“That would probably be all right,” Carl answered, “until you began shooting game, and then they’d just naturally put you into a stew. They know very well that gods in white robes don’t have to kill game in order to sustain life.”
“Oh, why didn’t you let me dream?” demanded Jimmie. “I was just figuring how I could get about four gallons of stew.”
Abandoning the cherished hope of getting out into the forest for the time being, Jimmie now approached Pedro and began asking him questions concerning his own stock of provisions.
“According to your own account,” the boy said, “you’ve been living here right along for some weeks, taking care of the wild animals as the collectors brought them in. Now you must have plenty of provisions stored away somewhere. Dig ’em up!”
Pedro declared that there were no provisions at all about the place, adding that everything had been consumed the previous day except the remnants left in the living chamber. He said, however, that he expected provisions to be brought in by his two companions within two days. In the meantime, he had arranged on such wild game as he could bring down.
Abandoning another hope, Jimmie passed through the narrow passage and into the chamber where he had come so near to death. The round eye of his searchlight revealed the jaguars still lying on the marble floor.
The roof above this chamber appeared to be comparatively whole, yet here and there the warm sunlight streamed in through minute crevices between the slabs. The boy crossed the chamber, not without a little shiver of terror at the thought of the dangers he had met there, and peered into the mouth of the den from which the wild beasts had made their appearance.
The odor emanating from the room beyond was not at all pleasant, but, resolving to see for himself what the place contained, he pushed on and soon stood in a subterranean room hardly more than twelve feet square. There were six steps leading down into the chamber, and these seemed to the boy to be worn and polished smooth as if from long use.
“It’s a bet!” the lad chuckled, as he crawled through the opening and slid cautiously down the steps, “that this stairway was used a hundred times a day while the old priests lived here. In that case,” he argued, “there must have been some reason for constant use of the room. And all this,” he went on, “leads me to the conclusion that the old fellows had a secret way out of the temple and that it opens from this very room.”
While the boy stood at the bottom of the steps flashing his light around the confined space, Carl’s figure appeared into the opening above.