled away from the huge building.

The watchman lay there, breathing harshly and unevenly as a man does from concussion of the brain.

Next morning, in a hospital bed, the watchman’s breathing was better. He was conscious now. He stared up into pale eyes like colorless fire, set in a dead, immobile face that itself had no color whatever.

“Can you remember at all what the man looked like?” Benson asked urgently. Over his shoulder, Lieutenant of Detectives Hogarth peered anxiously.

The watchman was too weak to talk normally. He whispered:

“He had black eyes, and his skin was very dark. That’s all I could see. He had his left hand over his face like a mask.”

“How did you come to open the door for him that late at night?”

“I heard a tapping at the door. I called out, and got an answer that it was Van Zyder, who is a director in the museum. I thought he had something important to tell Dr. Brunniger, who was still there. I opened the small door in the big metal one. This man shoved a gun in my stomach. He made me turn around after the door was closed behind us, and slugged me.”

“And all you saw was that he wore dark clothes and had black eyes and a dark skin?”

The wounded watchman thought a minute.

“Just one thing more,” he whispered. “The man had his hat back just a little from his forehead. Enough for me to see that his hair was black too, and grew down on his forehead in a little peak. Widow’s peak, they call it.”

Benson’s pale eyes burned on Hogarth’s face.

“Not enough,” Hogarth growled. “I don’t think we can place the guy with such a meager description. But we’ll try, of course.”