[CHAPTER XVII--THE GREATER TREASURE]
I held my breath and listened, thinking that I would hear other shots, as I had done before. But no sound came to break the stillness. Save for the birds among the tops of the trees, and a big, solitary monkey that swung himself from branch to branch, chattering as he went, I was surrounded by the silence of the woods.
It was no news to me that I stood in the gravest peril. Such had been the case for many a day; and--as I have said--I had come to look upon life as of little worth. Amos I knew to be somewhere in the neighbourhood; and I knew also that if he found me it would go ill with me; I should not live for long if I fell again into that great villain's clutches.
And yet I did no more than shrug my shoulders. I had sublime faith in myself, in my youth, and the Divine Providence that, so far, had kept me from the way of harm. I had my blow-pipe, too; and, if the worst should happen, I could use it well enough to drive one of my feathered arrows straight into the heart of Amos Baverstock.
One learns, in the everlasting twilight of the woods, where danger lurks on every hand, to live for the moment only, to let the future look after itself. And so did I now; for Amos was no more to me than the jaguar and the anaconda--brutes of prey, all three of them, and the mortal man the vilest. Death in many forms and shapes was all about me--sharp fangs, the serpent's coils, poison, and disease. There was no need to scent from afar such dangers as might never come my way.
And so, once again, I turned my thoughts to the Red Fish, standing forth before me in the sunlight--a quaint and humorous-looking thing, had I been able for a moment to forget its wonderful significance.
I sat and looked at it; it may have been for half an hour, or even more. And my memory took me back to that sunny August morning by the Sussex shore, where I had first heard Amos speak of the Greater Treasure of the Incas; and I remembered, word for word, what he had said: "Gold! It is there knee-deep in a cavern, large as a cathedral." And here was I, Dick Treadgold, in the very place myself, after a series of most strange and unbelievable adventures, thousands of miles from Sussex. My very name, I thought, was to prove a kind of analogue with my destiny and actions; for I was fated, so it seemed, to tread on gold.
And at that, I pulled out my fragment of the map, and looked at it, reading again and again the passage that had puzzled me so often:
"The tail of the Fish. A blow-pipe from the nose of the Fish. Twenty yards across the Brook. Three feet, below the ground--a Ring."
There, sure enough, was the tail of the Fish--or, at least, the upper part of it, a sharp spur of rock protruding from the ground. I got to my feet and approached, taking my blow-pipe with me.