Chapter X: Part 10

“As I said before,” the man said, “I don’t believe for one moment that he had a mother and girl. In all the months I knew him I never knew him mention them nor have any letter from them. Put him out of your mind. He was a dark horse and a tank. It’s my believe that he was wanted for something: anyway he was under a cloud. Now about yourself: you say you want to get to Anselmo? Is that near Santa Barbara? Well, if it is, it’s seventy miles from here; and here is twenty miles from any road there.”

“Could you let one of your Indios guide me to the road there, early to-morrow?” Hi asked. “My eyes are well enough. The swelling will probably be quite gone by to-morrow.”

“I couldn’t, to-morrow,” the man said.

“Why not? I’d be ever so much obliged if you would.”

“I couldn’t send an Indio to-morrow: he wouldn’t go if I did: it will be one of their moon-feasts.”

“Well, then; why not to-night?”

“You’re not fit to go to-night: besides, these Aracuis won’t move a step at night. I don’t blame them. The snakes are abroad. Then there are tigers. Besides, there are too many ghosts for them.”

“I would chance the ghosts,” Hi said, “if you would direct me on my way.”

“You would never find your way,” the man said. “I couldn’t hope to show it to you in a first quarter moon.”

“Will you show it to me to-morrow?”

“Yes, I’ll show it to you to-morrow.”

“Early; first thing? Would you mind starting early, so that I may reach the road before dark?”

“I’ll start fairly early.”

“Will you tell me what you are?” Hi said. “I mean, what you do out here in the wilderness?”

“I?” the man said. “I’m one of the damned lost souls, who like my own way and mind my own business.”

“Certainly,” Hi said. “I didn’t mean to be inquisitive.”

“You say you haven’t any money?”

“No.”

“Do you play cribbage?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not much fun playing anything without having something on the game. Haven’t you got a ticker?”

“Yes, but the water’s got into it. It’s stopped.”

“Then you haven’t got a tosser?”

“No.”

“Damn well on your uppers?”

“Yes.”

“My God, My Father, while I stray. You’d better go and turn in, then, if you want this early start. I can’t play beggar-my-neighbour with you, like a damned kid. Next time you look in, you’d better bring some ooftish to cover your cards with: your mess-bills, too, if you don’t mind.”

“I’m sorry that I’ve no money,” Hi said. “But as for mess-bills, if you’ll tell me your name and agents, I’ll pay what you think fair for what I have had here. Or you can take my watch. It is a good one and nearly new: it will go well when cleaned.”

“We’ll talk about bills to-morrow,” the man said. “You’d better go and turn in.”

“Very well. Good-night.”

The man did not answer. He stood staring at Hi out of his cold, hard blue eyes: his lip was lifted in a sneer. Hi felt that he had never yet met a man so hateful. “He is a loathsome swine,” he thought. “A vile, taunting, silver-ring tick.”

He came to his hut and again had the sensation that someone was there: this time so strongly that he called out. “Yes, who is it, there?” before he saw that there was no one. “It is odd,” he said, “I keep thinking that there’s a man here. I’ve got to be all jumpy from being in the forest; and then, this hammock-post is like a man, and gives me the illusion every time. I wish there were a man here, Dudley Wigmore or another; then I might not be so dependent on this sneering devil.”

Still raging against the man, he turned into his hammock to think of things which did not bear thought; Carlotta and Rosa depending on him; Carlotta’s marvellous grace, beauty and goodness; now in gaol among blackguards at the whim of a madman; then, himself, who was to have saved her, all astray in a forest, all those miles from even beginning to send word about her. There was no sleep for one with thoughts like that.

Sleep would not have been easy in any case, for the village was celebrating something, a hunt or a moon-feast: he could not tell what. Half a dozen drums were beating. Presently the boys of the tribe lit a bonfire in the midst of the _patio_ or space in the midst of the village. They piled it high with wood which the women had collected during the day. As soon as it burned well, they began to march round it, blowing into horns of one note and flutes of two notes: some of them clacked discs of hard wood or rattled beans in goobies: those who could not make music, sang. The little, sharp-eared dogs sitting on their haunches at the hut doors put back their heads, till they seemed all throat, and sang likewise. The babies wakened from their sleep wailed upon high notes. The men of the tribe sang or told stories: the women and little girls dragged wood for the fire.

“I might be a thousand miles from anywhere,” Hi thought. “It may take me days to get to Anselmo or anywhere else.”

The bonfire lit up the inside of his hut so as to shew the tin boxes marked D and W. Since he could not sleep, his mind turned to these boxes. “There is something queer about this man,” Hi said to himself. “There is something odd about his relations with Wigmore. He said something about these solitary prospectors being always bad eggs; well, he doesn’t strike one as being a very lofty egg. He says he went through Wigmore’s things and found no letters. I know that there were letters, which he pitched on to the rubbish pile only a little while ago. He made no effort to find Wigmore’s friends. It’s true that he says he sent in an account of his death; yet he wears Wigmore’s belt and uses his rifle. And then, to keep away from the poor chap while he was ill: good Lord.”

There rose in his mind suddenly the image of the forest fever, as a grey thing without a head, a thing like a worm, which said: “It is just after the rains now: very likely I have put a touch upon you, so that people will leave you in a hut till you are dead. It is a very catching complaint, the forest fever.”

“Very likely,” he said, “very likely I have caught the fever: in which case they’ll never know at home what became of me: no one will ever know, except the Indians who will bury me here.”

“I’m going to look in those boxes,” he said, turning out of his hammock. “Perhaps there is some map or chart, if Wigmore was a prospector. With a map I might be able to find out where I am and how to get away from here.”

He pulled out the nearer of the two tin boxes from its covering of creeper. It felt and proved to be empty save for two small studs and a trouser button. He tipped the box on its side, to make sure that there was no label or address. “No further help there,” he said. “Now for the other.”

The second box had been used to block a hole which the dogs had routed in the hut wall. It had been weighted inside with a biggish hewn stone, so that the dogs should not thrust it aside. Beside the stone were some scraps of rubbish which Hi brought out to the light to examine. The things were:

A buckle of a strap.

Two halves of a lead pencil which had fallen apart.

The lead of the pencil.

A mouldy piece of knotted ribbon, which looked as if it had once gone round a packet of letters.

Two sodden letters in envelopes, both post-marked Shepton Mallet, the one on February 1st, the other February 8th, 1886, and addressed, “Dudley Wigmore, Esq., c/o The United Sugar Company, Santa Barbara.” One of these letters was signed “from mother”: the other was from “your loving May.”

Last of all was a much-weathered, ant-eaten pocket-book, sodden with damp and so clutched together by a rubber band as to be liker a piece of mouldy wood than a book.

“This is queer,” Hi said. “These letters have been opened and carried about in a man’s pocket. They are dated only about thirteen months ago. Yet that fellow said that Wigmore died a couple of years ago.” Either Wigmore was alive a year ago, or that tick opened his letters a year after he was dead. It isn’t likely that that fellow could have made a mistake about Wigmore’s death. He said ‘a couple of years.’ One could hardly go wrong on a point of that sort. One would remember when the only white man within twenty miles died.

“Then that fellow said, that Wigmore was a prospector, a pleasure-miner, and drank like a fish. Now it’s odd that there are none of the prospector’s things here: no pans and sieves for washing, no scales nor any stuff for making assays. Then if he drank like a fish, it is odd that there are no bottles left. It wouldn’t have been easy to drink like a fish out here; but if he drank at all he drank from bottles, and there are no bottles nor parts of bottles. Now father said that any forest Indian would work for a week for a bottle, which is a very valuable possession here. They make bottles into lamps, canteens, jewels, knives, scrapers and arrow-heads. There isn’t a trace of a bottle in this settlement, that I can see. So probably Wigmore didn’t drink like a fish. Probably also he wasn’t a prospector. Probably also he didn’t die a couple of years ago, but a year at most. This man has been lying about him. If he lied about his life, probably he has lied about his death. There has been a Wigmore here; that Wigmore is probably dead. The man who knows about his death has his gun and cartridges, and perhaps also his gold-claim and his mining things. The man who lies about him has profited by his disappearance. Supposing this man, whoever he is, this hundred yards Blue man, should have murdered Wigmore, in order to take his things?

“Who is this hundred yards Blue man? I’ll bet that name isn’t his real name, but a false name given to make me think that he is related to decent people. He is not a gentleman nor a man of ordinary decent feeling: he is a tick or criminal. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he has murdered Wigmore. If he thinks that I think that, he’ll probably murder me. I don’t think he’d think twice about murdering a chap. I’ll have to be jolly careful to-morrow. But, first, I’ll look at this book, to see if it will help at all.”

The book proved to be little better than pulp. It had been at one time a neat oblong pocket-book with a cover of black leather: now the dye in the cover and the endpapers had soaked through into the leaves, which were stuck together and stained like crushed blackberries. In the centre were two leaves which contained some legible jottings in pencil in a neat handwriting. They were seemingly columns of names. Closer examination shewed Hi that they were lists of words in different tongues. The left hand columns contained English words, the other columns were the Indian words in different dialects.

“It’s a vocabulary or dictionary. A polyglot Indian dictionary,” Hi said. “That explains what the man was. He was one of these men who write books about the Indians, and Indian grammars. This isn’t the hand of a man who goes pleasure-mining. This chap was a scholar. The only prospecting this fellow did was finding a new tribe with a different dialect.”

He had been standing bent over the book close to the door of the hut, where the glow of the bonfire lit his examination. Something told him suddenly that he was being observed. Looking up, to his left, to the point prompted to him, he saw Letcombe-Bassett standing at the mouth of another hut, three parts hidden, watching him. “The beast has been spying on me,” Hi thought, turning away. “He knows that I think things are a little fishy: he has been watching to see what I have been doing.”

The thought of being spied upon made him at first uneasy, then gay. “If it comes to spying,” he thought, “I’ll see if I cannot lead you a dance.”

He put the book on the shelf of the post for the night: then he turned into his hammock, thinking uneasy thoughts till he was almost asleep.

He was lying high up in his hammock, with his head propped by what sailors would have called the nettles. A faint noise at the mouth of his hut made him instantly alert: someone had crept stealthily thither, breathing anxiously.

“Yes? Who is there?” Hi called.

“Oh, are you awake?” Letcombe-Bassett answered. “I was going quietly so as not to wake you. I was afraid you might be asleep. I only wanted to say that we’ll start in good time to-morrow, if you feel up to moving.”

“To Anselmo? I’m up to moving.”

“I know nothing about Anselmo. I can start to set you on a road which will take you to Santa Barbara.”

“That will do. Thank you.”

“Right. We’ll start then after an early chow. Sleep easy.”

He moved across the hut entrance towards his own hut; Hi wished him good-night. “He’s a pretty bad egg,” Hi thought. “He is here for no good and he means me no good.”

These thoughts in his brain slowly merged into the noises of the village, which in turn grew into a night that covered him: he fell asleep in his hammock half covered by a quilt of cotton.

On this the sixth day of Hi’s journey, the five hundred odd men of Don Manuel’s army made their first march of fifty miles to the eastward, so as to camp at the water-holes at Amarga. At the water-holes, they were joined by some seventy more men, who had either followed them, or ridden in from the north or south. When they left Amarga they were more than six hundred strong.

XVI

It may have been the cold working upon a body worn by anxieties and hardships: it may have been confusion in a brain nine-tenths asleep; or it may have been another thing. As he slept, Hi became aware that Dudley Wigmore was in the hut, sitting on a box, waiting for him to wake. He could see him distinctly; a sad-looking man, of the middle build, fair-haired, blue-eyed, gentle and thoughtful, yet with a clench of resolution, in mouth and chin, which made the face memorable.

“I’m an ethnologist,” Wigmore was saying. “You want to escape from here without fail. This is Murder Poblacion.”

“Is it?” Hi answered. “By George, did that tick murder you? Wait a minute: I’ll be awake in a minute: then, I’ll ask you something.” He struggled with his sleep as he spoke, beating aside the quilt. He sat up to see Wigmore beside him, sad-eyed, resolute, yet in some way remote from this world. Wigmore was looking at him with a look so sad that he could hardly bear it; he was plainly there, in a suit of old drill, real and touchable. Yet in an instant Hi saw the thatch of the hut wall through the man’s body: the body was and then was not, like mist in a change of wind: Dudley Wigmore was gone.

“By George,” Hi said. “This is Murder Poblacion. I want to escape from here. That was pretty real. By George, if that wasn’t a dream, I’ve seen a ghost. I believe that that was Wigmore’s ghost.”

He was not scared by the ghost, if it were a ghost; it had come with too serious a warning for that. He was thrilled through with excitement; he was pitted against a murderer in a place twenty miles from friend or weapon.

“Golly,” he said. “That proves it to my mind. I’ve no further doubt that that man murdered Wigmore: he did.”

As he turned out of his hammock, he saw that it was almost dawn: the young men were mustering to a hunt. One of them began to make a melancholy noise upon a flute, to which the others answered by tapping upon their blow-pipes. Women were already at work at the cassava presses or at splitting away the twigs from the branches brought for firing. The young men moved off into the forest: the young women in a group moved off to bathe: the babies, dogs, pigeons and parrots came all to life at once: none but the grown men remained in their hammocks, even they were smoking.

“I’ll go through that pocket-book by daylight,” Hi said. “Perhaps I shall be able to make out rather more of it, when I have the light.” He put his hand to the shelf for the book, and found it gone: it had not fallen to the floor nor into his hammock: it was gone.

“I say,” Hi thought. “That fellow must have been watching me last night, to some purpose. That was why he crept to the door, that first time. When I was asleep, he must have crept in again and bagged it from where I put it. All right. It’s just as well to know that he is roused. I am roused, too. But, by Jove, he’ll never let me get to Anselmo, now that it has come to this.”

He was standing, thinking these thoughts, with a daunted heart, near the door of his hut, when a sentence floated into his mind as clearly as though a voice had spoken in his ear. “He will never let you get to Anselmo,” the sentence came. “Look out for him.”

It came with the distinctness of personality from the depths of his being to voice the thought matured there. “It is true,” he repeated, “he will never let me go. I must look out for him. But what am I to do?”

He had no time to think of what he was to do, because at that moment Letcombe-Bassett appeared: he seemed to be in a much better temper than hitherto.

“So you’re up,” he said. “Good. There’s nothing like the bally dawn in these bally tropics: one soon gets into forest habits here: they are the only ways that keep one alive here. As soon as Chug-chug brings our chow, we’ll pasea.”

“It’s jolly good of you,” Hi said, “to see me off upon my road.”

“Not a bit,” the man answered. “Out here, an Englishman with another Englishman, that is the least one could do.”

Hi thought that to see a man off the premises is perhaps the least that one can do: he also thought that the man’s mood had strangely changed for the better since the night before. Then he had been savage at the thought of showing the way: now he was eager to show it. It occurred to him that there might be a reason for this change, and that this reason, coming from an unpleasant nature, might be an unpleasant one.

“I suppose I might reach the road before to-night?” Hi said.

“Reach what road?”

“The road to Santa Barbara?”

“Oh, that road,” the man said. “I’m not so sure.”

“But you said it was only twenty miles.”

“Did I? Hell. Well, it’s more than that. But I suppose you might reach it. Yes, if you’re not lamed or crocked or ill you ought to reach it.”

“And can you let me take some food and water?”

“You’d better not take those here: you’ll only have to lug them along. No. We’ll stop at another settlement, some miles from here, and get a swag and a gooby for you there. Then you won’t have so much to carry. But here is Chug-chug with the chow. I always have chocolate, Spanish-fashion here, for breakfast. A man has to be pretty hard up to drink maté in cold blood. I’d as soon drink swipes at a wedding.”

After breakfast, the man suggested that they should start. He had his sporting rifle under his arm and his bandolier buckled to him. Hi kept his eyes from resting on the letters D. W. so plainly stamped upon them. He had taken pains to avoid any reference to D. W. He wondered, as they set out, whether he would not come to know the contents of that rifle during the course of the morning. He wondered whether that was why the man had dissuaded him from taking food and drink. “Naturally, if I’m going to be shot,” he thought, “he won’t want to waste food and drink as well as a cartridge. But am I going to be shot? Does he intend to kill me? How am I to dodge it, if he does? I can’t refuse to go with him. That would bring things to a crisis at once. I must go with him, and look alive and trust to my luck. The worse I expect, the better I shall find.”

The man led the way out of the village, across the river, where the Indians were bathing, to a narrow path through a cane-brake. The set of the path was to the south and west, which Hi knew could not be the course for Santa Barbara.

“This can’t be the way,” Hi said. “Santa Barbara must be north and east of this.”

“Of course it is,” the man said. “But this is the way. It swings north after a bit, but anyway you have to go west first of all, to clear the marshes. All the mountain water which isn’t soaked up by the trees seeps out at the foothills and makes marsh. You’d better let me lead you.”

“Lead the way, then,” said Hi. “It’s jolly good of you to trouble.” He thought that at any rate it was jolly good to have the man with the gun in front of him. The path was a well-trodden, very narrow Indian track, running irregularly between walls of high growing canes, which glittered and rattled. They had hard golden shafts from which pale sheaths, like corn-husks, peeled. High up, seven feet above his head, their shoots were bluish or seemed bluish from the sky above; while the sky in the narrow gash above was greenish from their yellowness. The path curved in and out, exactly as the leader of the tribe had swerved from snag or snake long years before, when the Indians had first gone that way. It was impossible to keep direction after the first few minutes. The most that Hi could say was that he never headed to the east, because he never had the sun in his eyes.

“We’ll keep forest habits, going,” the man said. “We’ll not speak on the trail.”

Hi was much relieved at not having to talk. He watched the man’s back in front of him, going on and on with the head down. “What is the brute thinking?” Hi wondered. “How soon he shall turn round and bowl me over? Or what a neat job he made of Wigmore and how it can be bettered? Or is he debating whether I’m too much of a kid to bother about? As to that, I wouldn’t mind betting that he’s made up his mind to do for me. The question is, when?”

That was the main question; but the other questions were not answered, they recurred continually, the question, “Will he?” and the other question, “What can I do to stop him?”

There seemed to be no likely way of stopping him. Hi’s mind was working very clearly and weighing all likely chances. The man was armed; he was carrying his rifle at the ready. He was a quick man, probably trained by years in the forest to wheel and make snapshots suddenly. He was a strong man, much stronger certainly than Hi. If Hi were to dart in upon him, to seize the gun, he would certainly settle Hi without trouble; being stronger, quite as active, much more dangerous, and in better condition. If Hi were to lag behind a little and then turn and run back, he would only run to this man’s village, where no one could direct him to safety, and all would tell which way he had taken. If he were to leap to the side into the cane-brake, he might be lucky; he might by some miracle leap into cover which would hide him: far more probably he would at the first spring land in some thicket which would hold him, like another Absalom, till his enemy could deal with him. Even if he were not shot in the first minutes he would still be alone in the bush, lost, not knowing his whereabouts nor his course. He might wander for days there without finding a way out.

“What I must do,” he thought, “is to wait, if he’ll let me, till I can see some real chance of escaping, and then take my chance: the first that comes: any way of getting away: there’s none at present.

“But why does he lead me all this way? We must be three miles from the village. If he had only wanted to get rid of me, he could have potted me long ago and put me on an ant’s nest. Perhaps, after all, he is setting me on my way to Anselmo or to the road. By Jove, if he is running straight, I’ll apologise to him. But I’ll bet he isn’t. He’s got something in his mind and the time for our settlement hasn’t come yet.”

They went on in Indian file through the cane-brake, neither speaking, with strange thoughts and threats passing from one to the other, till the cane-brake gave way to a jungle, which arched over the path, shutting out the sky. They walked in a tunnel of greenness, pierced with slats of glare, down which flakes of living glitter and colour floated and soared, or sometimes paused as butterflies. Hi looked for some place to his right side into which he could dart for safety: no place shewed there. The man led on without uttering a word.

After half a mile of the tunnel of the jungle, Hi saw in front of him the glare of a clearing, and at the same moment felt or heard a call within his mind, to look to his right side. Afterwards he decided that he heard the call as sound and at the same time felt it within him as warning. He looked, as the call bade, to his right side, with the sense that that part of the wood was evil. It looked more than usually black and joyless, being a thick cover of trees made like stage Druids with lichens. Yet at the point where he looked there was a space of mournfulness, in the midst of which, upon a mound from which a foot protruded, he saw the figure of Dudley Wigmore, as he had appeared at the hut the night before. The face was sad as it had been the night before: it had a look of hopeless brooding.

Hi was quite certain that he had seen it: he looked for one second: it was certainly there: he looked again: it certainly was not there; though the foot was there, a white man’s foot, in a boot. He looked to his front instantly, just in time to catch the look of Letcombe-Bassett, who glanced back at that moment to see what he was looking at.

“We’re nearly there now,” he said.

Hi felt that they were, but answered: “Surely not at the road?”

“No,” the man said, “not at the road, but what we’re coming to.”

“How far have we come?” Hi asked. “Four miles?”

“Call it two and a bit.”

“It seems more, in this forest,” Hi said.

“I’m used to this forest,” the man said. “Do you find it gloomy at all?”

“No,” Hi said. “Not when I can see the sunlight.”

“The last bit is a bit gloomy,” the man said. “It would be a good place for putting anyone away, if anyone were inclined that way.”

“I suppose it would,” Hi said, becoming very watchful. “I didn’t consider it in that light. I suppose you always run some risk from Indians in a forest like this? Or are you too much feared by the Indians?”

“You never know where you stand with Indians,” the man answered. “But this is the sort of place they would choose, if they wanted me to pass over Jordan. And no one would be any the wiser. One would be bones in a week and green plantation in two: undiscoverable; just like part of the world.”

He led the way into a space which had been cleared not very long before by many men working together. Hi knew that Dudley Wigmore had been murdered by this man at the spot over which they had just passed. That was Wigmore’s foot sticking from the grave; that was Wigmore’s wraith dreeing his weird there. How soon was he to be added to Wigmore’s grave by those hands now playing upon the rifle?

“There now, what do you think of that?” the man asked, nodding ahead.

That was a stone temple carven with gods by some race long since forgotten. It had been covered by jungle until a few months before: now by many burnings, hackings and tearings its face had been cleared and its doorway laid open.

“What do you think of that?” the man repeated.

“I suppose it is one of these Indian temples,” Hi said.

“Yes,” the man said, “one that hasn’t been touched. Do you know anything about these places?”

“No,” Hi said, “I’m afraid I don’t.”

“What do you think of it?”

“It’s very grand.” Indeed it was very grand, being in two orders of colossal architecture, carven to the cornice with grotesques of gods. It seemed to Hi to be five cricket pitches long. It was built with a tough stone facing over brick. Wherever trees had broken the facing, the brick core was laid bare: they were small bricks laid in a mortar like melted flint spread very thin. The bricks were rose-red and seemingly as tough as stone. All the roof of this temple was covered with trees, shrubs, plants and flowers, beautiful exceedingly. It occurred to Hi that this was the sort of place for which Dudley Wigmore may have come prospecting.

“I’ve had the men at work at this one for some time now,” the man said. “I’m getting it a bit clear now. Where do you suppose the treasure would be?”

“I suppose the Spaniards got all the treasure at the conquest.”

“Not from this one: they never came near this one.”

“I’ll bet they did,” Hi said.

“Well, I know they didn’t,” the man said. “This place was lost in the jungle centuries before the Spaniards came. I can prove it: look here.”

He led Hi to the temple door, in front of which a great heart tree had once grown. This tree had been sawn through and removed: the near-by ground was all burnt and scattered with its wreck.

“There’s the proof,” the man said, “that tree was blocking the main door long before the Spaniards landed. Count the rings in the stump.”

“That’s true,” Hi said, glancing at the countless rings. “But don’t these tropical trees put on more than one ring in a year?”

“No, they don’t,” the man said. “Whereabouts inside do you suppose the treasure is?”

“I suppose under the altar, wherever that would be. But the people would have taken it with them when they went from here.”

“They didn’t go from here.”

Hi waited: he knew that the man wanted his help in some way in this treasure-hunt. He would not ask any question which might bring in or suggest Wigmore. He was certain that Wigmore had discovered this place and had been murdered because of it. Any knowledge which the man had was Wigmore’s.

“It will be hard work,” Hi said, “to get inside this place.”

“Nothing like the work of getting to it. The roof hasn’t fallen.”

“I’ll be surprised if it hasn’t,” Hi said, “with the weight of the trees growing on it.”

“The roof can’t fall,” the man said. “These builders couldn’t vault a roof. That is why this place is so narrow. The roof is of slabs of stone laid upon balks of stone. It’s as strong as a hill. It is all enormous walls, with narrow rooms inside them. There’s a certain amount of mess inside, of course: these tropics sprout like sewage, but it can be easily cleared: that is, fairly easily.”

“It would be interesting work,” Hi said, “to get inside and see what it’s like.”

“Interesting? I believe you,” the man said. “This place was built by the Quetzals, whoever they may have been. They had a picture writing of sorts and kept a history in it. They’ve got rolls of their history in Santa Barb’; people have been deciphering it. Nothing much is known of them yet, for they were gone before the Spaniards came. Now I’ve reason to believe that this place is the great temple of the Quetzals; the Temple of the sun, or the Temple of Gold. It was a legend when the Spaniards came, as I expect you know: they heard of it: they often looked for it, but they never found it; the forest fever saw to that. Except by a sort of miracle no one could have found it. The Quetzals were a great race: you’ll see their cities up in Melchior; but the fever came in and wiped them out. I believe that this old god-shop is bung full of gold.”

“What gold?” Hi asked.

“Gold of offerings.”

“That would be exciting.”

“The Sacramento would be a fool to it.”

“Do you know that they offered gold?”

“They offered all the gold they found, so the histories say: thousands of pounds for hundreds of years: believe some of what you see and a tenth of what you hear: it is still likely that they brought a lot of gold here, and here it is still.”

“That will be a find.”

“Well, what do you say to giving me a hand to get it? I’ve cleared this space by the help of the Indians, but I’m not going to have these Indians looking for the gold: not likely. That is the white man’s perk: none of my brown brothers in this for me: no fear: the hunting parties would go wearing gold till the Barboes learned of it: news soon spreads in this forest. Then we should have the Government in. As you can see, it’s more than a one man’s job in there, but I reckon that two could shift the stuff and find the altar. And we’d need two to get the gold melted down and into Santa Barb’. They buy it there, pesos for weight, at the Assay Office. I tell you, the Ballarat field is just footle to it. This is Tom Tiddler’s ground, that the kids play.”

“It sounds pretty thrilling,” Hi said.

“Thrilling? I guess it is thrilling: p.d. thrilling.”

“I’m awfully keen on getting to Anselmo first,” Hi said.

“I know you are,” the man said, “I know you are. But what is Anselmo beside what I offer you here? We should shift our traps to here for a couple of weeks, and after that what would Anselmo be? Why, you would be able to buy Anselmo: buy it ten times over and all that’s in it: miss and mister. And I’d be a lord at home and have a bloody deer-park.”

“Yes, I know,” Hi said. “I say, it sounds exciting. But have you any picks and crow-bars?”

“Yes, in a stone trough there: out of the way of the ants.”

“I suppose we could get done in a couple of weeks?”

“We’ll have to, for the sooner we lift it the better. Not that anyone will come.”

“You mean that the fever will come down?”

“No, but these Aracuis go talking: and news spreads. Shall we start, then? What do you say? Off saddle and at it?”

“I’d like to, frightfully,” Hi said.

“Well, here you are then,” the man said. “I’ll give you a third share in anything we find: very likely a million pounds.”

“I say, that’s generous. But before we start work,” Hi said, “I’d like frightfully just to walk along the building and look at it, from close to. I’ve never seen one of these places before.”

“Look your bellyful,” the man said. “I hoped you’d see sense when it came to the point. I’ll get the picks along.”

The man kept his eyes upon Hi, who took a pace back to consider the front of the building. He did not see the temple: it was all a blur of angry gods topped by a foam of flowers and the spears of palms in a glare of light as red as blood. He knew that the man was watching him: he knew that the man had killed Wigmore so that he might be alone in possession. The facts of the murder were all bright in his brain. Wigmore, the scholar, had found the place and cleared it. Then this man, the wanderer and waster, had come thither, by some Fate or chance, and had murdered Wigmore. Now that he himself had come thither, the man wished him to help in the finding and the raising of the treasure. If he refused, he would have a bullet in his brain within ten seconds. If he accepted, he would have a week’s or a fortnight’s toil: then the bullet. If he tried to escape, what hope had he, save to wander in the fever forest in the fever season till he died miserably or was lost in the marsh?

“We’ll start in that door where the tree was,” the man said. “It may not have been the main entrance, but the stone is all worn away there by people’s feet: it is a used entrance.”

“All right,” Hi said, with the words sticking in his throat. He did not know what he was to do; there was nothing that he could do. He felt suddenly that there was nothing for it but to plunge into the forest, cost what it might. “I’ll never get out of it,” he thought. “But anything to get away from this fellow.”

The building faced him, running north and south across the clearing. They were standing close together nearly opposite the central point.

“Well, have you looked enough?” the man asked. “You’ll have plenty of chance to look at it in the next ten days or so.”

“I’d like to go along the side of it once,” Hi said. “I’d like to pace it.”

“Pace away,” the man said. “It’s 120 yards, but you’ll want to know for yourself, I suppose.”

“Have you measured it, then?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’d like just to pace it and see it close to.”

He turned south from the man along the line of gods to the end of the temple, which had not been cleared of creepers; the forest came to it and cloaked it there. He turned here to look along the line of the building. What struck him most was its silence, its blood-red colour where the facings had fallen, and the fact that every inch of it bore life of some sort. The man was watching him and playing with his rifle; he was sitting on the stone trough which contained the tools, much as a cat, having a mouse in a shelterless space, will drop him, withdraw a few paces, look at the sky and lick her fur. Hi pretended to examine the carving: he felt that the man must know what was passing in his mind. “I must start pacing,” he thought.

He lifted his eyes towards the other end of the building. Dudley Wigmore was standing there, facing him, with his right hand upon the building, and with his left beckoning to him to come. It was very strange: he was there and yet he was not there: he certainly saw him: then lost him: then knew that someone sad was there who wanted him to go there. “Right, I’ll go,” he thought; so he set out, pacing and counting.

When he came to the central door, abreast of the man, he was hailed. “You needn’t go any further, chum. The other half is exactly the same, another sixty yards.”

“I’m going to the end,” Hi said. “I believe your figures are wrong. I believe you’re four yards out.”

“A pace won’t beat a yard-measure, chum.”

“I’ll talk in a minute,” Hi answered, still counting. “Just a minute, if you don’t mind: I don’t want to lose count.”

He went on counting mechanically, thinking of a strangely different mark of a vanished race not far from his home in Berkshire. Someone had told him long before that that monument was 375 feet long. He counted his pacing of this temple wondering if it would not prove to be the same, and if it were the same why it should be. All the time he was terrified, lest he should be shot in the back: the sweat was dripping from him. Hope kept surging up in him that he might escape: despair kept urging him to fling himself at the man’s feet and squeal for mercy. All sorts of thoughts, of home and Carlotta and the things he wanted to do, seemed to be protecting him. His life was from second to second; “eighty-one,” he was alive, “eighty-two,” no bullet, “eighty-three,” not dead yet. Dudley Wigmore was there: he could see his expression; very sad, yet hopeful. Dudley Wigmore was not there; the end of the temple was there, in a great corner-god, helmeted in the snake and eagle, whose mouth crunched the leg of a man. By this time he was up to the hundred. Suddenly Dudley Wigmore was there again, showing him the forest beyond the end of the temple: the ground was sloping down there in a cover of greyish thorn and greenish scrub, topped by what looked like ilex. He went on pacing, repeating his count aloud: “a hundred and ten; a hundred and fifteen.”

“Hey, chum,” the man called. “Hold on a minute. Wait for me a moment.”

Possibly he began to suspect suddenly: at any rate, he snapped-to the breech of his rifle, rose, and began to walk steadily towards Hi.

“I’m just finishing,” Hi called. “I’m sure it must be more than you make it. I make it 127 paces.” He turned to see where the man was, measured his distance as about fifty yards, and then quietly, as though exploring some ruin at home, turned the corner of the building.

The instant that he was out of sight, he darted across the end of the temple into cover: he forced his way through the scrub, ducked well down into it so as to be hidden, and ran downhill as he had never run. He had gone perhaps seventy yards, head down and arms across eyes against the thorns, when something hard took him across the leg, just below the knee, so that he fell headlong violently into a thicket. It was a severe fall, which knocked all the breath out of him. He came to himself with a pain in his leg. “I’ve been shot,” he thought, “shot and hit in the leg.”

Up above him on the plateau of the temple, he heard Letcombe-Bassett call: “Chum. Heya, chum. Are you there, chum?” He heard him probe at some of the near-by cover, seemingly with the barrel of his rifle. “I’ve not been shot,” Hi thought, “I fell over a snag.” He dared not stir a muscle, he hardly dared to breathe: Letcombe-Bassett seemed so near, almost looking down upon him.

“Sing out, chum,” Letcombe-Bassett called. “Where have you got to? Answer.” He listened for an answer, and, having none, muttered a curse.

“You needn’t pretend that you can’t hear me,” he called again. “You’re within a few yards: so answer: don’t play the giddy goat.”

Hi’s heart was thumping in his throat, yet he smiled at this order, it was so like the call of a cross seeker, in hide and seek, in the shrubs at Tencombe, bidding the hiders to call “Cuckoo again.”

“Now cheese it, chum: come off with this kidding: where are you? Cut this right out.”

There was a pause after this, while Letcombe-Bassett listened, not so much for an answer, as for some sound, which would show him where Hi was. Hi kept still as a stone, which was not easy, for he had fallen into an uneasy posture, in a thicket which was the breeding or roosting place of minute scarlet midges. These things surveyed him for a few seconds, then, having decided that he would be good to eat, they settled upon him. There were perhaps fifty of them, each with the theory that the nearer the bone the sweeter the meat. Their bite was by far sharper than the bite of the spotted-winged marsh-midge at home. But far worse than the bite was the pertinacity with which they thrust down his neck, into his ears, up his nostrils, or down to the roots of his hair, before they bit. Hi longed to beat them from him and scratch as he had never scratched. Letcombe-Bassett listened, making no sound.

“Chuck it, chum,” he called at last. “I know you’re there. You won’t kid this nigger: I’m not that sort. You’d better come out. If I come in to fetch you, you’ll sing a different song, my lad.”

Seeing that threats had as little effect as persuasion, he tried again, with an appeal to reason. “Look here, kid,” he said, “I’m only speaking for your own good. You’ll never find your way out of this. You’ll get bushed to a dead cert, just as you were before. And if you get bushed in this part, God help you. There’ll be no kind white man to give you chow; don’t think it. If a snake doesn’t do you, a tiger will. Or if a woods Indian finds you, he’ll eat you: to say nothing of the fever. Come on out of it, like a sensible kid and turn-to at the temple. . . .

“If you think I’m not offering you enough, you’ve only to say the word. I’ll go you an honest half, share and share alike, in all we find: I can’t say squarer. I wouldn’t do it for many people; but I like you, because you’ve got guts, and so I tell you straight.”

“That’s why Doll Tearsheet loved Falstaff,” Hi thought, not stirring. “An odd taste, but love is blind. What will be his next move?” Letcombe-Bassett paused to consider and to listen.

“All right, chum,” he called at last. “I’ll remember this. You needn’t pretend to me that you’ve got clear away. I’m not so easily fooled as you may think. You’re within earshot and very well within range; kindly remember that. Are you going to come along and bear a hand?” He waited for ten seconds for an answer, then said,

“I’ll give you while I count seven: if you don’t come before then, I’ll come in and fetch you. I know where you are. As a matter of fact I can see you from here.” This was thrilling hearing, though Hi believed (and earnestly hoped) that it was not true. The man gave it a few seconds to work upon his victim’s mind; then he began to count.

“Very well, then: while I count seven. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. This is your last chance, I warn you straight. Are you coming? Very well, then. . . . Seven. I think I may promise you that you’ll regret this, my young friend. You’re within easy shot-gun range, and I’ll walk you up like I’d walk up partridges. I gave you a square deal, but you asked for trouble. Don’t blame me, if you get it.”

At that instant, from somewhere in the forest, perhaps thirty yards from where Hi had entered it, a piece of a dead bough fell to the ground, with a noise which to Hi was exactly that of one slipping on wet earth and recovering. To Letcombe-Bassett it gave a much-desired clue.

“Right,” he called. “Thank you for telling me where you are; now we’ll see. My Indians say you stink. You’ll stink worse before I’ve done with you, my young whelp.”

At this he burst into cover in the direction of the fallen bough; but as the jungle happened to be thick there, he gave it up, went back into the open, cast about for Hi’s marks, and re-entered at the very place where Hi had entered. When once within the scrub, he seemed to neglect tracks and again tried to force a passage to where the bough had fallen. He beat the cover as he went. It was all dry, feathery, fronded cover, sweetly smelling when crushed, but abounding in scarlet midges. Hi heard him slap at his cheeks and curse: he himself felt that he was being eaten alive, yet he could not stir.

“All right,” the man called. “Don’t think I’ve done with you. You’ve not done me yet. Since I know you’re not over here, I know you must be over there; and when I get you, you’ll get the kibosh put on all this poppycock; you wait.”

The man cast back along the fringe of the cover, beating it, as far as Hi could judge, with care. The wood there was all sage-green sari-sari plants, easy to thrust through but confusing to see in, as the fern-like shoots grew thick to the ground. When he had made a cast of about sixty yards, he turned, to make a cast back, a little further into the wood. Hi heard him come nearer.

“The brute,” Hi thought, “he knows something about hunting; he’ll cast to and fro like a shuttle till he lands right on to me. My only chance will be to trip him and try to bag his gun.”

The man came slowly back, searching: Hi heard him kick at the undergrowth, shake aside boughs, slap at the midges, and whistle between his teeth. Sometimes he sang, in a voice no bigger than a hum, the first line of a song:

“There were three flies; three merry, merry flies.”

He would stop here, as though he knew no more of the words, hum through the tune, or whistle it, in a groom’s whistle, between his teeth, and then sing the refrain: “Whack fol lol tiddly ido.” All the time, he was drawing nearer, beating the cover; presently he was at the end of his beat, and turning to beat back a little further into the forest. “I’m sixty or seventy yards into the forest from the clearing,” Hi reckoned. “He has gone roughly through half of that. Now he’s getting really near, and this time he may see me.”

The man seemed to think that he was drawing near to the quarry. “Do you hear?” he called, “you’re not dealing with anybody; you’re dealing with me. I don’t give up when I begin a thing: I do it. This cast or the next you’ll be sorry, my little sucking swine.” He came back, upon his new line, beating as before, and muttering to himself: “Oh, not in there? No, but not far off and not much longer. Damn these flies. If I’d a dog I’d damn soon flush this puppy. Come on out of it, you young swine. My good golly, I’ll take your pelt off in return for all these midges: so much I’ll promise you.”

He came slowly along, drawing nearer to Hi. He seemed to take hours over each few yards of ground. Hi understood now how it comes to pass that hunted men, with prices on their heads, will sometimes give themselves up. He had not come to that point yet, but it was no longer out of his thought. The man came near to Hi, passed him, still muttering, beating and singing, and so slowly went to the end of his beat.

“Now for it,” Hi thought. With the utmost care he moved his hand, so as to smear it, for one delicious instant, over his face: it was the only relief possible: the next instant, he heard the man turn and come swiftly straight towards him. Could he have heard or seen him moving?

“That’s where you are, is it, my cock,” the man called. “Right you are.”