"As you no doubt know," resumed the Senora, "no one has had the secret of the hiding-place. It has been by mere tradition that they were going to dig. That secret, you may know or may not know now, was in reality contained in the inscriptions on an old Inca dagger."
Inez shuddered at the mention of the weapon, a shudder that was not lost on the Senora.
"I have already told Professor Kennedy that both the tradition and the dagger were handed down in my own family, coming at last to my brother. As I said, I don't know how it happened, but somehow he seemed to be getting crazy, until he talked, and the dagger was stolen from him. It came finally into Professor Norton's hands, from whom it was in turn stolen."
She looked at Inez searchingly, as if to discover just what she knew. I wondered whether the Senora suspected the presence of Lockwood's footprints in the sarcophagus in the Museum—what she would do if she did.
"After he lost it," she continued reminiscently, "my brother threw himself one day into Lake Titicaca. Everywhere the trail of that dagger, of the secret of the Gold of the Gods has been stained by blood. To-day the world scoffs at curses. But surely that gold must be cursed. It has been cursed for us and ours."
She spoke bitterly; yet might she not mean that the loss of the dagger, the secret, was a curse, too?
"There is one other thing I wish to say, and then I will be through. Far back, when your ancestors came into the country of mine, an ancestor of your father lost his life over the treasure. It seems as if there were a strange fatality over it, as if the events of to-day were but living over the events of yesterday. It is something that we cannot escape—fate."
She paused a moment, then added, "Yet it might be possible that the curse could be removed if somehow we, who were against each other then, might forget and be for each other now."
"But Senorita Mendoza has not the dagger," put in Kennedy, watching her face keenly, to read the effect of his remark. "She has no idea where it may be."
"Then it is pure tradition on which Mr. Lockwood and Mr. Whitney depend in their search for the treasure?" flashed back the Senora quickly.