“The laughing serpent?” inquired Ned. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t you remember what the old Mexican said?” went on Bob. “Here is the parting of the ways, and here is the image of the laughing serpent.”
“Sure enough!” agreed the professor. “It’s an image cut out of stone, in the shape of a snake laughing. Wonderful! Wonderful!”
Right at the fork of the road and about fifteen feet from the automobile was the strange design. It was rudely cut out of stone, a serpent twining about a tree-trunk. There was nothing remarkable in the image itself except for the quaint, laughing expression the sculptor had managed to carve on the mouth of the reptile.
“I wonder how it came here?” asked Jerry, getting out of the car and going close for a better look.
“Probably a relic of the Aztec race,” replied the professor. “They were artists in their way. This must be the image the old Mexican mentioned. If it is I suppose we may as well follow his advice and take the road to the left.”
“The road to the buried city,” put in Jerry. “We must be close to it now.”
“Isn’t that something sticking in the mouth of the image?” asked Bob.
“It looks like a paper,” said Ned. “I’ll climb up and see what it is.”
He scrambled up the stone tree-trunk, about which the image of the laughing serpent was twined. Reaching up, he took from the mouth of the reptile a folded paper.