"I did not say 'murder,'" grumbled Amos. "You can do no worse than kill in the great Region of the Woods; and whether you slay a jaguar, a monkey or man, it is much the same in the end. But to kill a man like John Bannister is no such easy matter. He has the ear of a panther and the eye of a bird, and he strikes like the coral snake--silent and deadly--and for those self-same reasons, the story I am telling you must now turn something against myself. For I began the business by hunting John Bannister in the Wilderness; but, before the game was a week old, it was he that was hunting me, and hunting me, too, day and night, from the Putumayo to Bolivia, from the Amazon to the sea.
"I sought safety, at last, in the port of Lima, where I was sheltered by some pretence of Law and Justice; and there I joined forces with friend Joshua and three other kindred spirits who now lie unburied, their bones picked by the vultures.
"Well, then," Amos went on, "we five put our heads together and talked the question out. It was plain to us that, since Bannister was such a tough nut to crack, it were safer and simpler to go straight to the fountain head, as the saying goes, and see what could be done with the priests. I guessed from what Bannister had told me, that the Peruvians were a weak-kneed, cowardly lot, and thought it would not be difficult to frighten them into telling us all they knew. But we had to search the woods for months before we found them, living in the midst of black ignorance and superstition; and by then--would you believe it!--Bannister had got wind of our intentions, and had come back upon his own trail, crossing the mountains and descending into the Region of the Woods.
"He turned up in time to ruin all our plans. His very presence gave the priests the courage they had lacked. There was a stiff fight, and we, having the worst of it, were obliged to beat a quick retreat to the foothills, though we carried with us a hostage. So far as this man was concerned, I took a leaf from the book of the Spaniards. I knew that Pizarro had not gained all his knowledge by fair words and promises. I tortured the wretch, until he shrieked for mercy and promised that he would guide us to Cahazaxa's Tomb, upon the very crestline of the Andes, where he swore to us the Greater Treasure was hid. Thither we went, to find that the rascal had lied to us. A few golden ornaments there were, in a vault cut in the living rock, at the end of a narrow passage, and amongst these was the ancient sceptre of the Incas, but the lot were not worth the price of our journey. Moreover, John Bannister himself had had the audacity to follow us. Night by night, he hovered about our bivouac, hoping to deprive us of our hostage. So I set my mind to work to finish him; and as fortune had it, the old Tomb was as good as a rat-trap. For there was a great boulder at the mouth of the passage, which might be rolled down-hill to block the entrance; and even then it was as much as Joshua and I could do. We fooled John Bannister to enter the Tomb by making a show of moving camp and leaving the Peruvian behind. However, when we thought we had caged him, we found to our great dismay that we had under-estimated the man's colossal strength; for he rolled back the boulder as though it were nothing, and came down upon us like a raging lion."
[Illustration: "HE ROLLED BACK THE BOULDER AS IF IT WERE NOTHING
(missing from book)]
Amos paused a moment in his narrative. Listening eagerly for what was yet to come, I heard distinctly the disgusting noise of the chewing of one of his long, black cigars.
"We were unprepared for that," he continued. "Indeed, thinking we had got him safely caught, to starve to death or shoot himself, we were standing before the entrance to the passage without our arms; and before we could master him, our party of five had been reduced to two. It was Joshua who ended the affair. We had looted the Tomb of the little treasure that was there; and Joshua snatched up the golden sceptre of the Incas and struck down John Bannister, whom that night we left for dead."
"And what of the map?" asked Forsyth.
"We searched him, but never found it. He may have left it with the priests, or hidden it somewhere in the forest. Two years later, I again journeyed to the Region of the Woods, and found out from the priests that Bannister had taken it away with him, after he had returned to the Wilderness from Cahazaxa's Tomb."
Amos had calmed down by degrees whilst he related the whole story to Mr. Forsyth; but now, quite suddenly, he became as frantically excited as before.