“Oh, that’s quite a story, all about mysteries, buried cities and all that.”
“Tell us about it,” suggested Jerry.
“To-night, maybe,” answered the naturalist. “I want to get back to camp now and attend to my specimens.”
The boys and the professor, the latter carrying his box of curiosities, were soon in the auto and speeding back to the gold mine.
That night, sitting around the camp-fire, which blazed cheerfully, the boys asked Professor Snodgrass to tell them the story he had hinted at when they hauled him from the mine shaft.
“Let me listen, too,” said Jim Nestor, filling his pipe and stretching out on the grass.
Then, in the silence of the early night, broken only by the crackle of the flames and the distantly heard hoot of owls or howl of foxes, the naturalist told what he knew of a buried city of ancient Mexico.
“It was some years ago,” he began, “that a friend of mine, a young college professor, was traveling in Mexico. He visited all the big places and then, getting tired of seeing the things that travelers usually see, he struck out into the wilds, accompanied only by an old Mexican guide.
“He traveled for nearly a week, getting farther and farther away from civilization, until one night he found himself on a big level plain, at the extreme end of which there was a curiously shaped mountain.
“He proposed to his guide that they camp for the night and proceed to the mountain the next day. The guide assented, but he acted so queerly that my friend wondered what the matter was. He questioned his companion, but all he could get out of him was that the mountain was considered a sort of unlucky place, and no one went there who could avoid it.