I doubt if we could have found our way back to the place where the gold was stored had it not been for the uncanny sense of perception of the Mexican. He seemed able to see in the darkness, and he must have known the inside of that cave as a river pilot knows his stream. For he took us on a swift but silent walk until I could hear the wailing of women, and knew that we were approaching the scene of our conflict.
We had some light here, the light of a distant camp fire in the other chamber of the cave. The women had taken the bodies out into this chamber and built a fire. About this fire they rocked back and forth, wailing their thin chant of mourning.
They were as hypnotized with their grief as the Indian guard had been with the droned words of Emilio Bender.
Getting past them was easy, but we had to use considerable care to keep some of the children from spotting us. It was the older girls who made the trouble. They sat in on the mourning party, but youth is ever unable to concentrate for long upon any emotion other than love; and we could see the slender forms of the girls flitting about the mourning fire, putting on additional wood.
We finally reached the cleft where the gold had been stored. It was still there, intact.
Emilio Bender raked out the gold pieces and struck one of the matches. He devoured them with his eyes. There were golden ornaments, little gold images, even gold arrowheads.
In the greed of that moment, the man with the strange, aluminium-colored eyes forgot himself. He scooped such things as he desired into his pockets.
“This is my third,” he said, heedless of the fact he had taken a good three-quarters. “You two divide the rest and we’ll get going.”
It must have been the silence which warned him. It was the silence which precedes a storm, and Emilio Bender looked up to encounter the flaming gaze of the man who claimed to be Pablo Viscente de Moreno, a soldier who had marched the deserts three hundred-odd years ago.
“So!” yelled the soldier. “You would loot the plunder of a soldier, eh? You who claim to be a soldier, but are not even a charioteer!”
And the right hand of the soldier whipped the naked blade in a hissing arc.
“Arise and account!” shouted the soldier.
There was only the faintest light from the distant camp fires. They glinted in half reflections from the polished blade, and served to show the men as half-formed shadows moving against the chalklike wall of the cave.
“But think,” said Emilio Bender in his droning voice, “of what you can buy with that gold! Think of the sleep you have lost...”
I still believe that if he had surrendered the gold instead of trying to use his hypnotism he could have saved himself. But he was flushed by his success with the Indian and emboldened by greed.
“Sleep, sleep, sleep,” he droned. “You need to rest, to relax, to let your senses become warm and drowsy. You feel a strange quiet...”
It was then that the Mexican said something which has puzzled me, and will always puzzle me. Some of what had happened could be explained through the theory of dual personalities. But this remark tended to show that he knew.
“Quiet!” he shouted. “Sleep, you say! I have slept for three hundred years. Now look out for yourself!”
It happened so quickly that I could not interfere even had I wanted to. These two men had come to the final show-down, and that show-down was inevitable. The hypnotist had virtually created this strange man who was now challenging him. And the greed of the man with eyes like pin-points was bound to bring about such a conflict, sooner or later. As well sooner as later.
I heard the rasp of steel on steel, and an exclamation from the soldier.
“You would try to slip a blade into my stomach from below, would you? Then stand up and fight, man to man.”
“Quick!” yelled Bender to me. “Run him through in the back and we will divide the gold.”
I know of no remark that better illustrated the character of the man. It was his last.
There was the whirl of a blade, a cut, a thrust, a groan and something staggered back and slumped to the rock.
“Fool!” grunted the soldier. “You would pose as a soldier and turn out a thief!”
I groped for the pulse of the man with pin-point eyes. There was no pulse. His wrist was limp and already chilling with death.
The soldier saw my motion and laughed bitterly. “Am I so clumsy then that when I run my blade through their hearts you can feel a beat in the wrist? He is dead, I tell you. Come.”
He stooped and took the gold from the pockets of the dead man, and he made a rough division with me.
“Thus do soldiers share their spoils upon the field of battle,” he said.
I crammed my gold into my pockets.
From the main body of the cave was a terrific clamor of noise. The Indians were loose and on the trail, rushing down the cave toward us.
“Quick, run!” I yelled.
“Run? Why? Are we not two soldiers?”
“They have guns,” I said. “We have no chance against them.”
I doubt if I could have moved him, but, of a sudden, he spoke in a thicker, slower tone.
“Very well, then, let us run. I know this cave. Follow me.”
He ran; and as he ran his steps became more heavy, slower. The body gradually lost the spring and became as the muscle-bound body of a cholo laborer.
We ran through the dark, he leading the way.
“Stoop here,” he called; and I stooped, felt a low archway graze my body.
“There is another entrance, a secret entrance,” he said. “I hope I can find it. I am getting drowsy. Some one is shouting in my ear to go away and leave his body alone. Why should I have some one shout at me to leave my own body?
“Carramba! It’s all because of that man with the funny eyes. I know now that I must die because I killed him. As his corpse gets cold, so does my own soul get cold. I am paying a price, and yet it is not a price. It is something I have already paid... Here, amigo, take all the gold. I would rather you had it than the strange man who is pushing me out of my skin. How he pushes! And he is slow and stolid. He could never oust me but for the death of the man with the strange eyes. I can feel an inner chill.”
He stopped in his tracks, thrust golden ornaments and turquoise necklaces into my hands.
“Fill — your — pockets... Adios, amigo!”
And he was gone. I knew instantly when the other came into possession of his body.
“Que es? What is it?” he demanded, Mexican fashion, and his tone was dull as the tone of a man who is slowly awakening from a long sleep.
“We are in a cave,” I said. “Follow me.”
He accepted the statement with the unreasoning stolidity of his kind. I led the way in the same general direction the soldier had been piloting me. It was dark, and yet it was not entirely dark. There was a half light in the air, and a freshness which reminded me of dawn.
We pushed forward, seeing the vague shape of walls and minarets on our sides. I thought there was an opening overhead and glanced upward. I saw the pale glow of a star, pin-pointing out before the dawn, and I thought of the man with pin-point eyes.
Somewhere, we had left the cave and were in a canon which towered on either side in great cliffs. The cliffs spread apart. The floor of the canon became rough and bowlder-strewn. We fought our way forward. The light grew stronger, and dawn smells were in the air.
We found a deer trail angling from the floor of the canon to the side of the mountain, around it to the desert plain below the mesa. I led the way along this. There were no signs of Indians.