“You were lying unconscious on one side. Your turn for the torture was to come, and my friend and I rescued you. There was a great fight with the savages. And we would have been caught had it not been for the magic chariot. But we loaded you into the chariot and took you to a safe place in the mountains. There you recovered your health, but you could not remember how or when you came there or where you had been.
“We took you back to the rock so that the sight of the inscription might bring back your memory. Your wounds have healed, and the savages now have gone.”
With eyes that were clouded with thought the Mexican looked at him.
“Then,” he said, “you are no charioteer at all, but a brave soldier who rescued me from the savages.”
Bender nodded.
“That is right,” he said.
The Mexican clapped him on the shoulder.
“Ha!” he said. “A soldier!” And his eyes glittered. He turned to me. “Then you, too, are a soldier?”
I sensed trouble coming, and I wasn’t going to lie about it.
“No,” I said. “I am what you’d call a charioteer. Civilization has decayed my courage and spoiled my fighting trim. If you want to list Bender as a soldier that’s all right. I’m a charioteer.”
He stepped back, whirled the sword in a glittering arc, made a thrust or two.
I’ve seen fencers in my time, but I have never seen any one who could get the things out of a sword blade that man could. The muscles seemed to have been oiled and greased, made especially for sword handling.
“But the gold,” Bender was prompting him.
“My comrades!” snapped the soldier. “Is it too late to rescue them? How long was it since you found me?”
The man with the metallic eyes glittered his magnetic gaze straight into the pupils of the soldier.
“It has been more than a month,” he said.
“More than a month!” repeated the Mexican in wonder.
What would he have said if he had known it had been more than three hundred years more than a month? Perhaps nothing could have surprised him very deeply after his ride in the magic chariot.
So I was treated to the spectacle of a man picking his three-hundred-year-old sword from the bony hand of his own skeleton and starting out to avenge the fate of two comrades who had been dead for a third of a thousand years.
Chapter 6
A Monster
I got Bender off to one side.
“You’ve found the cave now. But you’d better do some of your hypnotic stuff and bring this fellow back to earth. There are natives all around here, and if I have any accurate knowledge as to where we are I’d say there was an Indian pueblo within a few miles of here. This is quite a cave, and we’re likely to find the Indians are familiar with it.
“If this chap runs onto some Indians down here, you can figure what’s going to happen. Better snap him out of it and we can find the gold somehow or other.”
Bender looked at me, and for the first time I caught a greenish glint of panic in his aluminium-colored eyes.
“I can’t hypnotize him any more,” he told me. “I’ve tried it half a dozen times. He’s dangerous, but there’s nothing we can do about it. The primary personality, Ramon Ayala the Mexican, I can hypnotize any time I want. But this secondary personality has too strong a will. I can’t do a thing with him.”
“Where,” I asked, “did this secondary personality come from?”
“It must be evidence of reincarnation,” he said. “I have always believed in it. This proves it. The individual is made up of hundreds of thousands of personalities. The channel from the conscious to the subconscious is well developed, and the experiences of the conscious mind are transmitted faithfully. But the channel from the subconscious to the conscious is not developed. That is why we don’t see the tangible evidence of reincarnation in—”
He was interrupted at that point by a roar.
“By my sword!” swore the soldier. “The man who has left his bones here is a robber and a thief. He has even stolen the gold chain and cross from around my neck. Look, I tell you! It is mine, and look at the shape it is in. It is blackened, the links of the chain are corroded. He well deserved slaying.
“But, mark you, my comrades, there is some foul miasma here which rots bodies quickly. For these are the bones of Indians whom I slew myself with this very sword, and but a little over a month ago. You are sure of the date?”
Bender nodded easily.
“Certain,” he said. “But let’s go find the gold.”
“Gold!” bellowed the Mexican. “Let us go find my brave comrades, or let us avenge them.”
“You are but one,” tentatively suggested Bender.
“Two!” snapped the Mexican. “You forget that you are also a soldier. Two soldiers and a charioteer. Diablo! What more do you want? We will avenge our brave soldiers who have died the death of the Indians’ torture!”
And he was off down the main slope of the cave, brandishing his sword in a glittering arc.
Bender leaned toward me. “I left my revolver in the car. Have you a weapon?”
I shook my head. I had nothing except two fists and a jackknife.
We followed the soldier, hurrying to keep up with the circle of illumination which was cast by the flashlight. There was no time for conversation, little for thought. Bender was worrying about the gold. I was worrying about what was going to happen. Perhaps it was a presentiment, perhaps it was the uncanny atmosphere of trailing around after a warrior who had been dead for three hundred years, but there were cold chills racing along my spine.
For we couldn’t control this soldier. I knew it. Bender was going to find it out, if he didn’t know it already. With the passing of every single minute the strange secondary personality that was the individuality of Pablo Viscente de Moreno, a soldier who had campaigned the deserts under General Don Diego de Vargas, and who had been dead three hundred years, became more firmly ensconced in the body of a cholo Mexican named Ramon Ayala.
And the personality of that soldier was something to be reckoned with. Civilization has done things to us. We have become weaklings, the whole race, believe it or not. It isn’t so much the physical strength that has ebbed from us, as it is the spiritual courage which we should have. Here was a man who had lived by the sword and had died by the sword. He was one who had lived his life, enjoying its every moment. His vitality showed it, made us seem as sick shadows.
Here was a man who had been raised at a time when one must be able to preserve his life in order to live. He couldn’t call a cop or rely on an injunction if his neighbor got crusty. He had to stand and fight, and that was the life he enjoyed.
We talk proudly of our hardy forbears who went westward across the plains in Eighteen Forty-nine. But how of those soldiers who campaigned the deserts in Sixteen Hundred-odd? Those men were traversing trackless wastes whose very nature and extent they knew nothing of. They didn’t have covered wagons and sturdy oxen. They didn’t have a green and fertile goal at the end of their march.
No, they simply headed their horses into the dry and burning desert, surrounded by hostile tribes, armed only with the weapons of ancient warfare, and knowing not what was before them.
Such was the man who strode in front of me, whirling his sword in a glittering arc for the very joy of life and combat.
And in the chamber behind me were the bones of this very man, dead three hundred years.
Is it any wonder that the cool air of the cave made the perspiration on my forehead seem dank and clammy?