Alexander Key
The Jade Amulet
Adventure Novelette
    South America is a secret wonderland. Men do not know what it conceals – but sometimes –

Time turns back – and adventure beckons

    When I got Don Jaime’s cablegram in New Orleans, I ordered a bottle of champagne and started packing.
       COME DOWN IMMEDIATELY DROP EVERYTHING CHANCE OF A LIFETIME STOP BRING SEAPLANE STOP WILL MEET YOU AT DOCK.
    All the way down I kept wondering what Jaime had up his sleeve. I knew it was pretty big. When the kid had paid me a quick visit six months ago, he’d been in a fever about something, but I couldn’t make him spill it.
    “All in due time, amigo mío,” he’d said. “The idea would sound crazy to you now – but when I’ve worked it out you’ll be the first chap I’ll holler for.” That was like Jaime Ramirez.
    You see, I’ve known him for a long time. His mother was American and a friend of the family. Jaime had an education in the States, and we were kicked out of three schools together.
    It was a broiling-hot day in December when I reached Jaime’s neck of the world. A mail launch met the steamer out at sea and took me into the shallow harbor. Jaime wasn’t on the launch, and there was no sign of him along the water front. Right away I began to feel uneasy.
    I can’t speak Spanish very well, so for several minutes I stood there all alone, looking at the big mountains back of the town, and trying to figure out how many different noises and smells went into the making of a Chilean seaport. I felt something was wrong. It was in the air, and every second I got more uneasy.
    I saw a uniformed harbor official staring at me. He took a step forward, stopped, and veered away like he’d seen a ghost. All at once I realized that the water front was quiet. Right in front of me a bunch of swarthy stevedores dropped their loads and started running.
    Then some one gave a yell that raised my hair. “Viva Ramirez! Muerte a Moncado!”
    A pistol cracked. The harbor official screamed, fell writhing on the cobblestones.
    I just had time to flatten behind a crate when a machine gun began to rattle out murder.
    Bullets gouged the stones, whacked into the crate over my head and made it bounce. They were firing at me! At me!
    I couldn’t flatten out any more, so I whirled sideways, shot to my feet, and put everything I had into a sprint toward a stack of freight twenty yards away. It was a mistake.
    Hurtling a mound of boxes, I smashed into the ugliest gang I ever hope to meet. They didn’t scatter – They whipped out knives and came at me.
    “You lousy, damned, infernal—” What was behind all this I couldn’t even guess, but I was scared, and boiling mad at Jaime and everything in sight. I smacked the first rat with a good hundred and eighty pounds behind it. He did a flop that knocked over the man behind him.
    For a few seconds I was all right; I stand six feet six, and these fellows were small. Two of them I kicked cold and my knuckles went through a couple of sets of teeth. Suddenly the firing started up again. I caught one glimpse of approaching uniforms – then something seemed to explode in my ear.
    * * *
    I have a recollection of waking up intermittently and of falling back into black pits of nothingness. Then I was quite wide awake at last and my head, though it throbbed a little, was clear. It was bandaged, and there was a smell of disinfectants in the air. I opened my eyes in a narrow hospital room, blinked at a slim, black-eyed nurse sitting beside me.
    “What’s that noise?” I asked, thinking for a moment I still heard the sputter of a machine gun.
    But it was only native music. “Una marimba, señor,” she explained.
    “What – what the devil happened? Don Jaime, where—”
    The nurse frowned, instantly left the room. She was back in a minute with a sharp-faced man in uniform.
    “The Señor Patrick O’Donnell is better, I hope?” He had a crisp, hard, military voice. “Bueno! It is necessary for you to answer a few questions concerning this affair of three days ago.”
    “You mean to tell me I’ve been here three days?”
    “Exactly. Why you are alive, is a wonder. You yanquis must have heads like mules. Now” – he bit out the words slowly – “just what is your connection with Don Jaime Ramirez?”
    “Huh?” I tried to sit up, fell back against the pillow. “What the devil’s this all about, anyway? Who in the devil—”
    “Answer me!” snapped the fellow. “I am speaking for the comandante – General Moncado. We have evidence that you and Don Jaime planned this thing together. The revolucion, you may be interested to know, was suppressed. But men have been killed. An attack has been made upon the government. The penalty, my friend, is a firing squad.”
    Vividly, I heard again the sharp cries at the water front. “Viva Ramirez!” – and something like “Death to Moncado!” So Jaime’s big scheme had turned out to be a revolution! The thing had flopped, and I was one of the goats. For a moment I was so sore I couldn’t think of anything to say – then I suddenly remembered something that put a new light upon the matter.
    “All right,” I growled. “Since you’re so smart, answer this one: What were your revolutionists doing shooting at me?”
    The man shrugged. “You were seen leading a band of Don Jaime’s ruffians across the embarcadero. Luckily, we had the militia ready and you were stopped. You were so foolish, you see, as to attempt to smuggle a plane into the country – your cablegrams gave that away. General Moncado was quite aware of your plans.”
    That was more than I could take. “You’re a liar!” I yelled, and tried to make a lunge at him. But all I did was go tottering across the floor; the nurse grabbed me just in time and forced me back in bed. I was pretty weak.
    The official moved to the door. The look he gave me didn’t speak so well for the future. “When your thick head is better to-morrow, you will be placed in confinement. Later on your case will be taken up by the comandante. Let me assure you that General Moncado knows how to deal with your kind.” The door closed behind him.
    I turned to the nurse. “You know English?”
    “A-a leetle,” she whispered.
    “Then tell me what happened.”
    “There was revolucion; much trouble all over ceety. They say thees Don Jaime try to run Moncado out, onlee ’e fail. Poleece breeng you ’ere to ’os-pittle, then General Moncado ’eemself come, leave guard. Don Jaime, I dunno – eexcept they confeescate all ’e own.”
    “Anybody besides this General Moncado come to see me?”
    “No veesitors allowed. You guarded, always.”
    “Now, what’s wrong with my head? How long before I can be up?”
    “Bullet catch you like dees—” The nurse drew a finger across the side of her head. “Not zo bad – just concussion. You be O. K., one day, two day.”
    I sent her away and told her I was tired out and wanted to sleep. But the minute I heard the guard lock the door behind her, I was sitting up examining the room. I felt fair enough except that my sense of balance wasn’t what it should be.
    None of my baggage was in sight, but my linen suit was in the one small closet. To the left was the window, showing a square of green lawn and a portion of the narrow street beyond. I was on the second floor.

    II.
    There were a couple of newspapers on the table that the nurse had been reading. While I waited for night, I glanced through them, deciphering them slowly with my poor Spanish. They told me nothing.
    I’d pushed them aside, forgotten them, when I suddenly grabbed up one page. Unconsciously my eye had been following a column of advertising – and it had stopped at a terse line in English. English! Those words jumped out at me like things alive:
       Gringo – Listen to the music!
    Only one person in my life has ever called me “Gringo,” and only one person could have composed that message. Then Jaime was safe – but what the devil did he mean? Music! What music?
    The only music I’d heard was the marimba player somewhere outside.
    For an hour I listened. Then, abruptly, the marimba player started up again, tapping out a tune down in the street. And while I sat there, wondering, the tune changed. He played a rollicking, lively air – “Yankee Doodle!”
    It came over me then how much a marimba sounds like a xylophone. And back in college days, Jaime’s xylophone had ruined many a good evening.
    Instantly I was pawing through my suit, looking for notebook and pencil. On a blank page I wrote:
       At twelve to-night – be ready.
       Gringo.
    I wrapped the note about the pencil, fastened it to the clip, eased out of bed, and crawled to the window.
    The marimba player was by an alley-way across the street. He was a tattered ruffian with an old straw hat pulled down over his face. A slim fellow, with something quick and catlike in his movements. It was Jaime, all right. When he saw me wave at him, he raised his hat slightly and I caught a glimpse of his curly, light-brown hair. It’s a combination you seldom see with black eyes and olive skin. Got it from his mother.
    I threw the pencil out of the window, watched him start toward it, then eased back in bed. In a minute he was playing, “There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night.”
    That evening I gave the nurse my handful of pesos and kidded her into getting me a pint of whisky. She slipped it under my pillow when she brought in the dinner tray. I can usually drink a lot of the stuff without feeling it, and I needed it now to help me negotiate that window. I don’t believe any one thought I’d try getting out that way – and I wasn’t so certain myself that I could manage it.
    With three years of mail flying back of me, I had no trouble willing myself to wake up when I wanted to. Before getting up at midnight I killed the whisky, then crawled carefully out of bed and drew on my clothes. The night guard was snoring beyond the door.
    My head felt entirely clear, but I had a lot of trouble trying to control my knees. They wanted to buckle under me. And, just as I was knotting the sheets together at the window, they gave way.
    By the time I got to my feet the guard was at the door, fumbling with the lock. I felt around in the dark for something to hit with, and touched a bottle of water on the table. When the guard burst into the room I let him have it. He crashed down, and in ten more seconds I was out of the window with the sheet burning through my fingers.
    * * *
    A touring car without lights roared around a corner, skidded to a stop. A wiry figure leaped out, heaved me into the seat, hurtled over me, and then we were roaring through town with motor screaming.
    One look at Jaime and I could see trouble sticking out all over him. All his breezy good nature was gone. His lean face was thinner. In the dim starlight, he looked harder, older, and a good deal like a bedraggled hornet.
    Jaime said nothing until we were well into the country, driving slowly through a winding canyon back of the headlands. He stopped once, listened, and gave a long sigh of relief.
    “Gracios!” he murmured at last. “The time I’ve had trying to get in touch with you, Gringo!”
    “Yeah,” I growled back, “why in the hell didn’t you tell me you had a nice little revolution all cooked up down here? ‘Chance of a lifetime! Drop everything!’ Rats! Now I’ve lost my plane, about the last thing I own—”
    Jaime stuck a very American pipe between his teeth and waited until I’d finished. “The revolution,” he announced patiently, “was a fake. A gentleman – I beg your pardon – a double-striped skunk named Diego Moncado started it. The object was to dispose of you and me, and to confiscate my estates. There were certain valuable items of mine that he wanted. Understand?”
    “No, I don’t. I can’t figure what this Moncado had against me; and he could have done all he wanted to without faking a revolution.”
    “Not in this country, amigo mío. I may be part Yankee, but you forget that I’m also a Ramirez. We’ve always one left, but I was too important politically to be bumped off without reason. People would start talking. A few fake riots did the trick, and it caught me napping. You were in it too, you see, because Moncado must have figured you knew something.”
    “What – what the devil’s back of it all?”
    “A fortune, Gringo, so big that it’ll make your hair stand on end. Half of it is yours if we ever win out. But I’ll explain later. This is a hot car. I just lifted it so we could get out of town. Here’s where we leave it.”
    He stopped the car. From the shadow of an arroyo came a burro cart driven by a silent, blanketed Indian. I got out, made it to the cart – and then folded up neatly and went to sleep. It must have been the whisky.
    I woke in Jaime’s hide-out, a cramped, smoky, dungeonlike room in some kind of an old stone building. It was on the coast, for I could hear water lapping against the walls outside. Two cots and a rickety table were the sole furnishings. Morning sun streamed through a deep-cut window.
    Jaime, wearing greasy coveralls and chewing at his pipe, was frowning at me. A heavy revolver was strapped to his waist.
    He looked nervous and worried. “How’s the head, Gringo?”
    “Ready for trouble,” I said. “Get me a gun, and tell me what’s back of this skullduggery and big-money business.”

    III.
    But Jaime kept mum until the Indian had brought coffee and a stack of tortillas, and had gone outside to play sentry. Then he opened up.
    “First, we’re in an old warehouse of mine in one of the coves south of the city. And we’ve got to get out damn soon before somebody takes a notion to come down here and look things over. Now, take a squint at this!”
    He laid something on the table that made me whistle. A four-inch amulet of carved green jade, mounted upon a heavy gold band. The carving was an Inca sun design, and in the center was the sun itself – a large, rounded yellow stone. The thing glowed, flashed with fire as I touched it.
    “Some topaz!”
    “Gringo, you’re a whiz in the air, out a little weak on mineralogy. Yes, the topaz is nice – but the jade happens to be one of the finest pieces of jadite in existence, almost worth its weight in diamonds.”
    “Great Heaven! Where’d you get it?”
    “My father got it from the coast Indians here. The family has always done a lot for them, and this was a little token of appreciation. They also gave him a hint on where it was quarried. To my father it was only an interesting legend. But I’ve been checking it with old documents, maps, looked up research in the libraries from Lima to Washington—”
    Suddenly Jaime was gripping the table edge and his voice was a tense whisper. “Gringo, no one ever learned where the old civilizations here got their jade. A raw deposit has never been found in this hemisphere. But they had fine jade to work with – lots of it. Man, I’ve found the source!”
    Abruptly he pointed to the window where a fleck of blue sea was visible. “Yonder, Gringo! A bit more than five hundred miles straight out. Every year before the Conquest our Indians sailed there, came back with the stuff. Didn’t know they were mariners, did you? But they were. If you had a plane, Gringo, and good charts, could you fly that five hundred miles to a little island – and come back again?”
    My blood was on fire. Green jade! I had a sudden memory of a necklace in a Fifth Avenue window, a green necklace, and not very large. But the price was in five figures.
    “Could I fly it?” I bit out. “Hell, yes! Give me a plane and I’d fly the Pacific if I thought there was something like that on the other side! But I’ve got no plane now, thanks to Moncado . What’s wrong with the boat?”
    “Too many complications – clearance papers, nosey port officials, and it would be hard getting a crew we could trust. And now, with the government hounding us, we’d be stopped by a gunboat before we could leave the coast. No, plane will save a lot of trouble. Take a look in here.”
    He flung open the door, cracked a hard grin.
    I stared into the barnlike interior of the rest of the building, hardly believing what I saw. “That – that’s my Bellanca! How the devil—”
    “Simple, amigo mío. You forget that steamers can’t come into any of the harbors down here – too shallow. The day you landed, I’d already sent a couple of my mosos out in a barge to pick up the crated plane and bring it here. They don’t know what it’s all about, of course, and they’re not very anxious to have Moncado catch them.”
    Seeing that plane again was like seeing an old friend. Jaime had done a fair job of rigging it, but not knowing anything about motors, he’d left that part to me. I glanced in the cabin, saw the equipment stacked in there, the extra tins of gas. The tanks were full, there were provisions for a month, and along with two light picks and a crowbar was a small box of dynamite. In his spare time Jaime had been busy; the plane was ready to travel – all but the motor.
    “Come on,” I jerked at him suddenly. “There’s twelve hours’ work ahead of us – and then I’ll have to study the charts.”
    * * *
    While Jaime’s Indian kept watch somewhere out on the headland, we buckled down on the engine. I knew we had to hurry. The plane’s disappearance was probably causing the officials a lot of bother; it was only a question of time before one of them would remember the old warehouse as a possible hiding place. I don’t suppose any of them outside of Moncado knew what was back of the business; we were just escaped enemies of the State, the plane and ourselves always a potential danger.
    It was late that afternoon when I thrust a question at Jaime that had been troubling me all day. “Just how much was Moncado likely to learn when he went through your things?”
    Jaime bit nervously at his pipe. “He’s known what I’ve been after a long time. For that matter, some one has always been toying with the idea. In my notes, now, were diagrams of a dozen possible islands that could have filled the bill. They ranged up the coast and on out to the Juan Fernandez group. A drawing of the jade island was in the bunch – but a man would have to study my notes pretty thoroughly to know it was the right one.”
    “Still, he kept his finger on our cablegrams, and he knew you’d found the right spot when you sent for me to hurry down with a plane. A man that could engineer a trick revolution would have no trouble with your notes.”
    “The notes were in English. By the time he makes up his mind whom he’ll get to translate them, we can be on our way back with all the stuff we want.”
    “Maybe,” I said doubtfully, and went to work again.
    I finished the last of my tinkering by torch light and then dropped off to sleep on one of the cots. I wasn’t feeling up to par yet, and was too tired to glance at the charts Jaime had picked up while he was waiting for me to come out of the hospital.
    I was aroused by the Indian shaking me. Morning had come. Jaime was feverishly buckling on his cartridge belt.
    “Mil diablos!” muttered the Indian. “Men approach – on horses!” He turned and ran. Almost immediately I heard his burro clattering away outside.
    Jaime whirled from the window. “Time’s up, Gringo! It’s a cavalry patrol. We’ll have just ten minutes to get out of here.”
    I had the prop ticking over as Jaime threw back the big doors of the warehouse. He gave the wheeled carriage beneath the pontoons a push and the plane slid down the ramp into the water. When he heaved himself into the cabin I gunned the motor.
    Halfway down the cove I glanced back. The horsemen were silhouetted high up on the headland. I eased back on the throttle for a while to let the motor warm up, then gunned it again.
    I had a job taking off. The tanks were full and the cabin was packed. I wasn’t certain of the engine vet, and I didn’t want to rise too soon and risk doing a pancake with that heavy load. When the wings finally lifted, spindrift from the open sea was sluicing down the windows.
    At a thousand feet I leveled off. The morning was perfect, no end to the ceiling, and the horizon ahead was sharp and clear. The motor drummed with an even flow of power. “Which way?” I yelled when Jaime slid into the seat beside me.
    He chewed at a pencil, looked at the sky, the chart on his knees and at his watch. His eyes flicked to my bandaged head.
    “If you’re sure you’re all right, Gringo,” he shouted back, “the course is 265°, and Heaven help us!”
    “O. K., brother,” I said. “We’re on our way.” I swung the ship’s nose straight out over the Pacific and opened the throttle.

    IV.
    The little bare guano islands swept behind us. An hour crawled by ; lengthened into two, three. We passed the shipping lanes, the last far-flung tramp beating it up from the Horn. Now, below us, there was only a bright bowl of empty blue; if anything went wrong we could drift for weeks without being sighted – if the plane held together that long.
    Jaime shot our position, did a lot of figuring, and marked a dot and the observation time on the chart. I lined it up with the mainland and veered more to the south. We were running into a strong cross wind and the horizon ahead was getting misty.
    “Little island,” Jaime wrote on a scrap of paper. “Volcanic, reefs all around it. Nobody ever goes there. Bad world, they call it. Malo Mundo. We ought to make it by 12:10.”
    Malo Mundo. Something about that name made my skin prickle. I may be Irish, but it doesn’t keep me from walking under ladders. Just the same, I had a hunch the day wasn’t going to come off smoothly – and a hunch has never failed me yet. I’d had one the day I landed – and look at the mess I walked into!
    The horizon ahead became grayer. A half hour later we cut into the first streamers of a swirling, tumbling mass of fog moving northward. The sun and sea were blotted out.
    We roared into it at five thousand feet. I thought sure we’d be out of it in a little while; at least, I prayed we would, and I sat there with my hands growing clammy on the stick, waiting for a break. It was nearly noon.
    Finally it was neon, and it struck me all at once what a hell of a long chance we’d taken, and what damn fools we were. We should have been more cautious, flown up to Peru, and planned on a boat. But a plane had seemed so easy – and there was that worry about Moncado beating us to the island.
    If there’s anything that gives me the creeps, it’s fog. And the fog continued, gray, opaque, endless. I watched the clock upon the instrument board tick the minutes away. When ten of them had passed I gave a long groan and looked at Jaime. If his calculations were correct, the island should be somewhere beneath us.
    Jaime snapped back a window and peered out. I throttled down to half speed and began to spiral. There was one chance left; that was to work gradually lower until we could see water. If there wasn’t too heavy a swell running, we could plop down on the surface and try riding things out for a while. But I’d have to be careful; the island couldn’t be far away, and according to Jaime it rose straight out of the sea to a cracking good elevation.
    At fifteen hundred feet we were still spiraling, working lower by inches. And then, suddenly, the plane slid through into a rift where the sun cut down like a shaft of quicksilver. A flash, and we were through it, but in that flash I had caught a glimpse of great rocks and a white line of surf at their base. During my blind circling I’d forgotten about wind-drift. We must have been carried on to the outer fringe of the fog – and right where we wanted to go.
    I wheeled, found the rift again, and swung down through it. I was thanking my gods for an unheard of piece of luck when something happened that still makes my scalp crawl to think about it.
    * * *
    There was a whipping crack. Instantly the motor screamed, vibrated as if it would tear the ship to pieces. We spun out of the rift into gray fog again.
    For about a half minute afterward I was too busy to be scared. I must have cut the ignition automatically, or I wouldn’t be here to tell about it, but how I ever got that crazily spinning plane down to the water, right side up with a dead stick, is something I don’t remember.
    We smashed into it sideways, swirled around, and when we stopped the starboard wing was drooping. And then, for long minutes afterward, we sat there in silence.
    Gradually I was aware of the soft roll of surf, the gentle movement of the pontoons scraping against sand in shallow water. Fog pressed close about us. A few feet away was a hair-line beach, with brown cliffs mounting dimly upward.
    I glanced at Jaime. Sea water was trickling down his narrow face, dripping from the point of his high-bridged nose. He expelled a long breath, fumbled with the seat strap about his waist. “Am I dead, or am I still kicking?” he murmured. “What—”
    “It was the prop,” I began. “Snapped off. Queer, just the minute we got here.” Then I began to swear. The plane was a wreck, and all the jade in the universe was not going to fix it or get us away from here.
    Abruptly I broke off swearing and blinked at the motor, the propeller stub sticking up just beyond it. “Great Heaven!” I breathed. “No wonder!”
    Slanting across one edge of the cowling toward the propeller was a thin, clean line. I pointed it out to Jaime, but still he didn’t get it.
    “Bullet mark! See? Somebody shot that prop off. We were circling up yonder for some time. They heard us; when we got near enough, they—”
    Jaime sat like one stricken dumb. A little muscle jerked spasmodically in his jaw. Finally: “Who – who’d be shooting at us – here?” He knew the answer, but he hated to face it.
    “Now who do you suppose?” I snarled back. “Moncado got those notes translated, and he beat us to it somehow. Probably used a fast boat. But he’ll be looking for us soon; let’s get organized.”
    I found a rope, crawled out, and tied what was left of the seaplane to a rock on shore. The plane had skidded into a cleft in the beach. Rock walls rose endlessly on three sides of us; toward the sea, dim in the mist, the surf sprayed high and white against a reef. If I’d tried to land in here of my own will, I couldn’t have made it in a thousand years.
    “I don’t believe any one can see us from above,” I said. “The cliff slants out quite a bit here. What’s that thing on your wrist?”
    Jaime pulled back his sleeve. He was wearing that green and yellow amulet that had started all the trouble. A queer look came in his eyes.
    “I – I was supposed to bring this thing along when I went looking for the quarry,” he said. “Just why, I don’t know. Seems like the amulet is some kind of a, er – a talisman of good luck!”
    “Good luck!” I spat. “Good luck! Hell! I f I never saw this lousy place again—”
    * * *
    I stopped. From some point far away – high above on the cliff – I heard a shot. Then another, and another. Those sounds, dull and muffled in the fog. brought me back to cold reality.
    A swift change came over Jaime. His jaw clicked shut; his eyes were suddenly hard and bright, two points of angry jet. I think a devil got into him then, and that he wanted Moncado’s blood more than anything else. I felt the same way.
    He swung around to me, and his voice was unnaturally quiet. “Let’s face the facts, Gringo. We’re stranded here, and we’ve got a war on our hands if we ever expect to leave. Moncado’s probably found what we’re after – those shots sound like he was polishing off a few of his men. He’d do that after he thought he had everything settled. Now, it’s our turn next. Let’s find him.”
    “Wait a minute,” I said. “I’m not going off half cocked – and I believe you’ve sized him up wrong. If I was in his place, I wouldn’t be bumping off any of my crowd until I was entirely certain the two of us were out of the way. No, there’s something funny going on. Any natives live here?”
    Jaime shook his head. “Island’s too small – only half a mile across, and all rock. Government report.” His voice became flintlike. “If we’re going to get off of here, Gringo, we’ll not be able to do it while Moncado’s alive. Where’s your gun?”
    My hand darted down to where my holster should have been. It was not there. After Jaime had given it to me, I’d worn it all day yesterday, and at night placed it under the mattress of my cot. In the excitement of leaving the warehouse I’d forgotten all about it.
    Jaime’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing. Death stalked the fog above us. Facing it with only one weapon was suicide. I cursed myself for seven different kinds of a fool, then an idea struck me, and I darted back to the plane.
    Packed in with the luggage I found the box of dynamite and a package of caps and fuses. I carried the box to the beach, took out a dozen sticks, and hid the box under a pile of loose shale above the watermark. Capping one of the sticks, I thrust the rest in my coat pockets.
    Jaime gave a crooked grim. “In some respects, amigo mío, that beats a gun. Now, here’s the layout. This seems to be a one-way beach. We can’t climb the cliff, and to the left yonder it juts out into deep water. It’s just as well, for nobody can come down here and monkey with our supplies in the plane without running into us.”
    “O. K., then. Let’s see what’s ahead on the right.”
    “And another thing,” Jaime went on. “Don’t forget what we’re up against. If I see any one, I’m shooting first and asking questions afterward. If there’s more than one, you toss a dose of that rock poison. If we want to live, we can’t be big-hearted.”
    We filled a knapsack with food and started along the edge of the cliff. I could see no way of looking at things except from Jaime’s angle. We were bottled up here, our predicament well nigh hopeless. I knew enough of Moncado by this time to realize what to expect. Moncado controlled the one means of leaving the island. When he left it, he’d leave alone – and he couldn’t afford to leave live men behind him. There was too much at stake.
    In spite of all this, I wasn’t yet ready to bring myself to cold murder.

    V.
    The beach was hardly ten feet across. It narrowed to nothing in places, and we had to go creeping around the base of the cliff in water up to our knees. One slip, and we’d be in over our heads. And down here, even though we were bordering the tropics, the cold Humbolt Current doesn’t make bathing very attractive.
    Finally we hit a wide shelf of rock that was alive with penguins. They marched sedately off like a company of soldiers, dived without a splash, and disappeared. We stopped. At one corner of the shelf a great spring gushed out of a crack in the cliff and foamed into the sea. I was thirsty, but it was all I could do to drink some of it. The spring was tepid, and reeked of sulphur.
    “Guess we can’t go any further,” said Jaime. “The cliff smacks right down into deep water just beyond here. But there’s quite a slope back of us. I believe we can make it to the top.”
    I opened the knapsack. We were eating, resting for the climb, when I began to pay more attention to the smooth rock shelf where we sat. It almost seemed as if the place had been cut out by hand. And then, right under my feet, I made out faint carving. I bent over, stared. It was a foot-wide circle, and in the center was a radiating sun design. Time and sea had worn it to a bare tracing.
    Suddenly I remembered Jaime’s amulet. It, too, was a circle, with the sun in the center, and radiating lines leading from it. The two designs were identical! But why the flat shelf facing the sea, the carving? The answer came when I saw three debris-filled holes near the water’s edge. Those holes must have once supported posts. This shelf, therefore, was a landing place – a landing place for the great canoes that must have set out from the mainland centuries before, carrying red adventurers to the quarry.
    I whirled at a sound from Jaime. He was crouched, facing the cliff, gun in his hand.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Thought I saw some one, something, up yonder.” He waved his gun at the mist-veiled rocks above the spring.
    I looked carefully. The fog was rising a bit and I could see for nearly a hundred feet upward. “You’re crazy,” I said. “No man could get out of the way that quick.”
    “Let’s climb,” he said. “This place is getting under my skin.”
    We started up the cliff, slowly following the windings of a foot-wide ledge. A dozen times we stopped, studying the sloping rock for movement, a place of concealment, a cave. There were birds, thousands of them as we went higher, but no evidence of anything human. Nor did it seem possible that even an animal could hide here. Jaime kept swearing that he had seen something, but that it had vanished before he was able to shoot.
    A half hour of careful climbing brought us to the top. We crouched there, eyeing the broken, rocky slope that curved away in the fog.
    “No use going on to the peak,” Jaime whispered. “Let’s work around the top of the cliff and find out how Moncado got here, how he’s situated. Easy now; if you see or hear anything, drop behind a rock.”
    We moved to the left, picking our steps cautiously. At times the fog swirled about us in impenetrable gray veils, then it would lift abruptly, showing jagged rock formations and blue ocean in the distance. Sometimes the sun burned down in a rift. I was afraid the stuff would blow over suddenly and leave us exposed to some one watching higher up.
    In a little while we reached the point above where we had landed. I crept to the cliff’s edge and glanced down. The overhang of the rock concealed the plane. At least this much was in our favor; there was little chance of the plane being discovered except by boat. Possible Moncado had looked along this side of the island, and, not seeing any sign of us, concluded that we had gone down in the heavy surf beyond the reef.
    We crept ahead, more cautiously. Those three shots I had heard were beginning to worry me; either Moncado had had a dispute with some one who had come with him, or he’d seen something which had frightened him.
    * * *
    Ten minutes later I thought I knew the answer. We had just rounded an abutment when we both stopped short at a sight on the other side. Beyond us a deep ravine cut into the jagged hillside. Lying in the ravine opening was a dead man.
    No one else was in evidence. But to make sure, we slipped back, crawled upon the abutment, and gave the whole region a careful scrutiny. My nerves were pretty much on edge when we hurried forward for a quick look at the fellow.
    He was sprawled face down, blood clotting in the dust.
    “A mestizo, one of Moncado’s men, I’m sure,” muttered Jaime. “Somebody whacked his back wide open. Looks like it might have been done with an ax.”
    “Let’s move,” I said. “I can’t figure out what happened here, but it occurred at the time of the shooting. See, over yonder? There’s an ejected shell, probably from an automatic. Come on; this place doesn’t smell safe.”
    I was starting away when Jaime clutched my arm, gave a sharp jerk that brought me stumbling behind the abutment again. “Some one’s coming – up the cliff.”
    At that moment the sun chose to cut down through the mist again, bringing out the entire hillside in sharp light and shadow. It was impossible to run now; the only thing to do was to hide and hope for luck. We swarmed up the rear of the mass of rock and flattened in a crevice near the top.
    Hardly were we hidden when I heard the clank of metal on stone, some one shouting a hoarse order. I found a crack where I could glance down.
    Fifty yards away a man heaved himself over the edge of the cliff. He reached down and helped another to the top. Behind him came half a dozen more. They were all armed with guns and machetes. Some carried picks, and one huge fellow struggled under a great coil of rope – swarthy, ragged, tough-looking hombres, every one.
    But the last two figures to appear were dressed in white linen and puttees. One was a small thin man with sharp features, quite blond. The other would have been noticeable anywhere. Short, thick, bow-legged and dark, with a bull neck and an immense pair of shoulders. He came rolling forward with a heavy swagger, thumbs hooked into the cartridge belt at his waist. His panama was pushed back on his head, and he chewed methodically at a cigar stub. At this distance his face bore a curious resemblance to a snapping turtle.
    “That heavy guy – is that Moncado?” I whispered.
    Jaime nodded, sucked in his breath. “I see it all now. That little blond shrimp with him, that’s Jake Grohn, a mining engineer. Funny I never thought of him. He and Moncado have always been thick as fleas. He’s the egg that translated the note, and he owns one of the fastest motor cruisers on the coast. That’s how they got here.”
    “There’s something queer about this,” I muttered. “Those chaps are all armed like they were going to a war. That’s no rifle Grohn’s got slung over his shoulder. It’s a Tommy gun.”
    The gang stood close together, darting uneasy glances along the hillside. At a sharp order from Moncado they sat down about him in a circle. He harrangued them for several minutes. They were too far away for me to hear what was being said.
    Finally they got up and started for the mouth of the ravine. Jaime’s fingers bit into my shoulder.
    “Gringo” – his whisper grated in my ear – “now’s our chance. Get out a handful of that dynamite. Six sticks would blow this mob to hell.” Jaime meant it. He was mad, and there was hate in every syllable he spoke. “Hurry!” he went on, tense, grim. “We’d be doing the world a favor to get rid of them, Grohn included. This is the best chance we’ll have. If they catch us, we’re done for.”
    Jaime was right. I’ve never seen a tougher-looking collection of wolves anywhere, and it burned me up to think what they’d done to us. “Yeah,” I whispered. “I know I ought to do it – it would save us plenty of trouble later. But—” I left the rest of it unsaid.
    Jaime muttered something, then: “You win, Gringo. I guess it was the Latin in me talking. But – how are we going to whip that crowd? Just two of us – ten of them.”
    “Wait,” I said, “we’ll think of something.”

    VI.
    Moncado’s men halted at the mouth of the ravine. They stared callously at the mestizo lying there, rolled their eyes nervously around at the rocks on either side. At almost any moment I expected them to spread out, begin searching the slope. It struck me suddenly that there might have been others in Moncado’s group, and that there had been a disagreement over sharing the plunder. If I was right it explained a lot, and it would be another point in our favor. There would be more fighting – and fewer men for us to worry about.
    But in the meantime we ran every risk of being discovered. I capped two more sticks of dynamite, laid them in front of me ready for instant use. I didn’t mind dealing out the stuff if it came to a show-down.
    Ten yards away I saw Moncado jerk his thumb at the dead man, give a guttural order in Spanish. “You, Rico, José, get that carrion out of the way!” Two ruffians dropped their loads, dragged the body down the slope and heaved it over the cliff. Grohn, silent, oddly pale in contrast to the swarthiness of the others, stood to one side. He kept one hand on the machine gun; his half-lidded eyes roved ceaselessly.
    Another order, and the group started up the ravine, Grohn and Moncado in the rear. They moved out of sight beyond a bend. At some point sixty or seventy yards from us, they seemed to stop; I could hear the distant murmur of voices in one spot. Shortly afterward there came the clank of metal, a steady pounding.
    “Now what?” muttered Jaime. “You don’t suppose that’s the quarry up yonder, do you?”
    I raised up cautiously. I could see nothing but the shadow of the ravine cutting deep into the hill. Jaime bit at his pipe, frowning. We waited for a quarter of an hour or more; the pounding ceased, but small noises still came down to us, and they came from the same spot.
    “I’m going to have a look,” said Jaime.
    Crawling, he began working higher up on the ridge. I followed. We kept in the shadows, worming around slabs of jagged granite and picking small stones out of our path.
    We were pretty high up on a hill when I heard Jaime give a half-audible whistle. When I got to him he was flattened out, staring through a deep crack in the ledge high above the ravine.
    On a shelf possibly a hundred feet below us, Moncado’s men were at work. I gave them only a glance, for I was blinking out at a great circular valley lying deep in the center of the island.
    The bottom, many yards beneath us, was a mass of rank tropical vegetation. Entirely around it, sheer as if it had been gouged with a knife, rose unbroken walls of rock. They swept on skyward in serrated pinnacles.
    “The island’s hollow!” breathed Jaime. “Just a shell!”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I guess your government men took one look at this place from the sea and decided it wasn’t worth exploring. I’ll be damned! Volcanic crater. You’d never suspect it from the outside.”
    “No way in to it except from above, either. Grohn’s picked the best spot in sight to go down.”
    I peered over his head. Beneath us the men had anchored ropes to several timbers braced in a crevice. One by one, they were lowering each other down a forty-yard drop to a pile of shale, which mounted above the tree-tops at the base of the cliff. Already the baggage had been let down, and Grohn, distinguishable by his white suit, was waiting at the bottom with most of the gang.
    Moncado followed last. Two men remained behind on the shelf. Each had a rifle.
    Jaime rolled away from the opening, found a shady hollow, and took the occasion to light his pipe. He looked at me quizzically. “Well, Gringo. Got any ideas?”
    “I have,” I said, “and some damn good ones. If we pull the trick right, we ought to be able to handle those two guards down there. Then we can yank up the ropes. That’ll place the whole outfit where we want them. There can’t be any other way in or out of the valley, or Grohn would have found it. The next thing will be to get our hands on Grohn’s cruiser. Then we’ll be holding all the aces.”
    “All but one,” said Jaime. “The jade must be down in the valley somewhere. Grohn knows his rocks, and he’s probably been here long enough to find out there’s nothing on the outside. We might bottle them in the valley, but it’ll just be a stalemate. They’ll have the quarry.”
    “A few days down yonder,” I said, “and we can make them talk business. They can ransom themselves out. We’ll make them do our quarrying for us, and we can haul the stuff up on the ropes. Come on, we’ve got to tackle those guards.”
    * * *
    Jaime gave me a hard smile, then his face became grim again. I could see he preferred to do his dickering with bullets.
    Taking the guards would be a job. One pistol against two rifles. And we didn’t want a shot fired if we could help it. The cruiser must be anchored somewhere near by, and there would undoubtedly be a man or two left on board. If we missed out on the cruiser, we’d be in the same fix as before.
    I hadn’t hit upon a plan until we were halfway up the ravine, approaching the turn. At the turn the rock bulged out several feet, leaving ample space for us to hide. We crept toward it soundlessly, peered around on the other side. The guards were hunched silhouettes on the shelf, their rifles across their knees. We were close enough to them to hear the low murmur of their voices.
    I picked up two stones, tossed one far behind me. Its clatter brought both guards to their feet. We flattened back against the rock as the larger man started slowly toward us.
    If everything had gone right, there would have been nothing to it. A quick, downward sweep of the stone I held would have silenced the guard as he came around the turn. Then we could have waited until curiosity brought the other one to us. But I wasn’t counting on my knapsack; in fact, I’d forgotten I still wore the thing.
    Just as the fellow’s head and shoulders came into view, I swung – and my knapsack caught on some projection back of me. The stone merely grazed his face.
    He leaped sidewise with an oath. In a flash his rifle was up. I kicked out at the muzzle, missed, and for a split second stared at death. But Jaime’s pistol blazed. The rifle dropped; the fellow pitched at my feet with a hole in his forehead.
    Muttering thanks to Jaime, I snatched up the rifle and leaped for cover. Bullets whacked the rock overhead, echoes clanged down the ravine. I thrust the rifle around the corner, tried to draw a bead on the other guard. I couldn’t see him, and a bullet nicked my bandage. I turned cold at the thought of the dynamite in my pocket.
    “Keep back,” said Jaime. “He’s scared; we’ll get him in a minute. “Arriba las manos!” he barked. “Drop that gun, or—”
    More bullets. Silence. I thrust the edge of the knapsack out. Nothing happened. I waited a few seconds, then peered cautiously up the ravine. The man had disappeared.
    Fearing something tricky, we inched toward the shelf. The shelf was empty, but we sighted the fellow far below it, just sliding to the bottom on one of the ropes. His rifle was slung over his shoulder. He struck the shale, rolled down the incline, and vanished in the tree ferns as if all the devils of hell were after him.
    “Should have shot him,” grumbled Jaime. “He’s spoiled our game and now everybody will know what’s up.” He slid his pistol back into its holster, looked at me, and abruptly burst into raucous laughter. “Hombre! No wonder that fellow was scared! If you could see yourself now – bloody bandage on your noodle, clothes, dirty, torn, old blood all over them. You look like a rawboned mountain just spewed up from Hell—”
    “And you,” I snapped back, “are no spring lily yourself right now. Yank up those ropes while I get that buzzard bait out of the ravine.”

    VII.
    I went back to the dead guard, appropriated his extra clips of ammunition for the rifle, and set myself to the task of dragging him to the shelf and rolling him over the edge. I didn’t like to do it, but I couldn’t leave him in the ravine, and there was no other safe way of disposing of him. He was Moncado’s hired thug, and Moncado could have him.
    Jaime squinted at the coiled ropes and then peered cautiously down into the valley, a great, dark-green circle in the afternoon shadow. I would have liked to enter the place, but I didn’t envy Moncado – who would have to spend the night there – to-night, and a good many other nights. There was something oppressingly sinister in that tight, matted growth stretching away below. And all around it rose a sheer, unscalable wall of rock, purple and black in the depths, evil-yellow where it caught the light.
    “We hold half the aces, Gringo. The next thing is the cruiser.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Half the aces is right. If you think we’re going to have an easy time getting our hands on that cruiser, you’ve got another think coming. Everybody’s heard this shooting.”
    We started back through the ravine, stopped as a faint shout came up from the valley. Jaime grinned. “Our little playmates have found out about the ropes. They’ll be losing their sweet tempers in a minute.”
    They did. A furious burst of machine-gun fire suddenly sent rock chips flying off the edge of the shelf behind us. “Let them cool off down in there a couple of nights,” I said. “Then they’ll be in a better mood for dickering.”
    Several things were beginning to worry me when we came to the mouth of the ravine. One was the dead mestizo we’d found. Something had happened, shots had been fired, some one had smashed him in the back with either an ax or a machete. And Moncado’s men had been definitely uneasy. I glanced around at the barren, time-gouged hillside, trying to piece together what had taken place here before the fog lifted.
    It might have been only a dispute between some of the crew. Whatever the trouble, Moncado had been too eager to enter the valley to give it much thought, and had gone down the ropes with the assurance that two riflemen could hold the shelf against all corners.
    Jaime jerked his thumb to the break in the cliff where the gang had first appeared. We approached it warily, flattened, and looked cautiously over the edge. Below us an easy descent led down to the water. A trim, sixty-foot motor cruiser rode to her anchor midway between the shore and the reef, a hundred yards distant. Her dinghy was made fast at her stern ; the evening sun glinted on a pair of rifles laid across the cabin roof. In the shadow behind it I could see the heads of two men.
    “They know something’s up,” Jaime whispered. “Not taking any chances.”
    “I’ll bet they’re not seamen; Moncado wouldn’t have risked leaving them there. How the hell are we going to get on board? That water’s cold.”
    “That, amigo mío, is the least of our worries. I had the good sense to include a rubber raft among the plane’s supplies. We can go back, pump it up, and pay the gentlemen a sociable little call some time to-night.”
    “Suits me,” I said. “I’m not an A. B. but I think I can handle that craft once we get on board. Let’s go.”
    * * *
    We crept back out of sight and headed for the ledge trail that would take us down to the landing by the spring, and thence around to the plane. I kept my rifle ready and my eyes open, for what I didn’t know; but a vague worry was prickling in me and I smelled trouble. If you’ve got a drop of Irish in you, you’ll know what I mean.
    During that walk around the barren slope I heard nothing and saw nothing to get worked up about. Apparently we were the only human beings this side of the horizon. But just the same, I felt queer.
    We had reached the point above the spring when I stopped suddenly. “Jaime,” I whispered, “did – did you feel the ground shake just then?”
    Jaime stared at me, frowned. “Your pins must be still a bit wabbly, Gringo. If you’ve got earthquakes on the brain, forget them. One tremor, and you’d see the stones rolling.”
    That gave me an idea. I turned around and surveyed the hill carefully. There was not a loose stone in sight – except a pile of them that had apparently rolled down and become wedged against an outcropping of rock. That settled it. I had felt a tremor, and it wasn’t the first one to occur here. The entire upper part of the island was cracked, serrated, broken, and tortured as if all the fiends of the universe had been turned loose upon it. The thought didn’t help my uneasiness very much.
    We slowly followed the narrow ledge to the spring.
    I think it was the sight of the sun design engraved on the landing that brought my mind to a quick, clear focus on the thing that had been bothering me all the time. Surely, this was the place where Indian canoes had stopped in centuries past; there was every indication that the landing had been painstakingly chipped out by hand.
    But why should those early mariners stop here, climb the difficult ledge to the top, and walk away around the island to the shelf at the end of the ravine? If the ravine was the only easy entrance to the valley, surely they would have moored their canoes at the point where the cruiser was now anchored.
    There seemed to be but two answers. Either there was a nearer, easier way into the valley – or Grohn was wrong, and the jade was found somewhere on the hill above us.
    “Jaime,” I began, turning around – and then sound died in my throat.
    Wet, glistening, copper-hued figures swarmed over the landing. Indians! It was like some miracle from Aladdin – five seconds ago the place was clear, with Jaime stooping at the spring, myself staring off at the red sunset, visualizing just such men as these who had come here before the time of Pizarro. Indians! Incas with feather ornaments, hatchets, gold bands and amulets of green jade. Green jade!
    We didn’t have a chance. They were all around us, steellike fingers gripping our arms before we even knew they were there. They’d come like shadows from nowhere, soundless, as quick and stealthy as animals. Even had I been able, I think I was too surprised to fire.
    I heard Jaime cursing, then the whole strange pack were plucking at our weapons, touching our clothes, and gabbling in sharp, jerky syllables. An old man, gray-haired and with thin, gnarled limbs, clicked out a command.
    Jaime and I were hustled across the landing, straight into the spring. We splashed through a deep pool, came out in a dark recess behind it, and entered a narrow opening in the cliff. Not once had I thought of peering behind the veil of spray where the water roared down from the cliff!
    The way led slightly upward; when my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I saw that we were in a rough passageway, the floor of which seemed to have been smoothed and elevated by flat stones. Twice we waded through running water. I decided – and rightly, I believe – that the place had been a lava flow back in the dawn of the island’s creation.
    We rounded a turn and came out abruptly upon a broad terrace with a fifty-foot flight of steps leading into the valley. A flock of Andean chickens scattered across a clearing and disappeared in the jungle. At the foot of the terrace were garden plots containing squash and maize. On either side, built against the cliff, were rough rock dwellings covered with thatch and overgrown with vines. Some of these were in ruins. About the whole place hung an air of dank decay, of withered age, as if time had been born here and had come back to rest.
    And out in the jungle shadows somewhere were Grohn and Moncado—

    VIII.
    I stared around me for a minute, then we were forced down with our backs to the cliff. The Indians, about a score in all, squatted around us in a half circle. They were thin, scrawny, sullen fellows of indefinite age; many of them were misshapen and ugly. There must have been women and children not far away, but they were not in evidence.
    The old man began to talk. Jaime listened attentively.
    “Degenerates,” I whispered. “Probably from inbreeding.”
    “Shut up,” snapped Jaime. “I’m trying to hear what they have against us.”
    “Can you talk their lingo?”
    “Sure,” he growled. “It’s just plain Inca.”
    The old man tottered to his feet, waved a hatchet at us, took in the valley with a sweep of his arm, and his voice rose to a high-pitched wailing. His eyes were bloodshot, fanatical; it made my flesh crawl to look at him.
    “They think we came with Moncado’s crowd,” muttered Jaime. “They’ve been watching us for some time. During the fog they had a fight with two of Moncado’s men up on the cliff – killed them both, and lost one of their own men. I don’t believe Moncado knew what happened. They’re sore as hell about something; say we have no right to be here. Old Noah is recommending that our hearts be lifted to make the sun god feel better.”
    “I’d feel better,” I said, “if you’d get up and put these guys straight about us.”
    Jaime did get up. and for ten minutes he was listened to in unblinking silence. Suddenly his gabbling was cut short by angry mutterings; I thought we’d have the gang at our throats in a second, but the old man barked out something and addressed Jaime again.
    “They don’t believe a word I said,” whispered Jaime. “These fellows have lived here since the beginning. They’re the official handlers of the jade – or the descendants of them, rather. It seems that the last canoe from the mainland warned them of devils with white skins. We’re the devils, and it looks like we’re sunk.
    “They consider their jade as something holy, with a lot of religious rigamarole worked in with it. I’d forgotten that all Indians think that way about it. Only priests are supposed to have the stuff. We’re white, we’re not big medicine men, and we’re out of luck. Now what?”
    Before I could think of anything, a rifle shot rang out in the valley. The high cliffs flung back a rapid succession of clanging echoes.
    Every man spun about; lips hung loose in terror, contracted in hate. I saw a native break through the fringe of jungle, run a few paces, and collapse. He clawed to his knees, shrieked something, and pointed behind him. Abruptly he fell on his face, lay still.
    “Moncado!” breathed Jaime. “Grohn will know there’s another way out of the valley now. When they find this place—”
    “With Grohn’s machine gun—” I began, and stopped as the Indians glowered at us with greedy vindictiveness, moved closer. I was getting ready for a fight when my eyes fastened on a bulge under Jaime’s sleeve. Suddenly I seized his arm, jerked the sleeve back. The amulet and its topaz sun glistened in the evening light.
    * * *
    The old man saw it; his jaw dropped. Other eyes saw it; sullen faces, faces contorted by hate, underwent a swift change. Hostility turned to reverence.
    Jaime saw his chance, talked quickly. I don’t know what significance the amulet had, or what he said to them, but in a minute he was king. Old Noah hung at his elbow, clicked orders as Jaime harrangued the lot of them.
    The terrace erupted to life. A half score of frightened women in blankets hurried up the steps, dragging children behind them. They disappeared in the cave. Rocks were piled above the edge of the terrace into a rough barricade. Naked, bronze figures worked silently, fearfully. Obsidian-tipped spears and hatchets appeared, were stacked behind the barricade. A man whose hands shook laid my rifle at my feet, ran. I saw Jaime snap fresh shells into his revolver.
    “Thanks, Gringo,” he said. “Í thought the game was up until you remembered the amulet. But the thing means “open sesame” for us. I guess it was worn by the old priests of the sun, and gives us official entry here. I’ve told these fellows that the ‘devils with white skins’ have come to wipe us all out with fire and thunder – but that there’s a chance to lick them if they do as I say. They don’t look much like fighters, guess they’ve forgotten how. So it’s up to us. How much ammunition have you?”
    “Five extra clips. Against Grohn’s tommy gun, that’s not much. Down! I think they’re coming!”
    We flattened behind the barricade. I thrust the rifle between two stones, trained it upon the clearing at the foot of the steps. Minute by minute we waited; the evening shadows grew deeper. Viewed at close range, the black jungle growth stretching away ahead seemed even more sinister, deadly. Above the dank smell of rotting vegetation I thought I could detect the faint reek of gas. Grohn and Moncado would not be anxious to spend the night down in there; when they came, they would come fighting.
    Abruptly I felt the terrace tremble beneath me as if a giant hand were gently shaking it.
    “You were right,” murmured Jaime. “This place is not so healthy.” He spoke something to the old man squatting beside him.
    “He says the valley gods are angry, that they do not like the trespassing of the huiracuches – the white men.”
    “Thank heaven for the amulet,” I said. “We’re white too.”
    Then my eyes jerked to the clearing. Nine figures moved along the shadows, stopped. They were half crouched, rigid. I could feel their eyes searching the terrace for movement. There was Grohn, small, wizened, ready to deal death with the machine gun poised in his hands.
    Slowly, cautiously, I began swinging the rifle barrel toward him.
    Before I could line him with the sights, an Indian sprang upright, uttered a shrill cry, and hurled his spear into the clearing.
    * * *
    The spear fell short; rapid points of flame stabbed the shadows. The valley thundered with echoes. The Indian clutched his stomach, ran shrieking to the steps, fell over the edge. I kept firing toward the place where I had seen Grohn – until I realized he wasn’t there.
    “That fool buck spoiled our chances,” muttered Jaime. “They were back behind the trees before I could shoot. I don’t think we even brought blood.”
    I said nothing for I was trying to pry the last shell out of the rifle breech. The weapon was ill-kept and rusty. The shell stuck fast.
    Jaime saw it, cursed. Vague figures darted through the shadows again; the Indians, fear-crazed and unmanageable, leaped to their feet and began hurling spears and hatchets toward the jungle. Grohn’s machine gun mowed them down mercilessly. They shrieked, milled about the terrace like miserable animals, and those that were left dropped their weapons and ran for the mouth of the cave.
    Jaime worked feverishly reloading his revolver. “Gringo, they think they’ve got us licked – and they’ll be charging up the steps in a minute. Hurry, get some of that dynamite ready. That’s our only chance.”
    I’d forgotten all about the stuff. I emptied my pockets, began preparing the uncapped sticks. What little light remained was fast fading. Soon it would be night.
    Bullets spattered against the stonework. I felt the hot breath of one come through a crack. My hands were shaking, and no wonder; if a bullet so much as nicked some of this stuff I was working with—
    While I hastily cut short lengths of fuse, Jaime fired intermittently at flashes from the jungle. Once I heard a man scream. Suddenly the machine gun roared again. Stones crumbled over my head, flying particles gouged my face. A metal urn danced across the terrace, rolled against my leg.
    “For Heaven’s sake, hurry, Gringo!”
    The urn gave me an idea. Instantly I reached for it, began packing the dynamite sticks inside. I filled it as tightly as I could and tied the fuses together at the top.
    “Hold your fire, Jaime,” I whispered. “Let them start a rush for the steps. When I give the word, begin crawling back toward the cave – and crawl fast! Grohn’s tommy gun can’t reach us up here if we keep low.”
    Jaime’s teeth flashed in the twilight. “I hope that business works, amigo mío. I’ve got just three shots left.”
    We waited. The jungle was quiet. On the terrace somewhere an Indian moaned. The moaning ceased after a while. The dead lay about us, and death hung in the air, silent but almost tangible. Twilight turned to night. The jungle was an evil thing, crouching like a black beast just beyond the dim stairway.

    IX.
    I had the urn ready to throw, and in my hand was a match. My eyes strained in the blackness, watching for movement.
    They came silently and quickly, and I didn’t see them till they were almost on the stairway.
    Moncado was in the lead, a dim square bulk in the starlight. A gun began to blaze in each hand as he leaped upward. Grohn and the others were right behind him.
    “Back, Jaime!” I snapped, and struck the match. I touched the wick of fuses, hurled the urn down the stairway, and began clawing frantically across the terrace. Jaime was just ahead of me.
    I was almost at the cave opening when the thing happened.
    It was as if the whole force of Hell had been released in the valley. I felt the terrace heave up under me, then the cliffs thundered with echoes; from the sound of it, the battle of Marne was being fought all over again.
    I got up dazed, then Jaime was jerking me into the cave, fumbling in my bag for a flashlight. Outside the noise continued; a great slab of rock smashed down from above and tore away what was left of the terrace. I heard other rocks falling, crashing into the jungle.
    Jaime played the light briefly from the cave entrance. He turned, sat down weakly upon a rough bench. Some one lighted a torch from a pile of smoldering embers and thrust it into a bracket on the wall. Its smoky flame showed the old man standing with a striped cloth thrown over his body. His eyes had the haunted look of an animal’s, but his face was strangely composed. He spoke something to the small group of silent, trembling wretches clustered in one corner – all that remained of the keepers of the jade. They stared at him vacantly, prostrated themselves on the floor.
    The old man turned to us, carried on a rapid conversation with Jaime. I could still hear rocks crashing into the valley outside, and the cave floor seemed to be unsteady.
    “He’s telling us the place is doomed.” Jaime shot to his feet, drew his hand over his eyes. “There’s some legend about the gods of the valley rising. Come on, let’s get out of here – gods or no gods, that dynamite charge has started something. When I looked out yonder a minute ago, the whole valley was shaking like jelly! In a place like this, it doesn’t take much—”
    Holding the light in front of him, he began running toward the other end of the tunnel. The only thing that mattered now, I knew, was to get our hands on the cruiser.
    After what we had been through, the taking of the cruiser seemed a small task. And we had better luck doing it than I had expected. We inflated the raft from the seaplane, paddled around the projection of the cliff, and approached Grohn’s boat from the stern.
    Both guards were below, frightened out of their wits by the explosion and the continued rumbling of falling rock within the island. They were making a futile effort to start the engines when we came upon them. They surrendered so readily that I think they were glad to see us.
    * * *
    As I’ve said before, I’m not much of a seaman; but it didn’t take me long to get those engines purring and then I scrambled up into the pilot box to experiment with the controls. That part took me considerably longer.
    When I discovered the throttle and learned the trick of the reverse and forward lever, Jaime herded our two hands forward to heave up the anchor. Above the pilot box was a powerful searchlight with a handle inside for controlling it. I swung the beam along the base of the cliff and set myself to the ticklish job of maneuvering a sixty-foot craft in the narrow stretch of water between the island and the reef. As soon as I got the feel of the thing it wasn’t so hard – not a great deal unlike managing a seaplane, when it came to figuring current and drift.
    Jaime burst into the pilot box. “Hey, Gringo,” he snapped. “Head for the landing. I promised that old boy we’d come back and pick up his crowd.”
    “You – you what?” I gasped.
    “Yes,” said Jaime. “We can’t leave them there, you know. Listen to that racket! I think the whole damn place is going to fall to pieces.”
    “O. K.,” I growled. “But you’ll be the death of us.”
    Cautiously, at quarter speed, I swung the cruiser around the cliff. But when I picked up the landing with the searchlight, there was only one figure upon it. It was the old man. He was standing erect and immobile, oblivious to the ominous rumble going on behind him.
    I was afraid of tearing out the propeller on rocks if I came in broadside, so I pointed the yacht’s prow straight toward the Indian, gunned the engines in reverse a moment, and tried to hold her nose against the landing
    Jaime leaped out. It seemed that he stood there forever, talking with the old man, arguing with him, pleading with him. Finally, when a segment of the cliff plunged into the sea a few yards away and sent up a geyser of spray, I yelled for the idiot to come back.
    Instead, he began heaving small baskets to the forward deck. The things seemed to be heavy, and he worked furiously getting them up. The Indian stood by, arms folded, gazing vacantly off into space. When five baskets were on board, Jamie scrambled after them and I gave the engines full speed astern.
    And then, for a half hour afterward, I was too busy keeping clear of the island and trying to find a channel through the reef to think of anything else. I was taking a long chance, a green hand in those waters, but I wanted to get that island as far behind me as I could. Once, when I was past the reef and driving into the open sea, I thought I heard a dull explosion. But I didn’t look back. That would have been more than my Irish could stand.
    At last Jaime came in and sat down. His face was drawn, white.
    “Lord!” he murmured. “Those poor devils!”
    “What was the argument about?”
    “They wouldn’t leave. They might be degenerate, a remnant of something a lot better, but they were the island’s keepers and they were still proud. At least the old man was. Something in their religion, and their superstition about the jade. They weren’t ever supposed to leave the place. All they wanted was for those baskets to be taken safely away, by the right person – some one wearing the amulet of the sun.
    “I know they thought all that stuff would be taken up to the Cordilleras, to be used in the old temples, to decorate the royal trappings of Atalhualpa and Montezuma, to be thrown as offerings into the sacred well of Chichen Itza, to be worn in holy rites by the virgins of the sun—” Jaime broke off, stared out of the window. “Lord! That island just folded up and collapsed like an empty purse. And they wouldn’t leave!”
    “What,” I asked, “is in the baskets?”
    Jaime looked at me, and his eyes were haunted. “Jade,” he said simply. “The pick of the island. The finest pieces that could be gathered, polished and worked by four centuries of experts – royal jade, sacred green jade; jade carved for red priests and kings who lived four hundred years ago—”
    I couldn’t answer him for a long time. Finally I snapped out of it. “There are a lot of chaps living four centuries later who can put some of the stuff to pretty good use. You and I make two – and I know plenty of others.”
    Jaime grinned. “O. K., amigo mío. If there’s enough gas, set a course for Callao, Peru; I’ve got friends there. And if your head is all right, for the love of heaven take off that confounded bandage!”

    1936
    (Top-Notch, vol. XCVIII (98), #4, April, pp.104-127)

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