“I know it. You see—father wrote me from Valparaiso, while he was ill there. He told me he’d been hurt and was coming north; and he said he was on the track of a deposit of precious stones that would make us rich. I was to meet him in Mobile. But he didn’t say anything about any man named Floyd.”
“Well, that puts a different face on it,” said Lang, greatly taken aback. “As for Floyd, of course he may merely have learned of the thing by some chance.”
“I know father wouldn’t have engaged any mining prospector,” Eva went on. “He wasn’t interested in such things. He was an explorer, an archæologist. He believes that the old Inca civilization extended away south into Patagonia, and perhaps originated there, and that is what he’s trying to establish. He has gone farther toward deciphering the Inca quipus—the knotted-string records—than any other man. He must have merely chanced on the emeralds.”
“Well, now it seems that Carroll has the only clew to where they are,” said Lang, reviewing the situation mentally. “It’s my fault; I shouldn’t have let him pocket them; but just then my mind was full of nothing but Rockett’s money. I suppose you don’t feel inclined to accept his proposition of going shares on the enterprise?”
“Shares with that man? I should think not!” she exclaimed. “Why, you know he’s a thief, almost a murderer. He nearly killed my father. Fancy what father would say when he found that we’d given a share in his discovery to the man who robbed him!”
“Carroll’s got a strong position, though. We might buy him off. Possibly he’d accept five hundred dollars or maybe a thousand dollars for the maps and photos, if he was made to see that there was no better to be had.”
“But why should we,” rejoined Eva, “when my father will be back here soon, and he will know the way exactly to that place in South America?”
There was no possible answer to this. Lang could not tell her that Morrison would never come back to guide them, and he began to wonder if he had not been too lavish with his optimism.
The astonishing fact that Carroll’s tale was substantially true had hardly yet established itself in his mind, but now it began to grow and develop its glittering possibility. An almost incalculable treasure in emeralds, emeralds as big as small potatoes—it was romantically incredible. Yet it might be so. Indeed, lives had been lost, crime committed, a ship sunk for its sake already, and without knowing it he had himself been circling on the vortex of its fascination.
But Eva did not seem much interested in it. To her, everything in the world was postponed until Morrison’s return. Now she was growing restless, afraid that telegrams might have come to the hotel for her, and presently Lang took her back to the Iberville.