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Roy Glashan's Library
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Adventure, 20 May 1924, with "Mamu The Soothsayer"
A VAST mountain spur, knife-edged, towering jagged and precipitous and bare, full six thousand feet from the narrow valley—which itself was eleven thousand feet from sea level—and sloping back from there another eight or nine thousand feet to lose its stern outline under the everlasting snow masses of the Peruvian Cordillera.
Four thousand feet above the tortuous silver thread which wound along the valley bottom, and almost perpendicularly above it, a great jutting mass of dolomite, startling in its pink and pale-green marble-like discolorations against the prevailing dead gray of the limestone cliff.
Upon the very edge of the jutting rock, prone upon his belly, peering down with the unwinking keenness of the giant condors above him, a man. Brown-yellow and shrunken and old. Inconceivably old. Nobody knew how old; and he himself had forgotten.
He wore sandals of raw llama hide and baggy pants of hand-spun llama wool and a bowl-shaped hat with ear-laps of llama fell, and over all a flaming crimson poncho of the same material with a broad green border. As he sprawled motionless in the sun he must have looked to the condors like a great splotch of blood upon the painted rock.
Like a condor the ancient watcher craned his bald, withered head and looked slowly, calculatingly around. His rock was a vantage point of observation, sacred to him and his forefathers for more generations than he knew. The great spur thrust itself like a chisel blade into the landscape. Hard and unyielding, it had forced the converging stream of melting snows in ages past, to cut its path in a long detour, full five miles out of its way, to round the obstruction and then double back in a sharp angle, five miles again, till it met the softer strata of its original path.
At his back, just below the rock, was a narrow trail. Beyond it, the black jagged mouth of a great limestone cave. Opposite his face, sheer and barren, towered the other wall of the cañon, closer by half a mile than the stream far below which never saw the sun.
Away to his right and far down, perched dizzily on a subsidiary scarp, he could see the ancient Inca city of Cuzco, massive and square and clear-cut in the thin mountain air. Converging upon it he could see other silver threads winding along the mountain sides, now glittering in the sun, now tunneling underground, now expanding into clear, square-hewn pools. The conduits of the ancient capital—vast undertakings that excite the envy of modern engineers—brought water for the close-packed populace and for the terraced fields.
To his left, round on the other side of the chisel blade, and as high above him as the city was below, foamed a long white fall
like a horse's tail, about which there was an ancient prophecy which was very much to the fore at the present moment. At its foot the fall formed an ice-cold lake, which the engineer of the Inca, six reigns before, had known how to tap and lead through subterranean caves and artificial tunnels to form one of the sources of one of the city conduits. The overflow splashed and leaped down, forming pools and lesser lakes as the geological structure demanded, before plunging finally round the sharp corner of the chisel blade into the sunless chasm which the old man watched so intently.
Away and up beyond the white fall wound the narrow trail, sheer against the cañon wall, cut out and buttressed and stayed with blocks of hewn granite. Up and up it went, twisting, tunneling and finally disappearing among the high passes. The well-worn, well-preserved trail to a mine. One of the gold-mines of the Inca.
Where the mine was, the old man did not know—or care. Somewhere back in the mountains; that was enough. It was none of his business to know about such little matters as mere gold.
His business, as had been the business of his fathers and grandfathers before him, was divination. The reading of omens. The unraveling of prophecies. The advising of the Inca's destinies. And just now the old man was sore beset to understand the portentous things that were happening, and to decide the best for the Inca's people.
Huayna Capac the Inca was dead. Civil war had broken out between his sons, Huascar and Atahuallpa. And in the midst of it all a strange white people had come up out of the sea and had marched into the city of Caxamarca. The prophecy had said that when a white people came riding upon fiery beasts that had flowing manes and tails like the waterfall, they would be the gods of old come to restore peace and plenty to the desolated land.
But these white people had acted not at all like gods. They had fought with Huascar, who would have received them with open arms, and had thrown him into prison. They had inveigled Atahuallpa, the last of the Incas, into Caxamarca under promise of safe-conduct, and now held his sacred person captive.
And they wanted gold. Nothing but gold. Enormous piles of gold.
Would gods so worship a mere metal that could serve no useful purpose and was good only for ornament and nothing else? Mamu the Soothsayer, hereditary priest of the sun, was sore perplexed. And a decision was urgently imminent.
To his left, high among the passes, winding down the long trail, was coming a great llama train. It brought gold from the mine. Gold of the distinctive ruddy color, in ingots, carefully sewed in little saddle-bags, thirty-five pounds to each llama. How many llamas there were he could not see. Eighty or ninety, or perhaps a hundred. Part of the ransom of the last of the Incas.
To his right, hidden from the train by the chisel-blade spur, far down in the narrow cañon, men opposed one another. One of the opposing bodies was a mere handful. Not more than fifty at most. White men dressed in bright steel breast- and back-pieces, with steel plates overlapping on their thighs, and steel helmets on their heads. Some carried keen steel blades; some steel-headed pikes; and some, the terrible thunder-tubes that spat lightning and killed from afar. Mysterious invulnerable creatures. Almost as gods.
The other party numbered about two thousand. Brown men, who wore padded, cotton quilts and carried copper swords and bows and arrows. They were massed at the lower end of the cañon where it narrowed to a bottle-neck between the cliffs. They chattered nervously to one another, uncertain, without coherence or decision. The noise of their chattering came up to the watcher high above them, softened and sublimated and confused with the murmur of the stream.
Above them, across the wider floor of the cañon, stood the white men in two ranks, silent, stern and cold.
FROM his high perch Mamu the Soothsayer could see, midway between the two bodies, a little group, foreshortened to pigmy size, conferring upon a weighty question. From that distance, of course, no word could be understood. But Mamu the Soothsayer knew very well what they were talking about.
The leader of the brown men, a cacique by his feather cloak, was making an eloquent speech with graceful gestures of appeal, pointing down the valley to the city of Cuzco and shaking his head, begging obviously for an extension of time.
The leader of the white men, a short man with tremendously broad shoulders and a black beard, listened impatiently to the interpreter; listened with deference to one of his own men, a tall man who wore a brown robe with a hood pulled over his head; and then shook his own head with angry vehemence. The cacique pleaded again with a certain stubbornness. The man in the brown robe whispered ever in the white chief's ear.
Suddenly the latter's patience exploded. He barked an order. Immediately the lieutenant by his side cut down the unarmed cacique. The man in the brown robe lifted high the silver emblem of his god and shouted an exhortation to the grim ranks behind. And the next instant, with incredible coolness and confidence the fifty charged down upon the two thousand.
Mamu the Soothsayer groaned in body and in spirit. This same thing had happened before, and always with the same inevitable result. Always these appalling white men, a mere handful of them, with the ferocity of devils—yes, devils, not gods—had hurled themselves upon dense bodies of his own people, and always had they slaughtered them in heaps.
As had happened before, so it was repeated now. The invincible men in steel armor, close-serried, disciplined, rushed into the thick of the close-packed Indians and began to hack their way through the mass. The double ranks took the form of a wedge faced with steel, and slowly, surely, hewed their way through the heart of the mob. The bottle-neck gorge became a death-trap.
The quilted warriors of the Inca hurled themselves in masses with sublime valor upon those terrible white men. A few they dragged down by sheer weight of numbers. But only a few. It made no difference. Surely and indomitably the wedge won through to the outlet.
The ancient seer looked down on the massacre and wailed aloud for his people. To the left and up he looked and saw the llama train with its golden burden winding down that side of the spur, all unconscious of the slaughter being enacted in the dark gorge on the other side. A hundred llamas weighted with gold. And for what? For these terrible white gods—or devils, whichever they might be?
Down to the right he looked again in time to see the inevitable culmination of the conflict. The steel wedge had won clear to the neck of the gorge. The quilted warriors lay behind them. Some hundreds prone and still. Many more hundreds crawling or hobbling brokenly among the shambles. The rest huddled like sheep struck by a fearful thunder-storm. The way to Cuzco lay clear before the strangers.
But the implacable man in the brown robe held aloft his symbol and exhorted his people in the name of their god. The chief shouted an order—and the wedge turned on itself and began to hew its way through the huddled mass once again.
It was enough. The old soothsayer was convinced. There was no room for indecision any longer. This was not the peace and plenty of the prophecy that these strangers were bringing to his people. Devils they were in truth, not gods.
Gold was their god. Only gold. That feeble metal which his people used for ornament alone. Gold was the accursed cause of the coming of these white devils. As long as there was hope or prospect of squeezing gold out of the people of the Inca, so long would the devils scour the desolate land. The curse of the Supreme Lord Sun and of the lesser gods, Ilimane and Caxama and Iliammpu, upon the devils and upon their golden god! As the white devils must be destroyed, so must be destroyed forever the gold that they came to seek!
The ancient seer leaped to his feet and stretched his lean arms up to the sky in an ecstasy of denunciation. His withered body contorted itself into spasms of hate as he called down the curses of Almighty Sun upon the white devils who slew his people by the hundreds down in the sunless gorge.
The devils, for their part, knew nothing about it all; and, had they known, they would have laughed at the wild maniac who leaped like a little wizened monkey against the side of the cliff so far above them.
Yet at that very moment that feeble old man's momentous decision was making history which would affect all of that country for centuries to come.
"Accursed be the gold!" he proclaimed. "As long as gold is, so long will the devils harass the people. Never must it be given to them! Never must they find it! Never must they know the mines from which it came! Illappa, Illappa. It is the unchangeable law! Illappa. It is a prophecy!"
The llama train was rounding the last bend of the precipitous trail. In single file they came. The leaders, men with long whips, who herded the mine slaves, paused and looked with awe upon the aged priest who stood stiff now and entranced with the ecstasy of his emotion. Slowly the old man's eyes opened, as from an inward vision. He saw the long gold train waiting on the narrow path. Waiting for leave to pass behind his outpost rock round the edge of the spur and continue down the trail on the other side of Cuzco and thence to Caxamarca—in full view of the white devils below.
But Mamu the Soothsayer had decided. There was no faintest shadow of doubt in his mind now. A yellow and withered claw shot out from under his blood-red poncho and pointed at the accursed sacks of gold bound on the llamas' backs. His voice broke into a high-pitched shriek as he hurled his order:
"Destroyed must be the gold! Accursed is the gold! Accursed be he who touches it!"
The slaves looked at him, hesitating, wondering. Below them, a sheer drop of over a thousand feet, the last of the chain of lakes glittered silver in the sun before it overflowed and broke in a series of falls and plunged finally round the bend of the out-jutting spur into the dim gorge of the slaughter. The inexorable claw suddenly pointed down to it, and the priest shrieked:
"Accursed is it! Let it be lost! At once! Forever!"
The slaves hesitated still. Vast labor had gone into the gathering of the treasure; and this order was too sudden for their not over-keen wits.
But the hereditary priest of the Sun advanced upon them.
"The order of the Supreme Lord Sun!" he howled. "Let it be hidden from the white devils forever!"
Such a command from such a priest was all-powerful. A burly fellow, a slave of one of the Mansu tribes, began to understand that it meant obedience. What affair of his was it to reason why. Methodically he set his back against the cliff and slowly he planted his foot against the leading llama. Gaging his balance carefully, he gave a great shove.
The poor beast staggered, lurched and disappeared over the sheer edge. In the long silence the faint splash of it came up to them from the lake. The man stepped to the very brink and stood with toes overhanging, looking down the dizzy cliff with the coolness of the born mountaineer. Only silver ripples in three widening circles broke the surface. Nothing more. Weighted with thirty-five pounds of gold, the beast had sunk without hope, without a struggle.
As he looked, another brown wooly body hurtled down, growing appallingly smaller as it sped and seeming to poise itself for endless seconds above the surface before it struck. Then on the tense nerves broke the high fountain of spray, and presently the sound of the splash.
Another followed, and in quick, succession another. The reflection of the cloudless sun from the widening circles seemed to engulf each gold-bearer the instant that it struck the surface. The priest howled along the line, a blood-red portent on the trail, crazed with the fervor of sacrifice, wedging his frail body between cliff and beast, and pushing with all his feeble strength as he screamed the order of the Lord Sun to the slaves.
Their slow minds began to grasp the command. They saw the example and they followed it. Gold, after all, was nothing to them; while the command of the archpriest was a very imminent order. With dull uncomprehending obedience they set themselves against the rock wall and hurled one gold-bearer after another over the cliff.
Within five minutes of its inception the great sacrifice had been culminated—just five minutes before the gold-train, had it continued on its path, would have rounded the sharp bend of the trail and come into full view of the white men below.
Mamu the Soothsayer stood panting, overcome as much by his emotions as by his exertions, glaring wild-eyed with a holy joy at his accomplishment. A faint, confused sound of wailing blended with the far murmur of the stream and filtered up round the angle of the spur from the horrid gorge below. Mamu crawled once more on to his outpost rock and looked down on the scene of the slaughter.
The terrible white men had gone, marched on down the defile. Only his own people remained. A pitiful few, who wailed over the heaps of their dead. The old man lifted his voice and wailed with them for the soul of his country about to die. He lifted his thin arms and called down his final curse for all time upon the white strangers from the sea who were devils, not gods.
Then he wrapped his blood-red poncho closely round his aged frame and slowly stepped off the painted rock, and moved across the trail and into the great cave beyond the trail. The mystic labyrinth in the mountain-side where only priests might enter and in whose vast depths other devils dwelt. Devils who shrieked and moaned in the moonless nights and whose voices could be heard by startled mine slaves on the trail.
There, in a certain chamber, Mamu the Soothsayer took from a stone coffer bundles of brightly dyed woolen strings tied in a tangle of queer knots, the quipus of the Inca. And he proceeded with ceremony to write in knots the history that he had made.
HE same jutting mass of dolomite; A little worn, a little more corroded by the fierce winds and lashing rains that had smashed and howled up and down the gorge during the long years. But still a prominent outpost, pink and pale green against the dizzy cliff.
The trail that wound to the mine was gone. A disused goat-path, a crumbling ledge, a bit of buttress and a caved-in tunnel showed where once had been a road leading nobody knew where.
The cave behind the rock remained, damp and vast and barren, an object of awe to Indians who had occasion to follow their strayed llamas that far.
The same sun slanted cold against the north face of the painted rock. The same condors—apparently—wheeled their endless circles with endless monotony high in the thin blue ether and looked with minute inspection upon apparently the same old man, prone upon his belly, who in turn looked down with the same keen caution upon white men in the valley.
The old man wore llama-hide sandals and llama-wool pants and hat and poncho. But the pants were frayed and the hat was shapelessly sodden and the poncho was a faded crimson. Almost might they have been the same. But the imported German anilins did not stand the weather as well as the vegetable dyes of the olden time, and the old man was not the all-powerful priest of an imperially established sun worship.
To Mamu the Soothsayer—enlightened people called him a witch-doctor in these days—there remained but the shadow of the ancient grandeur and the almost forgotten relics of the lore of Mamu, his great, great, to the nth degree removed grandfather.
But he looked with the same beady-eyed, angry suspicion down to the left of his outpost upon the white men who stalked about the borders of the silver-surfaced lake. They wore, instead of steel, Stetson hats and khaki shirts and cord breeches and high-laced boots; and they carried, instead of swords, curious shiny instruments of brass and little telescopes upon tripods through which they scrutinized the lake-level and the cliffs and the overflow; and they made notes in little books and talked calculatingly together in a little group.
There were but three of them invading the barren solitude of the valley this time, and no huddled mass of Indians opposed them. A couple of sullen and apathetic peons held the white men's mules a little lower down. That was all.
Like a condor the ancient watcher craned his bald and withered neck and looked down to his right. The gloomy gorge was empty. The valley beyond was empty. Not a hut nor a sign of habitation. Down and away at the head of the far valley of Villamcayu a new city of Cuzco raised the roofs of its blatant "palace of justice" and its cathedral and its theological seminary. Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Inca on the mountain-scarp called Sachsahuaman, was empty. The massive walls of it remained, roofless and overgrown, and as enduring as Stonehenge or the Wall of China—and as deserted. The people of the Inca had gone with the roofs and the roads and the conduits. The blight of the white devils who had come out of the sea seeking gold had fallen upon them and they were not. Of all that mighty race there remained but a few dull-eyed apathetic Quechua Indians, reduced to a condition of peonage, who knew nothing of language or customs or history of the greatness that had been. Not a single thing at all.
And Mamu, who knew—well, nobody knew just how much the old witchdoctor knew—if anything at all.
The eyes of Mamu glittered as coldly-yellow as a condor's as he sprawled and watched, silent and motionless upon his rock, a splotch of very old rain-washed blood.
At last words came to his lips. Muttered fragments. Forgotten memories out of the subconscious, rather than deliberate speech:
"As long as gold is, so long will the devils harass the people. Accursed is it. To be hidden from them for ever."
Muttering and mumbling, he edged himself backward off the outpost rock and scuttled across the crumbling path, a faded ragged figure of a Nibelung or an old man of the hills disappearing into the dark gulf of his cave.
THE white men, for their part, knew nothing about it at all. And, had they known, they would have laughed with superior modern wisdom at the quaint old witch-doctor who grumbled forgotten omens, flattened like an ancient lizard against the cliff-side so far above them.
Yet that feeble old man had a history behind him which established his ancestor's curse as a prophecy which had held good throughout the ages. For four hundred years since the coming of those first adventurers out of the sea had others of their color scratched the bare surface of a lost history to look for hidden gold, and had scratched the barren surface of the ground to look for mines of fabulous richness. And they had found next to nothing. An occasional feeble little hoard here and a few lean mines there—and the recent haul of a clear million out of a lake that was drained in Colombia, which had reawakened the enthusiasm of search. But the fabled wealth of the Incas was as lost as was their history.
And now there came these white men with the relics of a rumor and with scientific equipment to wrest from its hiding what the last of the priests of the last of the Incas had hidden beneath the curse of the Supreme Lord Sun.
There were three of them. One, who wore a tawdry imitation of the costume of the other two, was displaying the prospect to them. He was lean and swarthy. His high, narrow eyes and heavy lips showed the unmistakable blending of Indian slave with negro slave, though his own proud claim was of an ancient Spanish ancestry. He waved his arm over the landscape with a proprietary gesture.
"This, señores, is the place," he said. "Yonder, high up on the cliff to the left, runs the ancient path. See, the señores may still see a trace of it. Below the path then, in the lake must lie the gold which the writing of my illustrious ancestor tells of. Remains only for the young señor—" he bowed grandly toward him—"to tell us out of his knowledge whether it may be possible to come at it."
The young señor was typical of thousands of his age. Athletic, clear-complexioned, with the alert eyes and slightly overconfident carriage of his kind. He had but recently earned the right to inscribe himself, James W. Temple, C.E.; and he was full of vim and enthusiasm and ignorance about everything except C. E.
He had been examining the landscape with keen interest and peering through the little telescopes, and he now made known his findings.
"This thing shouldn't be difficult at all," he announced with the confidence of youth. "The inflow from above isn't much, so we can easily side-track that, starting from that ledge there about a hundred feet up. Look! The natural formation lends itself to putting in a few sections of flume and digging a bit of channel and so bringing the whole flow out to the side here."
The third man looked wise and grunted, "Uh-huh," with dubious interest.
"Well, how about getting all this stuff out?"
The engineer was delighted to explain: "Well, you see, there's quite a lip to this overflow here. We can blast away some eighteen or twenty feet of that and get rid of that much depth with a whoosh. After that—mm-mm—"
He ran his fingers through his mud-blond hair and cogitated with his head on one side, eying the drop of the valley as far as he could follow it before it turned the corner of the spur and plunged into the gorge.
"I had hoped," he continued, "to be able to tunnel, like those fellows did up in Colombia; but there isn't much drop, and we'd have to cut through solid rock for perhaps a couple of miles, depending upon how deep this durn lake. is. No, we'll have to siphon."
The other two emitted noises indicative of the need for elucidation.
"How siphon?" The C. E. repeated their inquiry. "You know the principle of a siphon, don't you? Well, we do the same thing on a big scale. Lay a pipe line, one end in the lake, the other end as far down the valley as we have to go to get lower than the lake end. Fill 'er up with water once with a small pump, and then sit by and watch atmospheric pressure do the rest."
"Hmh, sounds easy," said the third man. "How much will that cost?"
ANTONIO LEPANTO he was, known in New York to a wide circle of friends as "Tony." Big and stoutish and prosperous looking, with the indefinable air of metropolitan bright-lights about him. Tony had amassed a small fortune in the unusually short period of two years through having perfected a system for connecting the three-mile limit with the houses of his friends. When one of the cogs in his system slipped a little he had been wise enough to take a rapid and sudden holiday abroad. In Lima his loud and lordly manner of spending money had attracted the attention of Diego Miguel de-la-Vieja y Hernando-de-Soto, who was looking for just such an American millionaire who might be persuaded to gamble on a sporting proposition.
Diego's judgment was sound. Tony, having gambled before and having won so easily by taking long chances, and being temporarily withheld from reaping his customary harvest, was easily inflamed by the fantastic allure of the story that the descendant of the de-Soto unfolded to him. He knew—everybody knew—of the stories of vast treasures hidden by the Incas. All Lima talked about that gorgeous haul in the Colombian lake.
"By golly," he reasoned, "looks like something worth taking a chance on."
Hence the engagement under frightful vows of secrecy of young Templar, who had just come out with his diploma and a confident hope of landing something in this good mining country where competition was not so fierce.
Templar ruffled his hair again over the cost problem and did marvels of mental calculation with the apparent facility of all C.E's. He screwed up his face and squinted into the distance, visualizing the figures as he delivered sum, multiple and quotient.
"Of course, this is guessing a good bit before I get the canvas boat set up and go out and plumb the lake to get depth and content and all that. But s'pose we use a six-inch pipe, and s'pose I can run 'er far enough down the gorge to get a decent suction; we'd oughta get about five hundred gallons per minute. Small Knowles pump to start the suction; save gas after that; 's a big item. Timber for shoring; tools, labor, dynamite and all that. Should get 'er empty in about two months. Do the whole thing on about ten thousand dollars."
He snapped forth the last and looked at the financier for the expected outcry. But Tony Lepanto's best boast was that he was a "good sport." He smiled an easy satisfaction.
"Guess I can stand that. But now, s'pose you can get the water all out, what then?"
"Well, gee!" said the C. E. "I don't know. Depends on bottom. But in this kind of formation there shouldn't be much sludge; and I don't see any signs of a landslide or a cave-in of the cliff or anything to cover up the stuff to any extent. So, if Mr. Diego's dope is all O.K., you ought almost to be able to walk in and pick up the loot. May have to dig a little muck; but there don't seem to be anything difficult about the problem from any angle that I can see. Looks easy."
And so it was—without due consideration of the unknown factor of Mamu the Soothsayer.
"The whole thing hangs on Mr. Diego's dope," continued Templar. "If the stuff's there, I can get it out, and that's flat."
"Well, I ain't no archaeologist," said Tony. "But the dago's dope sounds like a good gamble to me."
"But assuredly, señor" Diego was eager to insist, "it is as I have said. The writings of my illustrious ancestor have come down to me from my mother's side. The Hidalgo de-Soto was personally employed in the glorious battle which took place in this ravine. He was present with incredible valor at the taking of the enemy stronghold of Cuzco; and he notes, as the señor has seen with his own eyes, the tale—confessed by a prisoner who hoped thereby to save himself from the ministrations of his captors—about the casting away, by the orders of a priest, of the gold in order that it might not come into the hands of the conquerors."
"Aw shucks, I can't read that funny stuff," said Tony.
"But señor!"
The illustrious descendant of Spanish hidalgos held out two very black hands in desperate argument.
"The señor has had the documents verified in the Collegio Municipal. What more can be required?"
The señor looked at Templar for a further possible objection.
"Gee, I don't know," said the C. E., and pushed his hat back the easier to ruffle his hair. "I'm no judge of old parchments. All I can say is, if the stuff's there I can get it out on about ten thousand bucks expenditure."
"Well."
The financier lighted a long cheroot and sucked at it a while with short vigorous puffs. Then:
"Guess it looks like a good gamble to me all right. I'll shoot the works. Le's go on down to the saddle-bags and take a shot off the hip to success. I loaded in some stuff in Mollendo that's no bootleg wash. So we'll call it a day and get back to town; and tomorrow we can get right down to the matter of equipment."
But the C.E. was still young enough to be enthusiastic about his work. He guessed that he'd better stick around. There'd be measurements to be made and the canvas boat to be set up and the lake to be plumbed and various other preparations for the saving of time and consequent speeding up of the happy day when they should walk into the dry bottom and sort golden ingots out of the ooze.
"I'll be all right in the pup-tent till we can pitch regular camp. 'Tisn't the rainy season," he argued. "You can send me out some grub; and there isn't anything about the equipment that isn't mining-gear of the commonest sort. Lima ought to be full of that kind of stuff. I'll make out a list right here which you can telegraph down from Cuzco to D.C. Williams, and it'll be up on the next train—which'll be next week on this benighted line," he added with a grin.
MR. TONY LEPANTO was not averse to save time without inconvenience to himself. But he had an emendation to his engineer's plan. His voice assumed a tone of portentous wisdom.
"All right, I'll wire your list from Cuzco. But if you want quick delivery and according to your specifications, I'm going to send your order to Schneider in the Calle Commercio. There's too many of our own houses have a way of thinking 'at any-thing's good enough for shipment into the backwoods if you can't go an' pick it out yourself—Now don't get all wrought up, young feller. This isn't meant for a slam—An' I don't know as I altogether blame 'em. But I'm a business man, an' I've made money by keeping my eyes skinned. I've been looking around while I've been in this Lima burg an' I've learnt that there's a heap of American firms seem to think anything's good enough for the South American trade. But these Heinies are out to build up business. Ask any importer in Lima."
Templar breathed heavily as if he had been personally insulted and did not know what to do about it. Finally he stated his creed—
"I don't believe an American firm would do that sort of thing."
Mr. Tony Lepanto had long ago lost the faculty of recognizing that obscure ideal known as business integrity. He laughed in huge delight at the youngster's wide-eyed disillusionment, and slapped him on the back with boisterous cheer.
"Ha, ha, cheer up, young feller," he told him out of the wisdom of his experience. "You'll learn soon enough that you've got to watch out for your own end every time 'cause nobody else is going to do it for you. What I'm telling you is the right dope. Only hope the dago's dope about the boodle is as good. You stick out here if you like and get busy on the job, and I'll make it right with you. I'll give you a cut-in on the jack when we get it.
"But there's no use in me sticking around in this forsaken hole in the ground waiting for machinery to arrive, and freezing solid in the mean while. So I'll go on in with your list and shoot it through; and I'll put up in the bug-roost they call a hotel. They got some honest hooch there anyway, an' I can maybe jazz some of these gloomy spicks up to a little gaiety. You come on in as soon as you get a bellyfull here."
SO THE two rode into the city of New Cuzco, and the white man proceeded to while away the week by educating the native mind with his delineation of right-up-to-the-minute modern American gaiety—which somehow did not recommend itself as very dignified to the Latin-American idea.
However, even the railway which runs from Lima to Cuzco; and thence to Puno on Lake Titicaca, to connect by boat with Bolivia, does finally arrive. Templar rode in from camp with an inexorable note-book in which to write down on the spot a list of misfit parts and shoddy goods. He was surprised to find everything exactly according to invoice. Mr. Tony Lepanto grinned at him with moist-eyed amiability, settled himself with extreme deliberation on a crate and said:
"I told you so."
Then he proceeded to give an aimlessly rambling lecture on the benefits of keeping one's eyes skinned in business. It was evident that the effect of jazzful gaiety was difficult to shake off.
And then came along an incident which shook it from him with a sudden jar. He saw the freight-bill. For a full minute he studied it, and added and re-added the column while his face changed from a pale-olive tint to a dull-red, and the pale watery eyes rolled with a growing indignation. Then he exploded. His bull-neck swelled and his voice bellowed so that the world might hear.
He was an American citizen, he proclaimed to all and sundry, and he refused to be swindled by any one-horse, jim-crow, two-foot-gage railroad in any yellow-belly country on earth.
He wasn't the kind of person that anybody could put it across on, and it would take white men anyway and not a set of monkeys—and much more to the same effect.
The railroad officials heard him with bored tolerance. They had met that kind of gringo before, many of them, and they knew that their customs were different from South American customs. They explained patiently that the coal which had hauled this freight some four hundred miles and some eleven thousand feet up into the mountains had come from the sen or's own country of Pennsylvania. But the gringo insisted in loud English that he didn't give a hoot where it came from; he refused to be robbed by a gang of gosh-blanked spiggoties; and he would go and see his consul about it, he would.
Templar felt sick for his country and hoped desperately that the officials might not understand that brand of English. The illustrious descendant of the conquistadores grinned at him with a maddening familiarity. He saw no reason why he, mestizo though he was, was not quite as good as the Americano.
"Amigo," he said with intimate confidence. "Better get your compadre away before he gives offence. I will follow with the goods. I have arranged with a fletero who contracts to carry the things out by mule-pack; and I will bring peons for labor."
It took Templar half an hour of anguished argument. But he succeeded eventually in persuading his compatriot to leave the matter in the hands of a very much harassed consular agent and to ride out with him to the scene of operations. As he rode he made shift to restore good humor by telling of the gratifying physical conditions which his investigation had revealed.
He had paddled all over the lake, he said, and had found an average depth of about seventy feet. There were apparently some deep pockets towards the center; but that would not interfere with them in any way; for the depth at the base of the cliff where the treasure was was only sixty feet. Bottom seemed to be a bit softer than he had hoped, which, coupled with the extreme chill of it, precluded any hope of diving. So they would just go ahead with the original plan of siphoning; and his estimate of the cubic content of the lake was just about what he had guessed. So there was going to be no difficulty at all about anything; and within two months they would surely be collecting their ingots.
All this was eminently satisfactory. Yet the employer, in his existing mood, found room to grumble at the monotonous prospect of spending two months in such an isolated frozen camp. However, he had ordered a few cases of the real stuff to be sent in with the other equipment and he guessed they would be able to stick it out somehow. His temper was not improved by finding that the camp gear did not arrive that night, and he was forced to sleep in a pup-tent with insufficient covering for that frozen altitude.
It was not till the next morning that the cavalcade straggled in. Up the gorge it came with the exasperating dilatoriness of mules, left very much to their own devices, in whom persists the unquenchable hope that they may be able to find something eatable by nozing under the sunny side of boulders three thousand feet above vegetation level. But it all arrived at last; the pipe, slung tandem between a mule at each end, and the rest miraculously balanced with the awful muddle of raw-hide rope that only an Andean mule-packer can contrive.
With the mules plodded in a dozen peons under the illustrious Diego. They were Aymaras, as dull and drooping and depressed as the mules; beasts of burden, with very little more to live for than their four-footed companions; creatures born to labor that they might get something to fill their bellies and the minimum of something to cover their bodies from the biting cold.
Diego had hired them as their padron, by which arrangement he made a commission as a side-line to treasure-hunting, of ten per cent, on their wages. He was, in fact, a labor contractor, and he treated his labor with quite as much consideration as the fletero did his mules.
Only, the far-away drop of the blood of the conquistadores rendered him much more efficient than the latter. Without waste of time, now that he was on the spot at last, he cuffed two of the men into understanding that their job was to scout roots and sparse twigs twenty miles down the valley where things began to grow and to keep the camp supplied with firewood for the cook who would be along presently. He kicked others as indiscriminately as he did the mules and showed them how to set up tents. He swore much better than the fletero and got a lot more accomplished. He was a good man, was Diego of the illustrious descent.
Templar contrived to add to the confusion by long arguments with Diego to the effect that that was not the way to get the best results out of labor. In America, he explained, workmen were not kicked—much. Diego smiled and shrugged and waved his hands with deprecatory insistence. Would a mule go, he demanded, if it were not beaten? Would a peon work? And in the meanwhile both mules and peons stood about with drooping heads and enjoyed the respite. Yet at the end of a full day the gear was all finally unloaded and disposed of and the. mules disentangled from the mess and sent home. A strenuous day.
TEMPLAR rose early the next morning, all eager to get to work. He enjoyed the idea of a dramatic flourish for an opening. So he decided to blast away the lip of the lake-shore as a beginning and encourage everybody by the satisfactory diminution of the water by some eighteen feet at one fell swoop. He set his force to drilling, at the points he marked out for them, to plant his charges.
And high above, Mamu the Soothsayer lay flat on his rock and watched with uneasy suspicion. He did not know just what the white men were proposing to do. Something that must be circumvented, he knew. That was all. But how? He was a lone, feeble old man with only a half-forgotten legend of a sacred trust behind him. How was he to encounter these all-powerful, all-wise white men who came up out of the sea? He did not know. He could only watch and wait.
All day he watched men drill holes in the rock. He did not understand what was the purpose of the maneuver, lie tried to size up those who were obviously the leaders. The padron, he understood. Him he hated as a renegade; half-Indian, but a traitor to that half. But there was something more. Old Mamu the witch-doctor,
with his lore of the forgotten centuries, was very close to vague impressions that came to him out of nowhere. He felt instinctively that this was his arch-enemy.
The lusty young man with the tousled hair and the open face, he felt afraid of. This was the one with whom he would have to match his wits. The other, the big man who sat moodily upon a rock and smoked cigars incessantly, he knew to be the moving force, the boss. Obviously, since he did not work.
Late in the day the holes appeared to be completed to the young man's satisfaction. The old man saw him place little packages into each with personal care and then fill the holes up with earth and tamp it in. He knew many spells which entailed the burying of charms in secret by night. But what wizardry was this that could be done in the full view of broad daylight?
The workmen were suddenly hustled off to safety down the valley, and all stood motionless in a group by the tents while the witchcraft worked. Little wisps of smoke, just discernible from that height, ran along the ground and disappeared into the holes.
Then with awful suddenness the earth rent itself asunder and all hell spouted up out of the gash. Mamu felt a hot blast of air hurtle past his face and suck at his breath. Like an aged turtle he shrunk his head within his poncho and clutched with instinctive fingers and toes at the smooth surface of his perch. Through his dizziness he heard the falling of great rocks and the roar of waters.
When he was able to look again he saw a turgid stream filling half the ravine, almost up to the level of the tents, and his sacred lake dwindling before his eyes.
For fifteen awful minutes he watched, feeling his own blood ebb with the lake, having no knowledge of how long this devastating phenomenon might continue. He could picture the secret bottoms, which must never be seen by white men, being laid bare, and he called with desperation on the setting sun which looked coldly aslant on the scene to protect its ancient secret.
And the sun heard him; for presently the rush of waters began to slow down and presently it stopped. But twenty feet of the sheer cliff glistened slimy and wet below the encrusted ring that marked the level that used to be.
Mamu the Soothsayer leaped to his feet and stood on the very edge of his rock and lifted his withered arms to the sun in supplication.
"Illappa!" he wailed. "Illappa, Illappa!" His thin voice echoed up the sides of the ravine.
From far below the white men looked up and saw the fantastic figure poised against the cliff, his faded-crimson poncho fluttering like a danger flag in the chill wind that whistled straight down the gorge from the snow peaks.
"Say there," Tony wanted to know, "what's the queer old duck doing up there?"
"That, señor," said Diego, shrugging and spreading his hands with a sour look, "that is without doubt one of the old witchdoctors of the Indians. The ignorant peons go to them for charms and magic and medicine and things. We of course, señor, know that they are silly fools. But if one does not give them money they cause trouble among the peons. Carramba, better that we shoot him now. A cartridge of Weenchester is cheaper than a bribe."
Templar and Tony looked at one another, wondering whether the illustrious one was in earnest. But Mamu solved the question by disappearing from his aerie. At that height and angle the cliff face looked perfectly flat, and it seemed that he had stepped like a goblin right into it.
A very successful day! With such an auspicious opening the morrow was to inaugurate the beginning of the flume which was to side-track »the in-flow. Maybe a week's work; maybe a little more; and then the pipe could be laid for the siphon.
TEMPLAR awoke, therefore, very early, full of enthusiasm and energy, and shouted from within his tent for the cook to hurry up with the coffee.
"Si, señor," came a sulky voice from the cook. "Immediatamente, señor. Pero se han ido los muchachos excomulgados. No tengo lena mas." Which meant that the two unnameable cook's-helpers had beat it and he had no firewood.
Templar grumbled to himself that he could wait for coffee if it came to a pinch; and he whistled not very harmoniously the refrain of a popular song as he dressed, visualizing the while just how he was going to proceed with the work, the coffee already forgotten.
He stepped out into the freezing morning and bawled for Diego to muster the crew. My gosh, time was flying; the treasure was waiting, and nothing was being done.
The tarpaulin stretched against the cliff-face, which was all the shelter accorded to peons, remained inert. No crew emerged. No Diego.
Tony Lepanto struck a night-capped head out of his tent-flap and cursed the cold and inquired what the bawling was about. Templar told him, and he dressed with marvelous suddenness—it was clear that he had not washed—and came out to help him bawl.
He was very suspicious about everything and very much annoyed.
"'T's the worst of these spies," he growled. "Y' can't rely on 'em. Condemn that dago; it's his job to get the men out. I'll have to fire him if he can't pep 'em up some."
"Yeah, I don't cotton much to him myself," Templar agreed. "And gee whiz, I don't like his methods. One of the courses at the col. was on the handling of labor; and goshalmighty, I'm not surprised that these poor — don't show any interest in their job. We ought to be able to get another foreman. But since the documents are his, I suppose he's got to stick."
Tony Lepanto looked out of the corners of his eyes to try to understand whether so much innocence could be genuine. To his way of thinking, the documents had ceased to have any value as soon as the lake had been identified. But Templar with corrugated brow was inspecting the scene of yesterday's blast and kicking moodily at the loose stones. There was no guile in that face. Just plain American—of a type that Mr. Tony Lepanto had not mixed with very much. He said nothing, and lighted a cigar.
Just then Diego himself came round the corner of the spur out of the ravine and stamped up to where they stood.
"Señores," he reported, "the peons have all escaped during the night. Not a one has stayed. Not a sign is left. That the Guadeloupe may curse their pig ancestors!"
"Escaped? But, good gosh, why? What was wrong?"
Diego threw out his hands.
"How should I know, señor? This is the way with peons. Lazy they are from the day of their misbegetting. To make them work one must beat them."
He sat familiarly on the rock by the side of the gringo, his partner, and cursed for a full minute in picturesque Spanish. The gringo kept pace in crude English.
"——," the illustrious one swore, and sprang to his feet. "I ride to Cuzco to bring other peons—and a whip of bull-hide. This lost day shall be made up; and, rely on me, señores, these ones shall not escape. I pitch tent below them in the narrow; and upwards they cannot go. Carramba! The señor has perhaps a cigarro?"
So the day was spent in aimless and fretful waiting. It was not so bad for Templar; for he could find employment in planning the simple details of his flume. But the financier of the project chafed. He was peevish at the cold and inaction. He walked aimlessly, huddled in his plutocratic fur coat, and swore. He smoked incessant cigars, and swore. He humped himself down upon convenient boulders and chewed upon his cigar-ends the while his eyes roved restlessly, frowning from under bushy brows, and swore. And with each change of action he took a nip from a heavy silver flask "to keep out the cold."
HIS roving eye caught sight of the waterfall far up the valley, and he regarded it with scowling disfavor for a while. Then he called Templar:
"Say, young feller. I dunno whether you've noticed it; but I like to keep my eyes skinned when I'm in on any business deal; so I'm asking you. Where's all that water go? There's a heap more coming down up there than flows in here?"
Templar had not given him credit for so much observation. He had been wondering about that himself; and he hazarded his theory:
"Just where it goes, I can't say, Mr. Lepanto. Probably into some fissure."
"A fissure? What all's a fissure?"
"Oh, well." The C.E. thought a while how to serve his knowledge for popular consumption. "All this is a limestone formation, you see; and in limestones there are always patches and veins and streaks of sodium salts and magnesium salts and sulphates and such stuff that is soluble in water. In the course of ages seepages through the surface have gradually melted these away and left underground channels, fissures, running sometimes for miles. There's a well-known instance back in Nevada of a regular underground river, the Armagoso. Limestone caves are formed that way mostly. Well, somewhere up there the flow from that fall has met a fissure and has gone careering into the bowels of the earth to break out somewhere or other. But it don't come over the edge to us, so we should worry."
"Hm. 'S it safe?" grunted the popular consumer.
"Oh, sure. You see, there's no sign of the overflow from this lake ever having been any more than it is now. At least, not for a very long time. No, I take that first statement back. The overflow used to be considerable. You see, these stones way out here are water worn. I imagine that the water from the fall used to come over here; and then it found its fissure and got side-tracked."
"Hm!"
The financier grunted again, took another drink, and retired under his fur collar.
With evening came the new peons and a raging Diego. He could hardly contain himself. He threw himself off his mule and stormed up to the white men.
"Carramba, señores, what think you?" he fumed. "That accursed witch-doctor! I kill him, amigos, with this hand! Canastos! Look you now. I found one of those who had run away. Him I beat till he confessed. And why? Guess, señores! Evil spirits lived here, he said. Devils howled at them in the night. It was a warning of death; so they fled. Do me evil, if it was not that wizard with his tricks. Always is it so. Blame me that I did not shoot him the same moment that I saw."
There was a silence, broken only by the guttural grumblings of Diego, till Tony Lepanto expelled a cloud from his lips.
"Well, if that ain't a hot one! What d'yuh know about that?"
"You know, I thought I heard noises during the night," said Templar. "High up they sounded. I figured they were birds; night-jars or something. I was going to ask about it—I'll be durned. I suppose the old coot toots a horn or something and scares these Indians stiff."
" " Diego swore. "Horns or birds or devils, these ones shall not so easily escape me. Nor that witch-doctor! Carramba, but it was my illustrious ancestor who knew how to deal with these people. As I, Diego de-la-Soto, know too. Señores, the men are here. The treasure awaits. To work!"
So Templar directed the building of his flume while Diego made provisions for pitching his tent at the head of the ravine where it narrowed down to a few yards. The peons' tarp shelter would thus be guarded by the white men's camp above, in which direction escape would have been arduous anyhow; and by his own tent below, in which direction he felt viciously sure that escape would be not at all. To all intents and purposes it might have been convict labor.
"Gee whiz!" Templar grinned dubiously. "Looks kinda like slave-driving, don't it?"
"Come, señor?" Diego expostulated with his ready spread hands. "Slaves? But by no means. Are they not paid? Carramba, I had to promise them twice the usual before I could get them out here. Though—" he shrugged—"that was only a trick to pay for the trick of the witch-doctor. But—" he raised his voice to drown out Templar, who looked as if he were about to say something—"we are honest men, the señores Americanos and I of the blood of de-Soto. We pay them an honest wage. Believe me, señores, there are others, people of no family, who make promise and pay not at all. Verdad; it is true."
Templar shrugged in turn and let the still small voice remain still. He was no evangelist. Just an ordinary young American from an engineering college. He couldn't hope to alter the system of a country. He was there to do a job of engineering.
So he focussed his attention on the job in hand with all the strenuous energy that belonged to his youth. The flume grew; not so fast as he thought he could have done it with willing labor. But it progressed. A bit of channel, a little shoring up, a stretch of board aqueduct. Taking advantage of the natural formation wherever it could, it crept along from day to day.
AND from day to day the old soothsayer watched from his high aerie, flattened out like a lizard in the sun. This new move was something that he could understand well enough. His people from olden time had known all about the making of conduits for water. The only thing that mystified him was why the thing did not connect with the stream. There was a wall of rock at the channel head.
He puzzled over it, a growing fear gnawing at his heart as the work progressed; and he racked his brain for a plan to hamper or stop the sacrilege. It was a desperate problem for a lone and feeble old man. He was a very shrewd old wizard. He knew his Indians from every angle and understood how to bend them to unquestioning obedience. But here he was pitted against a stranger folk who did not respond to his wizardries and who had terrible magics of their own. Enough to frighten away any ordinary ipage or medicine-man. But he was Mamu, hereditary descendant of Mamu who had made the golden sacrifice. This was an old standing Feud to the death.
By day he watched and racked his brains. By night his devils howled high in the mountain crags and their eldritch shrieks echoed up and down the ravine. The peons rose in a body on the first night and crept with the silence of ghosts past their overseer's tent, making for the open valley. Not a sound came from their taskmaster. His tent remained silent and dimly outlined against the rock. Once round the bend of the ravine, they would be free to run like frightened goblins down the gorge and out to freedom. In a body they reached the corner. There was a little scuffing as they slipped round the sharp angle of the spur. Nobody wanted to be the last.
And then, as they turned the corner, they were met by a demoniac figure who waited for them in the dark and lashed at them with savage joy with a long whip of bull-hide.
"——!" the figure raged at them. "Try to run away, would you? Afraid of devils, yes? Well, here is a devil who is much worse than your screeching spooks. Back to your pen, dogs; or I tie the first one I catch and cut him in two."
And the peons bellowed dumb-animal cries and huddled like sheep back to their shelter. They tried no more to escape by that road. They worked better, too. Sullenly, as always; but Diego carried the terrible whip hanging from his wrist by a loop of leather, and threatened to use it on any excuse. He would have done so, too, had Templar not strode up to him on the first occasion and talked to him with a very set face, and cold.
"Mr. Diego, when those men are on the job they're my labor," he said very distinctly. "You pass my orders on to them, when they're off the job; well, I suppose since you're partners with Mr. Lepanto and their contractor, you've a right to look after them your own way. But no strong-arm stuff during hours."
The partner immediately appealed to his partner. But Mr. Tony Lepanto had taken occasion to brace himself against inaction and cold a little more often than even his practised head could stand. He looked dully from one to the other with moist eves and settled the dispute with magniloquent obscurity.
"All right," he said.
Diego stood scowling, and Templar tense. But there was nothing more to be got out of that fuddled condition. So the half-breed gave way before the white man, and the work progressed once more. It progressed quite well. After a few days Templar found he could relieve some of his trench diggers and utilize the time in joining up pipe.
"You see," he explained to Diego, whom he had forgiven, within half an hour of establishing his point. "We can join up some four lengths, which is about all we can handle with our full crew; and then we'll rig a shear-legs and lower the whole section into the water here where it's deep. Then we'll join an elbow at this end and carry over the bank. After that it's a two-man job and the rest can get ahead with the flume."
Diego had to admit the sense of it; and, though he still scowled, he explained the maneuver to the peons and helped to carry it out. The work progressed apace. The flume was nearly completed. Just some thirty more feet, and then there remained the comparatively easy job of joining pipe and carrying the line on down the valley.
And then, in broad daylight, five of the eleven peons disappeared. Just vanished into thin air. They had been working, all five of them, on the flume when it was decided to knock off for lunch. Diego, of course, kept incessant watch on the lower gorge. Above was bare ravine, steep, broken by little falls and sloping terraces, scalable of course; but no place where a man could hide without a full half-hour of strenuous climbing. Yet they were gone. It might have been witchcraft.
Diego rushed at the remaining six who sat dully apathetic by the pump which they had been installing at the edge of the lake. He lashed out at them indiscriminately with his whip, the while he shrieked in frenzy:
"Where did they go? Tell me, or I rip you in two! Tell!—You won't?" Swish! "Tell!"
Templar reached him and caught his arm.
"Cut that out, Diego. You're crazy!" he snapped.
Diego was, for the time being. The negro in him had reverted to pure jungle man, and the faint trace of Latin was in the grip of uncontrollable rage. He struggled fiercely with Templar to get his whip-arm free. The Indians crouched sullen and inert. It had been beaten into many generations of Indian peons not to run away when they were beaten. They winced as the lash curled round their bodies, but remained as dumb as cowed dogs.
Mr. Tony Lepanto staggered up the slope. His lunch had come wholly out of a bottle. He was very much annoyed about this fresh delay to his treasure hunt. He was in no condition to reason. But in a fuddled way he felt that his fortune was being dissipated upon recalcitrant working men. When things were not going his own way he was not such a very good sport apparently.
He lurched up to the group, stared owlishly at them for a moment, then he drew back a heavy foot and kicked the nearest Indian clear off the bank into the icy lake. With drunken singleness of purpose he kicked another to follow the first.
Templar let go of Diego's arm to turn his attention to this new maniac. Tony, fortunately, was not difficult. He struggled with drunken insistence to accomplish his object; but as a drunken man will, stupidly with thick mutterings of:
"Leggo me. Lemme get at the mutts."
Restraint in his case was more a matter of persuasion than of force. Presently he was induced to relinquish his idea and sit down upon a convenient boulder, where he swayed grumbling, and resorted to some more stimulant after his exertion, more than was really needful.
THE diversion on the whole was fortunate. The Indians were aroused from their apathy to help their fellows out of the lake. They knew what immersion in that chill water meant. Diego, too, was startled by the near tragedy-out of his fury. Considerably sobered, he ordered the shivering wretches to go and dry off at the cook's fire. Templar was left alone between his two employers. He was very pale, and breathing hard. Just what to do he did not know. Decision comes with age; and he was younger by half than either of them. Still, this kind of thing could not go on. He struggled for speech and stammered and finally delivered himself:
"Mr. Lepanto, I—both of you, I mean! This sort of stuff's got to stop; or I quit right here. This is no way to run a job."
Mr. Lepanto nodded with the portentous solemnity of an owl.
"I agree with you," he muttered. "Dago shou'n't beat 'em up. Le's take a drink on it."
Templar turned from him. He was hopeless. Diego spread his hands. His rage had passed as quickly as it had come.
"But, señor, they are peons, no? One cannot permit peons to escape without remonstrance, or we have soon no labor."
"My goshalmighty!" Templar was splendidly indignant. "They'll surely run away if they get treated that way. Who wouldn't? 'Sides, these ones didn't run away. You're plain crazy."
"But, señor, it is necessary—"
"Well, this rough stuff must be cut right out." There was a snap to Templar's voice as he interrupted him. "We can't keep the job going like this. Those men have gone. Somehow, somewhere. Maybe we can find out. In the mean while we've got to keep going. I'm here to get this job done, and it's going to get done. Gosh man, can't you see it's plain horse-sense?"
Diego shrugged an acceptance of what he couldn't avoid, and moved away to seek comfort in the enlargement of his wrongs to his partner. But Mr. Tony Lepanto had retired into the obscurity of a permanent wooziness. The everlasting cold, he grumbled, got into his bones. Nor was he able to adapt himself to living in a tent far from the flesh-pots and the bright lights. So Diego helped himself unobtrusively to his partner's store of liquor and sulked by himself.
Once more the work went on. Slowly, for Templar had to concentrate all his regaining six on the completion of the flume; and Diego was not of much assistance in translating orders. When he was not sulking, he prowled about the steep walled prison of the ravine as if looking for some hole in the ground where his deserters might have crawled.
Still, progress continued. Templar threw off his coat and lost his hat and buckled right in with his crew. He found that it was quicker and faster to show them how a thing was to be done and to call on them for mere brute power than to attempt to explain.
A few more evenings saw the flume completed. It was dry of course, and awaited only the small charge that was to blast out the remaining rock wall of the pool from which it led, which would then drain via the channel and out past the lake.
This was a simple matter of a couple of sticks. Templar planted the charge, touched off the fuse and raced back along the empty flume to safety. In a few seconds came the sharp concussion of dynamite in hard rock, and the retaining wall fell away just as the engineer had intended. It was followed by a rush of water rolling stones and debris before it. A very satisfactory little shot.
The echoes crackled back and forth as they leaped up the ravine walls. Templar shouted an enthusiastic—
"'Ray."
And at the same time there came down to them a thin wail, tremulous and high-pitched:
"Illappa, Illappa! Inti ccama arajpacha! Illappa!"
MAMU stood once again on the brink of his rock with his withered arms stretched out to the Supreme Lord, Light of the Heavens, in agonized appeal. A blood-red target clear against the cliff-face.
"This time I get him surely."
Diego hissed his murderous purpose in bastard Spanish, and ran down to his tent. Templar had no inkling of what he intended to do till he saw him come out with a short Winchester .44, cursing at the magazine, which had jammed in his haste.
Unlike most tenderfoot engineers, Templar carried no gun. The distance that separated him from Diego was some fifty yards. There was nothing for it but speed. He was young and active and had played football, which explains perhaps how he contrived to traverse that rubble-strewn slope in so short a time and remain intact But Diego had managed to fire one hurried shot before the low tackle rolled him, with Templar, rifle and all, into the muddy torrent that was now making its new channel from the overflow of the flume.
He was on his feet in a second, spitting grit and rage; and his first instinct was for his rifle, the original impulse still dominant. Templar found himself marveling, with the queer lucidity of tense moments, how the man's whole reaction was that of a hunter anxious to get in another shot before his game could escape, rather than that of a man trying to kill another human.
But Mamu, of course, had gone. Disappeared into the cliff-face as before. Diego stood glaring eagerly aloft, as one hoping to catch another glimpse of a mountain-goat or an ape leaping from crag to crag. When he turned in final disgust, Templar's hands were already on his rifle-barrel.
Curiously enough, Diego's impression persisted. He was incensed at Templar, not murderously, as the latter had expected, but with aggrievement for having spoiled his aim.
"Tcha-tcha, señor. That was beyond excuse. But one second more, and I would have toppled it clear into our very lake. Now I am without knowledge even whether I wounded it. Carramba, how without sense! Now we have endless trouble again."
The coolness of his disgust was extraordinary. Templar stood taken aback, groping vaguely for understanding of this man's point of view with respect to the dividing line between human life and Indian life. Without conscious volition words came to the surface.
"Cut that stuff out," he said lamely.
Diego threw out his hands, as always. What use was there in trying to reason with this domineering Americano who was swayed. by sentiments unbalanced by reason?
"As the señor wills," he shrugged. "But tomorrow, believe me, we find more trouble."
He gave in gracefully enough. But he solaced his disappointment and soothed the wound to his pride by stealing another bottle of his partner's whisky.
TOMORROW came. And the trouble was there. Templar awoke with a vague something not right impinging upon his subconscious. His first thought was for his labor. He stuck his head out of his tent and looked down to the tarp shelter. No, there they were, all six of them, huddled over a wisp of fire cooking their allowance of beans and fish. He dressed quickly and came out, still uneasy. And then suddenly he realized. The water!
He had gone to sleep with the harsher sound of the overflow from his flume splashing down its new channel. But now the new channel was dry, and the overflow from the lake glided smoothly along its old co arse. For some reason the flume was not working.
Diego was up and out as soon as he heard Templar stirring, and together they walked up inside the cut to look for the trouble, Diego cursing softly and muttering—
"It is I who told you."
Arrived at the very end, the cause of the stoppage was simple. The channel was choked with stones and rubble. Clearly no accident, but the work of human hands. Diego's hysterical whine was that of a hound upon a scent:
"Blood of a thousand saints! Mira, señor. This is the completed insult. This is indignity heaped up. Thus he jeers upon the failure which the señor caused last night. Not even did I wound him."
Templar was silent. What reply more difficult than one to the charge of, I told you so?
Diego hissed, whistling exhalations through his teeth, as he scouted round, full ninety-nine per cent, trail-hunting Indian plus negro; only his dress and his speech proclaiming a very faint one hundredth of illustrious distant white.
"S-s-sacramento! If he has left but some trace; some footprint maybe!"
He scrambled up the shelf over the pool and nosed around. Templar followed, almost as eager.
"Mira señor!" Diego's sudden shout was triumphant. "An overturned stone! Observe, the bottom is moist."
The shelving hillside was traversable: He scrambled along, careless of the stones he dislodged to roll down on Templar below. Another high yell heralded a find:
"He lo aqui una alpagarta! A grass sandal! By here assuredly he came. And look!
There above; the holes of feet in the gravel!"
He scrambled on, possessed with impatience. Up over another shelf. Round a jutting rock. And then he yelled his triumph aloud.
Templar panted up beside him and found himself looking into a thin cleft in the face of the cliff, a regular chimney. Natural ledges and jutting points formed a foothold which a man, bracing his back against the opposing wall, might well climb. At just about face height was a depression obviously chipped out to help the natural formation. And higher up a scrap of rag fluttered in the strong up-draft.
Diego's face, as he looked, was slowly undergoing a transformation. The ninety-nine per cent, of questing savage on the blood trail was being overlaid by hot-blooded vindictive white. The illustrious scion of the conquistador was darkly revengeful, almost grim.
"S-s-so? By this way he came? And somewhere up there he lives. Bueno—" he began to tighten his belt as he gaged the climb—"The witch-doctor who would despoil me of my inheritance. The bane of my family since the beginning. Sanctissima Trinidad! Hear me now. I make oath. The holy work that my illustrious ancestors started, I go to finish now. As long as this witch-doctor is loose, so long will the treasure be withheld. That is sure. Pues, I remove the obstacle."
With an incongruous reverence that was amazing he performed the sign of the cross, and added climax by pulling a cheap revolver from his pocket and inspecting the load.
Templar seemed always to be having to hold this man's arms in restraint. Yet it was his unconscious and dominating impulse. His jaw began to thrust itself out in obstinate opposition—
"None o' that stuff, Diego."
THE illustrious scion was plainly at a loss to understand the many inhibitions of this so meddlesome American.
"Pero señor, porqué? This man, is he not your enemy as well as mine? Is he not over and above an Indian? Thereby adding to his interference, insult in addition. Por Dios, why does the señor so infernally protect his life?"
Templar, faced with the question, was flatly unable to say. How was he to explain the reasons for the indefensible conventions about human life which held in his country to a man whose code about nearly everything differed so radically from his own? He could not tell himself just why he had to interfere. It was just because—well er—hanged if he knew. But—He ran his fingers through his hair and dodged the issue.
"Anyway, I was thinking about those tracks. Now I don't know a hoot about trails and all that. But wasn't that lead too plain? Why, durn it, I could have followed it. And I don't take that old witchdoctor for anybody's fool. What does he want to lay a scent like that for? Why does he want us to follow?"
The scion of the de-Soto was as scornful in his underestimation of the old wizard's cunning as the hidalgo, his ancestor, might have been.
"That savage? Hah, but the señor does not know these animals of the mountain-tops."
Templar was in no position to argue. Yet he had a thought.
"Those Indians. The five peons. They must have gone this way; they must be up there somewhere. Five strong men."
The illustrious blood of the conquistador laughed aloud at the thought of a mere five Indians. But the oblique Indian eyes suddenly narrowed with the birth of an idea. The negro lips smiled; and the man looked away. And then suddenly he gave in with ready shrug and outflung hands.
"As the señor wills. Bueno. What matter?"
And he shoved the revolver back into his pocket with ostentation.
"Vamonos. Let us go back and set those dogs to work."
Templar was young and he was a C. E. His training had been to judge figures and strains and pressures, not the subtle minds of men. He set himself to the work of clearing away the choked flume and connecting pipe lengths with a feeling that all was well with the world; and Diego assisted him with a right good will.
HE SPENT the morning cursing the paucity of labor. Six lazy peons were miserably slow, he swore. Now that all difficulties were removed, with twice as many workmen the treasure would be laid bare twice as fast. So that afternoon, after the lunch hour, he saddled his mule.
"I ride to the town to bring more peons, señor," he said. "And, carramba, a taste of aguardiente will not hurt me. I have worked more than in my life before, and this weesky of the señor my partner I do not like. Adios! By nightfall I return."
Templar did not really need any more peons. The work of joining pipe was easy; no more than a two-man job. Still, with more men, they could be shown how to work in pairs and so lay the required mile or so of pipe with a great saving of time. And then, as he had said, there would be nothing to do but sit down and wait for the lake to empty itself. So he whistled a discordant popular chorus while Diego rode down the gorge toward Cuzco.
Toward was strictly accurate. Diego of the illustrious and unforgiving blood of de-Soto turned the bend of the cañon; and then the oblique eyes narrowed downward and the thick lips grinned in a snarl.
"Fool!" was all his comment.
He drew the cheap revolver from his pocket and made very sure of the load.
Down the gorge toward Cuzco he rode. But no further. In the opening valley below, where the mountain-sides were not so precipitous, he tied his mule to a boulder and searched the barren slopes for a possible means of ascent. It was not difficult. By slanting along the face and zigzagging a couple of times he could reach to where he knew there must be the remains of the old Inca road. If only that were not broken down at some sheer precipice—he grinned in vindictive anticipation—he would run that wicked old fox to earth and settle the hereditary account once for all.
His luck seemed to be with him, for which he devoutly thanked St. Jago of Quito, who apparently had assisted his ancestors to many bloody victories. The ancient road was still traceable; a moldering foot-path, dipping down and climbing up to avoid fallen rocks and landslides; but a path that showed signs of regular use by naked feet. He followed it warily, without much trouble; a thousand feet above the dim gorge where his glorious ancestor fought while the gold that was his heritage was hidden by a priest of the sun. He looked down on the scene, and his grin was nastily predictive. Well, today he would finish that fight; and then, all obstacles removed from his path, the heritage would be his. All was as it should be.
His one anxiety was that when he rounded the bend of the spur he would be in full view of that interfering Americano who worked like a fool at the lake, and of whom he was for some reason afraid. But the favor of St. Jago remained with him. Just as he was reaching the very apex of the angle and regarding with interest the outcrop of painted dolomite, he craned his neck cautiously around a corner and found himself looking into the mouth of the great cave.
On the instant he stopped dead, like a stalking feline, moving not an inch. Only his narrow eyes nickered. Slowly, behind cover of his rock, he crossed himself and murmured a fervent Diogracias for that he had advanced with caution. For there, in a sunny spot, wrapped in his faded poncho, with his head bowed on his knees, squatted the aged wizard himself.
He was evidently asleep, wearied out with watching and conniving to guard his sacred trust against these invincible white men. It was not from this side that he had expected one of them. Diego's grin was that of a wolf with up-drawn lips as he crept with infinite caution up to his prey. With the crunch of his feet upon the gravel as he made his final rush, the old man awoke.
He was able to give only one terrified squeal before Diego's brown fingers closed on his throat and a bony knee pressed into his stomach. His withered old muscles were helpless. Only his eyes could roll as he clawed feebly at the choking pressure on his throat. His captor growled through his teeth and worried him.
"S-s-so, dog's dog; this is where you hide? Good. This saves much time and trouble. What my fathers started, I now finish."
He spoke in Aymara, which he pronounced with as faultless a diction as the old man himself; and on the other hand his rage was as cold-blooded as might have been the de-Soto himself. It was the one hundredth of conquistador blood that was dominant now. The illustrious scion of the white devils who had come up out of the sea had quite persuaded himself that this thing was a personal and a hereditary feud; and as a feudist he was quite justified in killing his enemy wherever he found him. He drew the cheap revolver from his pocket and cocked it.
The old man's eyes fixed themselves in the stare of dull Indian apathy and he ceased to struggle, though his fingers still clawed at the choking grip on his throat. Then a thought came to his executioner.
"Carramba" he muttered. "Better within your own cave, devil-doctor, where that interfering Americano down below may hear no report and make perhaps a fuss."
With that he proceeded to drag the old man into the inner gloom as he would a sheep or a doll or some other feeble and resistless thing. The cave was wide and high-vaulted, and the floor was as smooth as a road. Fallen stalactites of more recent times made a twisty path of what had once been a broad causeway; but the path was well trodden and clear. Diego looked for a convenient passage or arm not too far from the daylight where the echoes of his shot would be effectually blanketed. A little way ahead to his right just such a dim opening was visible. Good. Without effort he dragged his victim into it. No better place could be found for an execution.
AND then hands fell upon him. Countless tearing, snatching fingers and clutching bare feet. Dim forms beat at him from every side. His nostrils were assailed by the strong goaty odor of the never-washed Indian of the high Andes.
The revolver went off of itself; and one of the dim forms screeched horribly and fell and lay coughing. But they were powerful men who fought with him; their muscles had been well hardened by plenty of labor; and their hate had been well nourished by much experience of those who contracted for their labor.
Diego who would have been an executioner felt a filthy rag forced into his mouth and greasy llama-wool ropes winding themselves round his arms and legs and chest. He was as helpless in those quick-clutching hands as the old man had been a minute before in his own grip. In a very short space of time he was trussed like a llama for the slaughter; and the dim forms stood up breathing heavily. Four strong men, and a fifth who twitched and coughed on the floor.
The frail form of the witch-doctor appeared at the dim opening of the passage. "Bring him," he ordered simply. The four who smelled like peons picked him up and followed their wizard. The old man shuffled ahead in silence, and silently the men followed. Into the inner gloom the old man led the way. The cave seemed to be endless. In the distance Diego thought he could hear running water; but he could see nothing. The cavern was pitch dark now. The old man seemed to be bearing to the right. Behind him the peons lurched and staggered with their burden over the floor they could only feel with their toes.
At last the old man stopped and fumbled in the dark. His aged lungs wheezed as he strained at something. There was a sound of heavy stone grating on stone; and a dim light began to grow on the group. With it, the sound of water came clear and unmistakable.
Still without a word the men stepped through an opening hewn square out of the rock. They were in a further great chamber or passage which stretched away into the gloom before them. Diego, trying desperately to retain his sense of direction, thought that this inner chamber must run parallel to the face of the cliff. Then he saw the cause of the light, and knew that he was right. High up, through a jagged cleft, a ray of sunlight streaked down and made an irregular oval patch on the floor.
The wizard pointed a shrunken claw at a square-hewn stone seat, or table or whatever it was; and without a word the peons laid their burden upon it.
Still the wizard pointed. The peons seemed to understand. Great copper rings were let into the sides of the square slab. Without question they took their plaited llama-wool girdles which every peon carries, and forced their captive's hands and feet down to the rings and lashed them fast. Diego struggled with desperate terror as his bonds were loosened; but it was quite useless. They were four strong men. He was left in an excruciating position, drawn taut on his back, able to move only his head and his eyes.
Then at last the witch-doctor spoke. A single word. He pointed to the square hole which led into the outer gloom.
"Go," he ordered.
Without a word the four passed out of view. The old man followed, and there came again the sound of stone grating upon heavy stone.
Executioner and victim were alone.
MAMU the Soothsayer came back and stood looking at the prisoner whom his shrewd lure had brought to him. Long and thoughtfully he looked. There was no rancour in his expression; no hostility. Rather, an impersonal appraisal. Besides that, the withered old parchment face held no expression at all. Only the shrewd old eyes glowed as brightly as a cat's. And then the old man nodded slowly to himself.
He passed out of view again behind the prisoner's head; and only the flop and shuffle of his sandals were proof that he was busied with something. Diego, bound, helpless, gagged and stretched taut, paid during the next half-hour for all the many things that he had done to helpless Indians—and they had been many.
That awful impassivity! That silence! No abuse; no bullying; no gloating—all of which he would have understood—Just calm, expressionless scrutiny! There was a hideous suggestion of something duly prepared for, inevitable, which would happen without fuss or flurry.
Behind him he could hear the ancient soothsayer shuffling about engaged in some occupation. Beyond that somewhere, the rush of water. Rolling his head to one side, he could see, dimly outlined, the massive square of the entrance which seemed to be hewn out of the rock. Stretching on either side as far as he could see was a long shelf or bench, also hewn out of the rock wall and apparently carved with a design of winged human forms. He could not discern and he was in no condition to care. Besides that, emptiness—and the patch of sunlight on the floor.
Straining his eyes over to the other side, he could find nothing of comfort. Dim stone benches again apparently; short and square-cut; between them, tall stone figures which towered up into the gloom. Behind these, cut into the stone wall with extraordinary cleverness, so that the most possible light might be reflected from its polished angles and facets, a great circle with wavy lines radiating from it. Besides that, emptiness.
An awful horror surged cold over the wretched man. His heritage of negro was strong enough to conjure up hideous visions or juju ceremonies and voodoo deviltries; and the thin tinge of white had been strained through far too many cross-currents
to carry with it any of the stern fortitude of the illustrious de-Soto.
He strained himself desperately to scream; to summon help; to compromise; to beg for mercy. But only the horrid muffled sound of a well-gagged man issued from his lips.
The ancient soothsayer shuffled into view once more; but he paid not the slightest attention to the moaning, struggling figure on the stone table. He continued coldly, methodically busy with his affairs. He was transfigured.
Mamu the priest of the sun, wore instead of the shapeless felt hat with ear-laps, an enormous headdress of feathers; a crown it was, of brilliantly bejewelled hummingbirds' breasts with a great circle of radiating egrets' plumes, full six feet in diameter. In place of the faded-crimson poncho was a cloak, also of feathers, thousands of them, woven with amazing patience into a gorgeous garment. It was old and if was bare in mangy patches; but the merciful gloom smoothed away all defects. The relics of a glory that once had been were there. At the priest's shrunken breast hung a disk of metal, dully yellow, upon the face of which was carved the same emblem of the circle with the radiating lines.
From the bound man came convulsive moans. The only notice which the ancient priest vouchsafed was to look critically at the patch of sunlight which crawled slowly toward the stone as the sun outside set lower in the western sky.
With awful aloofness he shuffled about his occupation, a fantastic djinn of the underground. He was busy at one of the short benches between the tall stone gods. He braced his frail strength against the outer edge of the seat; and with a dry grating the whole top swung up on a pivot. It was a stone coffer such as many which lay about the ruined walls of Cuzco—though Diego had never known that they might have had counterbalanced stone lids. With the horror of extreme terror, he was unable to refrain from watching the ominous preparations for he didn't know what.
The invested priest groped in the dry unused depths and drew therefrom a long sliver of a shiny black material which glittered like glass. It was the shape of a spear blade with a short carved handle. There was reverence in the old man's handling of it.
It was obsidian. Volcanic glass; chipped and polished down to the keenness of a broken bottle. A sacrificial knife such as the high-priests of the sun were wont to use to cut the hot hearts out of living maidens in the old days before the white men came up out of the sea and destroyed the great pyramid temples.
But the helplessly bound descendant of those white men was mercifully ignorant of its use.
STILL in deadly silence, the descendant of those high priests shuffled over to the stone table and looked down on his victim. The victim writhed, and all but spoke aloud with his boggling eyes. The priest continued to look, withered, emotionless, cold. Then he looked at the patch of sunlight, now horribly near. Slowly he nodded.
He shuffled off and came back with a broken and rusty knife blade and reached a yellow claw to his victim's breast. The victim heaved horribly and strained his bound limbs till the joints cracked. But the priest only leaned over and cut the khaki shirt away from the left side. Then he squatted himself down in the patch of sunlight, and so waited.
Slowly, as the sun set, the patch moved toward the stone table; and with it the ancient feather-bedecked Nemesis crutched himself forward on his arms to keep within its radius. Slowly, inexorably, inevitably the light advanced. No power on earth could stay its deadly march.
At last, as if it had dropped whole inches suddenly, it threw a long line of brilliancy along the edge of the table. Mamu, the hereditary priest, rose to his feet with creaking joints and stood in the full glare of the beam. A full minute he stood staring open-eyed through the high cleft in the cave wall at his resplendent god. Then he stretched his two withered arms out to it, holding the blade in his open palms; and then at last he spoke. His thin voice, full of faults and reedy trebles, began to intone a wailing chant:
"Illappa, Illappa. Inti ccama arajpacha. Achachi-pa isapanim. Supreme Lord, hear thy ancient servant."
The cracked old voice rose and fell in its invocation.
Diego, helpless, chilled with a nameless horror of he did not knew what, listened with awful fear bulging from his eyes. Much of the chant there was that he could understand. The ancient ritual had been handed down~from father to son through the long ages; and with each handing more and more of the popular idiom had crept in. Still, he was in a vague horror about what it all meant till the officiating priest laid a shrunken left hand upon his bare breast and cried in the ecstasy of offering:
"The sacrifice that is required is ready, O Sun. Lord Sun, be ready to receive—"
Then a merciful providence caused the senses of Diego of the blood of the first conquerors to pass from him.
THE sun had duly set and darkness was growing over the little camp in the valley. Templar pulled at his pipe uneasily over the folding dinner-table and grumbled.
"I wonder what the deuce is holding Diego. He said he'd be back this evening, and here's darkness upon us. How in blazes does he think we're going to hold these peons, I'd like to know."
Mr. Tony Lepanto nodded with solemn importance and muttered—
"Aw they'll be all ri'."
Templar looked at him hopelessly. Small prospect of help there. Yet some sort of provision must be made. He tried to impress the need on his employer's befuddled mind.
"For Mike's sake, Mr. Lepanto, get a hold on yourself and try to get this. We're in a fix. Now listen. If Diego don't show up in another hour or so I'm going to sleep in his tent. Now see if you can't hold off from another drink tonight and keep your wits about you. I'll have the cook sleep here; and he'll wake you if he hears those Indians making a getaway up the ravine. We've got to hold these boys, or we'll be held up again with no labor."
After grave consideration Mr. Tony Lepanto saw the point.
"Aw ri'," he agreed. "I won' take any more. On'y jus' a night cap."
And he pushed the bottle from him with such good will that it fell over the edge of the table and broke on the stones below. He looked at the mess with slow comprehension and cursed the cook. Then:
"Nev' min'," he said generously. "I got plenty more."
So night fell, and Templar moved down to Diego's tent, and placed reliance on the cook. And that night the devils howled high among the crags in lusty celebration. And the next morning the sun smiled down on a camp of just three people.
Templar awoke his employer with a very set look on his face. Obstacles were bringing out the latent character of the young man. He was responding to the need.
"Well, Mr. Lepanto," he announced grimly. "They've gone."
Mr. Lepanto was sober enough in the morning to understand.
"Well, what're you going to do?" he asked. It was noticeable that he was letting all the responsibility rest on the shoulders of his engineer.
"There's just two things we can do," Templar told him with decision. "Diego's gone. I don't know when he'll be back. I've a notion he's sore and has gone off on a bust. He may be days. Now I can ride into Cuzco and try to rustle up some peons; but I imagine that won't be easy. Those birds who've beat it will have told the tale of their haunt and the whole labor market will be shy. And anyway, I don't feel like wasting all that time."
Mr. Tony Lepanto regarded the problem dully. The prospect did not look bright—
"Well, what's the second choice?"
"The second choice is—" Templar spoke with snappy determination—"that you buckle down and help me get ahead with this job. It's easy," he hastened to explain. "Everything's all set. My pump is rigged; all the pipe is laid down in position. We've only got to thread up. It's a two-man job; and I figure that a little work will be good for you anyway."
Mr. Lepanto by no means relished this second choice; but the thought of the money he had gambled was a powerful factor. His face was heavy with disgust.
"Gee, it's a fierce cold sort of a job," he grumbled.
Templar's point was won.
"Come ahead," he said. "Keep sober for a few days, and we'll be through. In three days we can finish the job, and then you can go to Cuzco and take it easy while the lake empties itself."
So once again the work progressed. And this time with quite a satisfactory speed. Templar was young and energetic, and he had quite an expert's knack in handling pipe. He kept his assistant down to the job with a steady grind that would have occasioned loud outcry and strikes among honest working men. Mr. Lepanto groaned and sweated in the cold; but he did assist—some; and he didn't drink—much.
Between the two of them the pipe was actually joined up. The pump was connected. The suction started. And, with the favor of the gods of labor, the thing worked. Even without tramping down the valley, round the bend of the spur, and down the gorge for two long miles to see what was happening at the other end of the pipe, they could hear the low, rushing sound of water under pressure.
The lake that covered the treasure was emptying itself out at the rate of five hundred gallons per minute. Templar snatched at his head to throw his hat into the air; but hat there was none. He had long since lost it. So he jumped high in the air instead and shouted the old football yell of his college. He even slapped his employer-assistant on the back and jubilated with him.
"It goes! By golly, it goes! All we got to do now is sit by and watch her dwindle. When she sinks down to the bottom of this end of the pipe, I'll just join on another section, start up the pump to fill her up, and let her rip once more."
Mr. Tony Lepanto was so exhilarated that he forgot for the moment to curse his partner for his absence. But the more he thought over things, the more convinced he became that the partner hadn't acted right and that his remuneration should be curtailed in proportion.
"Got the durn thing going without his blasted help, huh. I'll see where he pays for this. Wouldn't worry me if he never showed up now. Don't deserve a cut-in anyhow."
The thought that he would have a legitimate excuse to mulct his partner of a certain percentage, coupled with the pleasing reflection that he would not be called upon to gamble much more—if any—expense money before he saw his dividends waiting to be picked up out of the ooze, cheered him considerably. An ominous sign for future trouble. But it was nothing new. Men had known the same thing before. It was the beginning of the gold-fever.
So cheered was Mr. Lepanto by his reflections that he celebrated the occasion, plentifully and well.
AND Mamu the Soothsayer craned his neck like a condor and wondered what all the joy was about. He could see nothing happening. The water from above his sacred lake was diverted and was flowing merrily down the flume. He couldn't help that. Choking up the entrance, he knew, was of very little use. It occasioned only a small delay. And delay and harassment and lack of labor made no difference to that terribly persistent young man who seemed to meet every difficulty. He had feared that that invincible person would devise some means of blasting a vast gash out of the valley clear to the lake bottom. But after that first miracle no further such catastrophe had occurred. And now they sat still and made merry. What did it mean?"
So merry did the older one make that he was quite unable to ride to Cuzco and do the event the justice that it deserved. Which explained how he happened to be grandiloquently present two days later when Templar pointed to indentations and discolorations along the lake shore and insisted that they had not been visible before.
Mr. Tony Lepanto stared owlishly and grumbled that he saw nothing. He was impatient with the ignorance of the layman. How long would the durn thing take to empty out?
"How long? Why, gosh almighty, man. We're getting five hundred gallons a minute more or less. Now I make a round estimate that this lake holds at least twenty-five millions. Work it out for yourself."
The layman thought hard for many minutes. Then he said—
"Yes, I s'pose so."
So Templar planted a stick in the water and marked the level and told him to wait a few days and see. A lake didn't show an appreciable decrease that quickly. Yet it was emptying out. Slowly but surely the treasure was coming nearer. In a few days the decrease was apparent to anybody's eye.
It was apparent to the keen old eyes of Mamu the Soothsayer. Even from his height he could see that his lake was becoming distinctly less. He was appalled at the horror of it. What had these terrible white men succeeded in doing? That pipe thing that led down the valley; it must mean something.
With trembling limbs he scrambled along the path to peer down into the dark gorge.
He could discern the end of the pipe-line but faintly; but there was no mistaking the clear stream of water that shot from the end, a good fifteen feet out under the pressure which the drop into the gorge had created.
With the dominant impulse of the Indian in grief, old Mamu squatted down on his heels and bowed his head upon his knees. He felt very old and alone and helpless. After all his striving; all his plotting; after his final great sacrifice. Still the inexorable work went on. What could a frail old man do against these terrible people?
The impulse came to him, as it had come before, to give up and go away. Always had these white men vanquished his people. What use struggling? But Mamu had qualities which came with a long line of clean heredity. He had what white men call traditions. The sacred trust of his fathers was not a thing to be deserted as long as strength was left to fight.
He rose once more to his feet with renewed courage and clambered the path back to his rock. There he raised his weary old arms to the sun and called as he had called before:
"Illappa, Illappa! Achachi-pa sulima! Thy servant calls."
And the Lord Sun heard, and warmed his frail old bones and gave him—hope.
Templar looked up at the wailing cry, as he had looked before; and he laughed. He was free from care. What could happen now? Yet—as he laughed there was a vague uneasiness in the back of his mind. That old witch-doctor had proved to be a wily and a resourceful adversary. He found himself wondering, apropos of nothing, what had become of Diego. Surely the wildest debauch in the world must have come to an end by now. But his spirit had the resiliency of youth. He shook off the passing cloud and laughed again.
But Mr. Tony Lepanto shook an unsteady fist up at the wailing figure and muttered that that guy gave him the willies, and he would like to take a good crack at him.
Then the sun set behind the mountain tops, and Mamu the Soothsayer stepped away from his rock and into his cave with hope burning hot in his heart. Lord Sun had sent him a thought. Straight to the chamber of the stone gods he went, and straight through the darkness to where he knew he would place his hand on a torch.
Four hundred years of heredity and his own long fife had made that place familiar to every one of his five senses.
He struck a spark with jeuque, a circular piece of flint with two holes drilled in it through which a string passed, by means of which it could be rotated as a small boy does a button; a simple mechanism which has the flint and steel of our own pioneers beaten a hundred times,! both for intensity and temperature of spark.
Sticking the torch in a hole drilled in the rock, he opened the largest of the ancient stone coffers and pored over the contents; a hopeless looking tangle of strings. Red and blue and yellow they were, with secondary shades of green and yellow and brown; knotted and looped and re-knotted. An unravelable mess.
Yet Mamu the Soothsayer squatted before the mess and sorted the main tangles and counted knots and compared colors and lengths, and puzzled over things that his fathers had already forgotten. This was the history of his people. The quipus of the Inca.
Much there was that he couldn't understand. His fathers had forgotten, and their fathers had lost much before them. Yet a part of the ancient lore had come down to old Mamu; and half the night he sat up and pored over the knowledge of the wise ones who had been before him.
Patiently he reconstrued the dead past. And as he studied color and string and knot, his weary old eyes began to glow once again like a cat's and his drooping head picked up a new alertness.
He read anew the tale of the great waterfall and of the prophecy and of the building of the conduits and—here he suddenly tensed—he read how the fall had come to be regarded as an object of superstition by the untutored laity because it plunged into the earth and followed a natural fissure to burst forth in the lake below; and how the fissure connected with an arm of his own cave—which was after all but a part of the same great erosion of lime salts—and how the engineers of the Inca, forever looking for sources of water supply for the city of Cuzco perched so high on a barren mountain scarp, had found a way to connect this fissure with another one by cutting a trench and damming the original flow, and had so diverted all that water to feed one of the main conduits of the city.
It was enough. The inspiration that the Lord Sun had sent him had led true to its preordained consummation. The soothsayer sat all a-tremble, blinking at his torch, the sixth that had burned to a stump while he read. Suddenly he jerked himself to action. He snatched the torch and scuttled off down the twisty extension of the chamber of the stone gods. The water was there, of course. He drank from it habitually; but he had never followed that cross-passage to see where it went. Now he found that there was a regular path; steps had been cut to make it easy. The direction, too, was out toward the face of the cliff, which meant toward his sacred lake. Nor was it far. He quivered when he came to another intersecting passage, narrow and steep, the floor of which had obviously been hewn out and deepened by human agency.
At the point of intersection, just where the underground stream would have plunged into a steep chute, the water foamed against great blocks of laid stone and doubled back on itself to follow the artificial aqueduct. As his fathers had written with string, so was it indeed.
Mamu, servant of the sun, could give no thanks where no sun was to be seen. But he made reservation for a very special ceremony with the first rising of the next morning. For the present there was work to be done. Careful work and dangerous; for the surface where he trod was coated with a slippery scum from the undried spray of ages. Work such as might be done by four strong men. Mamu went to summon the slaves of his will with a holy zeal.
AS ONCE before, Templar awoke with a feeling that all was not well. Nor did he have to search his memory or even stick his head out of his tent to know that something was very wrong indeed. He had gone to sleep with the splash from the overflow of his flume. Now he awoke with the roar of a torrent tearing down the valley.
He dressed more quickly than ever in his life and stepped out. And stood paralyzed. The flume was there all right. It delivered its little stream as before. Nothing came into the lake from above. But over the lip where he had blasted foamed a small river.
That sick feeling of tasting his own heart came to him. His feet were lead as he went into his employer's tent and shook him. His shouted message brought the latter to his feet with a bound, cold sober for the time being. In his pajamas he rushed out and stood gaping at the catastrophe, careless of the cold.
And just then the sun crept over the high peaks and the thin wail that they had learned to dread floated down to them—
"Illappa, Illappa!"
Both men threw their heads back and gazed at the portent, trying to understand.
"Illappa!" the grotesque figure shrieked, and writhed in an ecstasy of adoration. "Inti ccama arajpacha."
Tony Lepanto swore in hot blood and ground his teeth with a feeling of impotent rage:
"Blast my soul and knock me for a dead 'un if that old scoundrel hasn't put this over on us. Curse him; I'm gonna fix him for this."
There was much more to the same effect. Mr. Tony Lepanto had already shown that he was not such a very good sport when his gamble was not going well. But this outburst was a revelation. The man's face was bloated with rage added to his permanent debauch and his neck muscles swelled alarmingly.
Templar was upset enough himself in all consciousness; but he could see the need of relieving some of that apoplectic pressure.
"He's done something, I'll bet," he agreed. "I don't know what. But I can darn well go and find out."
"How?" snapped the other.
"I guess I can get up that chimney where the peons went. There's nothing to it. Somewhere up there's the trouble; and I'm going to find out."
The chill of the morning bit through the financier's rage, and he remembered his clothes. He turned to his tent and snarled over his shoulder—
"Just half a minute then, and I'll come with you."
Templar remonstrated. The climb was a stiff one, he argued, and
"And what?" came an angry bellow from within the tent. "Y' think I can't make it. I'm sober, ain't I? And I'm gonna get a crack at that mangy pup if I die for it."
Templar saw that argument was useless with that alcoholic temper; so he shrugged agreement.
"All right then; it's your funeral. Better bring your flash-light 'cause that cleft seems to duck right into a sort of tunnel higher up."
Another growl was all his response. In a few minutes the other came out, dressed and steady enough on his feet. Templar had nothing to say. He led the way in silence, past the flume, over the shelf above the lake and up the rubble-strewn slope. Arrived at the chimney he suggested shortly:
"You better go first. Maybe I can give a boost from below, and perhaps save a fall."
His employer only growled something about Hades, and lost no time in commencing the ascent. He was willing enough in his resentful desire to reach the cause of his trouble. But his physical condition was not favorable to hard exercise. Within thirty-five feet his back began to go limp from pressing against the opposing wall, and his stertorous breath came in groans.
Templar got under and gave a shoulder to his wabbly feet. They rested heavily on him, and then made another struggle. Fortunately for both of them respite was not far. A shelf gave Heaven-sent relief.
The ex-rum-runner lay on his stomach, spread-eagled and breathing in great sobs. For the first time in his life he wished that he had let the stuff alone a little more. The labor of his lungs was excruciating pain. His head rolled as his body swayed to his inhalations, and he felt that he was going to die. Templar sat with his feet dangling and panted distressfully enough himself; and he could realize how the other felt.
But gradually even the financier's system reasserted itself. He was able to sit up, though his head still lolled limp. It was minutes before he could spare breath for speech.
"Oh!" he gasped. "Sweet Judas, what a climb! Phew! Curse the soul of that old scoundrel. Gosh!"
With shaking hand he pulled a flask from his pocket and took the customary stimulant. It braced his nerves as well as his vindictive will to go on. The chimney-cleft cut sheer into the cliff and the shelf followed it at a steep angle. Within some forty yards the cleft turned sharply to the left and narrowed. The bottom closed up rapidly and the roof converged, forming the tunnel that Templar had expected. It was steep and irregular, but nothing in comparison with what they had just passed.
Yet the flabby leader had to pause more than once to gasp for breath and refreshment.
Templar did not like it. The man would be drunk again soon at that rate, and then he would have a problem on his hands indeed. But argument was useless, of course. All he could do was to urge the need of speed.
FAINT light showed ahead. Mr. Tony Lepanto summoned his energy for a last spurt which carried him to the surface of a dim grotto. There he sat and recovered once more—and incidentally finished his flash. Templar helped him to his feet, and together they stepped out to the source of the light. They found themselves in the jaws of a passage which opened out into the main floor of the cave.
"Ss-so," muttered Templar, just as the last man who came there had done. "This is where he hides? Now what?"
"In!" said the other with decision. "That's where the crook hangs out."
He was brave enough physically, was Mr. Tony Lepanto, as one of his profession had to be. Without more ado he blundered ahead toward the inner darkness. Templar caught his arm.
"Easy now," he warned. "We don't know what's ahead."
"Easy!" growled Lepanto.
The drink was beginning to take hold again and he was bellicosely anxious to come to grips with this savage who interfered with the smooth running of his sporting gamble. But he had sense enough to ease his lumbering footsteps.
Together they advanced up the cave, Lepanto always in the eager and not very steady lead, Templar trying to restrain him. It began to be dark enough to need artificial illumination. Templar produced his flashlight and threw its white beam around. Nothing but dark emptiness. Vast jagged walls and stalactite-studded ceilings. He began to experience the eery feeling that comes with exploring the unknown bowels of the earth.
A square of dim light began to show far ahead and to their right. It was suggestively awesome. Templar felt himself tingling all over. But the bootlegger lurched boldly ahead. Suddenly Templar gripped his arm again. In the sweeping arc of his fight something had moved. He tried to throw the beam on it again. His fleeting impression had been of a man or men.
"What in blazes is eatin' you?" Lepanto growled.
Then he gave a sudden whoop and grabbed Templar's arm in his turn to point.
In the dim square of light stood the old witch-doctor himself peering out at the intruders on his sanctuary. With a yell of savage delight Lepanto rushed at him, his feet regaining the sudden amazing steadiness of a half-drunken man under the stimulus of excitement. Templar followed. By the time they gained the chamber of the stone gods the old man had, or course, disappeared. But away in the descending gloom to the right, above the noise of rushing water, they heard bare footsteps pattering on the rock floor.
Lepanto yelled again and charged down in that direction, Templar after him once more, hating to leave the unknown menace of the men in the rear, but loyally bound to stand by.
As they ran, the advantage began to be theirs. Old Mamu in the lead, besides being old, was in darkness. To make his case worse, after he passed his place of drinking, the uneven floor was new to his feet.
The pursuers overhauled him rapidly. His scrambling figure began to be visible in the beam of the flash light.
"Whoo-ie, come on! We've got him!" whooped Lepanto.
And just then he stumbled over a projection and fell heavily. He must have hurt himself hideously, for. he cursed in agony as he heaved himself up to one knee and clutched the bleeding rent in the tough cord cloth of the other leg. Then, in a frenzy of exasperation, before Templar knew what he was about, he snatched a revolver from his pocket and fired at the flitting figure in front.
"Missed him, curse it!" he howled; and he struck savagely at Templar who tried to reach for the gun.
His eyes glared the madness of the chase coupled with the mounting fumes of his recent refreshment. He barely lurched forward in pursuit again before he slipped on the treacherous moist floor and crashed down on his face once more. This time the gun flew from his hand. It skittered down a slippery decline and plopped into the rushing stream.
But the scrambling figure ahead seemed to have come to a blind end. The flashlight showed him hesitant before a seeming abyss. Lepanto shouted his view-halloo again—though it was more than half a groan—and plunged forward to the capture.
Old Mamu stood revealed at the end of things. Before him was the cross cleft of the old channel. Great squares of stone thrown to one side blocked what had been the artificial aqueduct. From the dam that had been they had been removed, four deep from the center. The water boiled against the remaining buttresses and then glided with a clean schloop through the five-foot passage that had been made, and slipped with an oily smoothness down the chute that led to blackness and the lake.
Mr. Tony Lepanto lurched forward to his trapped quarry. His eyes glared the bloodshot hate of a liquor-inflamed brain and his lips curled in vindictive triumph.
"Now I've gotcher, you louse," he said thickly; and he reached a heavy, unsteady hand to grip the old man.
But the advantage was now once again with Mamu. He had light to see by—and he had bare feet with almost prehensile toes that could cling to every little crevice and protuberance of the rock. With a sudden turn and with amazing agility for so old a man he stepped out on to the remaining wall of the dam and hurled himself bodily at the other side.
FIVE feet across was the gap. No jump for a youth. But old Mamu was very old. On his hands and knees he landed and scraped agonizingly along on the further surface—but he landed. Lepanto gave vent to a hoarse bellow and clutched wildly at the flying poncho. But the feet of Mr. Tony Lepanto were encased in hard leather soles. They shot from under him on the slimy surface of the dam. He shrieked just once, clutched desperately at nothing and fell into the exact center of the oily sluice.
The suddenness of the thing was appalling. A second—less than a second—and he had disappeared into the inky blackness of the underground.
Templar stood benumbed, vaguely waving his beam of light into a pit from which came up only the muffled roar of subterranean water. How long he stood, he never knew. A familiar sound reminiscent of menace impinged on his stunned senses:
"Illappa, Illappa. Isapanim."
Old Mamu the Soothsayer was breaking all precedent and giving thanks in the darkness to the sun for his delivery.
Then the cumulative horror of the thing gripped Templar. It surged over him in a cold wave. The clammy blackness of the inner earth; the insistent triumph of this old wizard from the very beginning; the awful undoing of those who sought to harm him—he had a horrible impression that he knew now what had become of Diego—and overlaying it all, the menace of those men he had half-seen in the gloom of the outer cave.
He turned and fled from that place. Not til! he reached the outer air did he leave behind him the feeling of things clutching at his spine from the dark crevices of that awful cavern.
He was a silent, hard-faced man when he reached his camp in the valley of his wasted effort. Without explanation he gave orders to the bewildered cook to saddle up and ride with him into Cuzco. The job was through, was all he said. He would send for such gear as could be salvaged later. There was nothing else he could do. The funds had ceased..
Within fifteen minutes he was riding through the gloomy gorge headed for the open valley; and he called it as he rode—
"The camp of no regrets."
No regrets at all. Despite the fact of the gold that stayed in the lake. Despite the fact that he had run away from the dark. He was neither sorry nor ashamed. For he had learned two things, he vowed grimly, which would be of use to him.
One was that it was unsafe to regard a job in his profession as easy until it had been accomplished. And the other was the knowledge of a treasure and of the means of getting it. And some day, perhaps, he would go back—when Mamu the Soothsayer would have passed from the guardianship of the sacred lake to his ancestors who had guarded it before him. For he had learned to respect Mamu.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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