“Oh, my country!” he said, slowly yet with apparent exultation; “then there’s a real mystery for us to unravel, ain’t there, Donald? What d’ye suppose makes that music; and who does the shouting now?”
“Ask me something easy,” remarked the other, shaking his head as though he did not attempt to solve the problem. “That old fellow has them all locoed, is my opinion, and they believe whatever he tells them. Some people call it hypnotism; but I just reckon that they’re a lot of fanatics, and ready to sneeze when the medicine man takes snuff. But there’s another part of the thing that was a heap more interesting to Si Ketcham and Corse Tibbals.”
“What was that?” asked Adrian.
“Why, it seems that on several occasions, when the old rascal has wanted something or other that the whites possessed, and it needed the ready cash
to buy it, he’s gone into his sacred teepee and come out again with a handful of crude gold. Why, being a miner, and experienced in those lines, Corse says that it looked like he’d just knocked a hunk off a ledge that must have been virgin gold!”
“Tell me that, will you?” gasped Billie. “No wonder, then, so many palefaces wander off this way to watch the Zunis carry on when the time comes along for their rattlesnake dance, and all that fuss and feathers. Say, chances are that the old chap knows of the richest deposit of precious metal ever discovered. And when he disappears inside the mountain to talk with the Great Spirit, why, that’s the time he does his chipping of gold. Gee! now you’ve got me some excited, Donald.”
“Well, you want to keep right cool, and not give the thing away,” warned the one who was telling of these strange facts. “Whether the Witch Doctor has got a hidden treasure inside that mountain or not, it’s certain that up to now nobody has found a chance to spy on him. He’s too smart for that. And besides, these Zuni Indians have so many tricks up their sleeves, what with their hundreds of pet rattlesnakes and such, that white men don’t care as a rule to make them angry. All sorts of stories have been told about dens of the reptiles into which they cast those who make enemies of them. I reckon these are only yarns, because there’s been little, or no trouble between the whites
and the Hopis and Zunis; but all the same there’s something about the queer habits of these cliff-dwellers that makes miners, hungry for gold as they may be, keep their hands off. Nobody knows what a Zuni is carrying under his fancy blanket; and it may just be a rattler as well as not.”
Billie turned pale, and drew a long breath. Of course he was instantly reminded of his recent terrible experience with snakes; and this took away in some measure from the pleasure he was anticipating when he started exploring the quaint village of the Zuni Indians, with the houses chiseled out of the solid rock in tiers, and each door reached by a narrow ledge that ascended at an angle of forty-five degrees.
“I’m only telling you these things,” Donald went on to say, “because Billie has asked me to coach him about what we’re likely to run across. And perhaps, it’s just as well that all of us remember we haven’t got any business to poke our noses into the private affairs of these people. If we do it we must take the risk; and that’s what men like Corse Tibbals have always shrank back from up to now.”