The stone slab weighed at least four hundred pounds. But it came slowly, steadily up in Benson’s steel hands till it could be slid to one side.
Rough stairs were revealed. Benson went down them.
Every step convinced him that no one had been in here from the time the steps had been carved until now. The stone was rough from ancient chisels, and had not been worn smooth by many feet. And at the foot of the steps, lying almost in the center, was a rough circle that glittered dim yellow. He picked it up.
It was a carved, heavy plaque of solid gold.
With his stained face as expressionless as something carved from mahogany, Benson went on. The tunnel from the stairs was not long. It ended in a blank wall. But in the wall was another copper ring.
Benson pulled. There was a tremor. He leaped back.
The ring opened up the tunnel, all right; but in a way to trap an ordinary man. It was another of the ancient Aztec death traps. For a tug on it brought the whole wall down on whoever pulled — several tons of stone. Only one knowing the secret — or a man able to move like light itself with the first faint rock tremor — could escape death.
The fall of wall bared a cave or chamber beyond. But it was pitch dark. Daylight from the rock stairs carried barely to the mouth of the chamber and did not penetrate inside.
Benson had felt flint and steel in the tattered jacket he wore. He got them out, ripped a strip from the already ragged pants, and struck sparks. There was a smolder that leaped to a small, reluctant flame when he blew on it. He held up the flaming strip of cotton like a torch.
The average man would have gone stark mad with what the flame revealed. Benson merely stood a little more still than usual, and stared with pale and deadly eyes at stuff that had no meaning to him since the tragic loss of his wife and daughter, for whose sake alone he might have been excited about this. But it was a startling sight just the same.
The cave was some twenty feet wide and ten high, and went back farther than the light from the cloth strip could penetrate. The stuff that was piled in the cave from wall to wall and almost to the ceiling, with one narrow aisle in the middle, went back out of sight, too.
Gold! The stuff that had brought the Spaniards to Mexico. The stuff for which they had murdered the gold’s owners, the Aztecs.
To the end, the Spaniards had insisted that the huge quantities of gold they took back home in galleons was a fraction of the total. To the end, they had maintained that the great central hoard, the real wealth of the tribe, had been hidden from them and was untapped.
They had been right. Because here it was.
There were piles of gold slabs an inch thick by six to ten square. The legends of temples and priestly courtyards floored with solid gold had been correct. Here were the slabs, torn up and hidden to protect them from the invaders.
There were crude statues of gold several feet high and apparently solid. There were disks and plaques and bas-relief slabs of gold, ponderous in size. There were countless gold bells and rough ingots from which more of the plaques had been destined to be hammered. There were sheets of gold.
It was probably the greatest single mass of the yellow stuff that any human eyes had looked on at one time, barring a national mint. The yellow hoard of the Aztecs. Wealth uncountable.
“So you’re not quite the harmless coffee bean you made out to be!” a voice snapped behind Benson. “You knew where this was — which is more than we knew. Thanks for leading me to it, pal. Your bones can guard it—”
Benson had whirled, like light, strip of cloth still burning in his hands. At the entrance of the treasure room stood the man called Pete, gun leveled.
Pete never finished his sentence. From the “Indian’s” immobile face were glaring deadly, almost colorless eyes. In their menace they seemed actually to send out little sparks. There was only one pair of eyes on earth like that.
“You!” croaked the man. And fired.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Primitive Mint
The big tree, towering above everything for miles around, was a little world of its own. A dozen machine guns couldn’t dislodge Nellie and Mac and Smitty from it, because they couldn’t be seen through the thick foliage. Gas couldn’t hurt them because it couldn’t rise to where they were.
But already, at four in the afternoon, they were burning with thirst. It was just a hint that their stay in this place of safety was very limited. They’d have to come down soon.
Mac and Smitty talked it over. They agreed that their best chance to get down would be when night fell. Although it wasn’t much of a chance, at that. As darkness clamped down more and more, their ambushers would simply creep closer and closer to the tree, to be sure there was no escape.
The fact that the three handling the machine guns were none of Borg’s men, but three Indians scarred by a dozen revolutions in their hot-tempered land, wouldn’t have made Mac and Smitty feel any better about it. Where they might have escaped the eyes of white men, they hadn’t a chance against the lynx eyes of natives!
On another fork of the great tree, Nellie listened to the two of them without really hearing what they said. A plan of her own was forming in her mind.
Fragile and dainty-looking as a porcelain doll, she had already proved herself to be an adversary more to be respected than most men. And certainly one with more nerve than most men. As her present plan showed.
She was thinking of something Benson had said. She had come in a very short time to have a very large respect for this man whom Smitty and Mac called chief. Indeed, unconsciously, she had taken, in her own mind, to calling him the chief, herself.
Benson had wanted to locate the gold hoard because “it would make it easier to ambush Borg’s crew.” It had built up an instant picture in her mind.
Borg’s men were the personification of greed. They had murdered for gold. They had forgotten all the decencies. If they found it, wouldn’t they even forget their own personal safety for a few minutes, too?
She had a picture of an underground treasure chamber, with Borg and his murderers in it, staring open-mouthed at heaps of gold, forgetful of all else. If that picture could ever come true — couldn’t the men be trapped in there while they were off guard?
So Nellie’s scheme was to try to find the treasure, leave an obvious lead so the men could “discover” it themselves a little later — and then bottle them up in the ground as they had almost bottled Benson and his followers.
To do that meant finding the treasure to use as bait, of course. But Nellie had an idea on that, too.
The hieroglyphs from their section of the belt had included the symbol for the “rock that stands like a man,” and concluded with the ideograph that stood for gold — or the setting sun. In this case, might not the symbol mean both gold and the setting sun? Coupled with the statue, might not the message be that the gold was under the right hand, or the western hand of the statue?
Benson and Chandler had read one of the symbols as that of the rising sun, and had placed the treasure to the east of the ridge. It seemed to her just as reasonable to use the other symbol and place it to the west — and directly at the base of the great rock instead of at a distance to its right.
That would place the treasure up on the ridge itself.
Nellie looked out at the ridge, a hundred and eighty yards off. A little under where she leaned, the solid tops of the smaller jungle trees formed a rough floor over the jungle earth so that all you saw was green. Pity it couldn’t be walked on like a floor.