“The Indians have been here, I tell you. We shall find where there has been a great battle. Strange I do not smell the blood or that we do not see corpses piled along the way. I tell you they are cunning. They have cut away this trail as though it had been done by a hundred years of time. Only an Indian could do that.
“Forward, my comrades! Who knows what we shall find within the cave? I wish I had my blade. It would be most awkward to be attacked now.” But he kept pushing up the side of the mesa until the sheer wall frowned above us.
He stopped and pointed. “Look you at the cunning of the Indian. He has put these trees and bushes at the mouth of the cave, and he has made them look as though they had been here for years. I am afraid this means that he has conquered our men. But how could a horde of savages conquer trained soldiers?” And he looked from one to the other of us.
I shook my head and said nothing. It was Bender’s party and Bender could handle the explanations.
Bender fastened those pin-point eyes of his on the Mexican and said quietly, “Who are we to fear a few savages?” and pushed aside the brush.
“Charioteer, you are a man of courage!” said the Mexican. He reached out, grasped Bender by the shoulder and jerked him to one side. “But it is the part of a soldier to go first. Only I warn you, these redskins are fiends for torture. They gouge out the eyeballs and grind hot sand into the ears. They cut the skin off the soles of one’s feet and press cactus thorns into the flesh. They heat little splinters of wood and stick them into the body. They are devils when they capture one.”
Bender grunted. “Never mind that stuff. Let’s go ahead and get the gold.”
Chapter 5
Dust
Moreno shrugged and marched forward, going unarmed into a cave that he thought was filled with savages, who had been dead for three hundred years. It was the act of a brave man.
There was a narrow entrance. We had to stoop to get into it, but that entrance widened out within the first twenty feet. The cave went down on a sharp incline, but there were stone steps, worn smooth by many feet, and I groped my way in the darkness.
“There should be flint and steel here, a little tinder and a candle,” said the Mexican, pausing and groping.
Bender took a pocket flashlight from his coat and sent the beam flashing into the darkness.
The Mexican jumped back with an oath.
“Cascaras, charioteer, but you have magic of sorts! What kind of thing is that?”
“A magic light,” said Bender.
The Mexican regarded it for a moment with admiring eyes. Then he reached out and took it.
“It’s like the other magic: fine at first, but it may tire. I prefer the dependable light of my fathers before me. Here’s the flint and the steel, but, there’s no tinder. Surely that dust can’t be... Dios! It is!”
He looked at me, and I could see his eyes gleaming in the reflected light from the flash.
“There is too much magic around here,” he said. “I left that candle and the flint, steel, and tinder here on this rock shelf but last week. Now look at it. A hundred years might have passed, yes, two hundred years!”
And he scowled at me with an expression I didn’t like.
“You,” he said, “are the one who says but little. Yet you are never surprised, and you seem to know more about these magic things than this charioteer with the funny eyes. Speak!”
I smiled at him. “Better wait to argue about the magic until we find what has happened to your brave comrades. We waste time in idle talk. It seems to me you are better at talking than at rescuing comrades.”
The words snapped him out of it. He whirled.
“Right. First we will rescue those who need to be rescued. But you shall pay for those words! Blade to blade and foot to foot you shall make them good or eat them. To call Pablo Viscente de Moreno a coward, one must fight!”
And he was off down the stone stairway.
By the light of the flash I could see that it had been rounded by years and millions of feet. The very stairs had been worn in a deep passageway that bare feet alone had grooved into the rock.
“It was always here, this stairway,” said the soldier, as though he could read my thoughts. “But there is much that is strange. I will be glad to see my comrades, but I fear they are trapped by these savages.
“There must be treachery somewhere, and I will smell out the traitor and have his heart spitted with my blade. I remember something now of this place. It had to do with the feeling of sickness... There was a fight. Hundreds of savages came pouring down into the cave. I remember that which followed— Wait! It was off here to the right. The Indians crowded me into that little chamber. There were hundreds of them. I fought them and hacked them, and they shot their arrows at me, and there were spears. I was wounded. I remember a darkness that came over everything. My torch ceased to give light and I felt a drowsy feeling. At the time I thought it was death.
“But that must have been but a swooning, for I woke up at El Morro, the rock of the inscriptions. Let us see what happened here.”
He darted the beam of the flashlight into the interior of a round chamber which opened off from the main slope of the cave.
I caught the glimpse of the light on something white, and then he jumped back.
“Damn!” he cried. “I remember it now!”
For a moment he stood there, then he crossed himself and strode into the chamber.
There were skeletons there, and the floor of the cave was littered with bone dust. Bits of grinning skulls turned to dust when we touched them. There was a pile of bones in one end of the chamber from which there emerged a strip of glittering steel, reflecting in the beam of the flashlight.
The soldier leaned forward, grasped the blade from the bone heap and drew it toward him.
“Carramba!” I heard him hiss in a whisper. “It is my own. But my blade is rusted with blood. Look you, charioteer, at the incrusted blood upon it!”
He held it out and turned the light on it.
It was a wonderfully well balanced sword of finest steel. The hilt had been ornamented and incrusted with gold. There was a coat of arms upon the upper end of it.
In the shelter of the cave, in the dry climate of the desert country the blade had kept in splendid shape, almost as it had been laid down there some three hundred years ago. And who had laid it down? To whom did those bones belong?
The same question was in the mind of the soldier.
“Look you,” he said. “I was left here to guard this cave and this gold. There were two other men. The general was out making a raid, and meanwhile the savages swarmed down the stairs to attack us three. That is all I remember, that fight here. I went to sleep, or I swooned from loss of blood.
“And then I woke up at the inscription rock. I am still confused on the time. It was more than two weeks ago that I stood by my chief while he wrote his name upon that rock. After that came the fight. That is the last that I remember until I awoke by the rock.
“But now I am unwounded. When I swooned I had a hundred wounds. The blood poured down my arm until the hilt of the sword slipped in my fingers through the slime of my own blood. There were dancing savages grinning at me, shooting arrows at me... Now I wake up two days’ march away and am unwounded. What sort of magic is this?”
And he glared at Bender, with the pin-point eyes.
Emilio Bender did some tall lying, and did it fast.
“I am glad,” he said, simply and in a low tone of voice. “We were in the desert and we heard the cries of savage Indians. We knew that they were torturing white men. We sneaked our way toward the place from which the cries came, and we saw little fires, and there were white men who were lashed to a heavy stake, and the fire was eating its way into their flesh.