“Hah!” exclaimed the doctor, uttering a long-drawn sigh. “Yes, I find I shall be better off than Columbus, and I begin to feel that with such help I shall have a much easier task. There: we’ll go. Our friend Griggs has put quite a different complexion on the expedition, and I begin to think now that all we have to do is to keep on till we find the ruined city.”
“If it exists,” said Bourne.
“If it exists? Oh, it must exist, if you can say that of a dead city,” cried Wilton.
“The poor fellow we buried may have invented it all, being so bent upon his search, and gone crazy at last and made up that chart out of his own head.”
“No,” said the doctor thoughtfully. “I had the advantage of you others in being with him during his last moments, and hearing him talk calmly and sensibly to the end. He had suffered horribly from fever, and doubtless had been delirious again and again, but that chart was the work of no madman; half-an-hour’s conversation with him satisfied me that he knew perfectly well what he was talking about, and, after all said and done, there is nothing preposterous in what he told me. We have had proofs enough of there being rich gold-loving nations in North, South, and Central America who built great temples—the Mexicans, the Peruvians, and the nations who have left the huge ruins in Yucatan. I do not see why there should not be another gold city and temple here.”
“Here!” said Bourne dryly. “Where?”
“In the desert place among the mountains that we are going to find, my dear sir,” said the doctor firmly.
“Bagh! Bagh! Bagh! Bagh!” roared Griggs enthusiastically, and the boys joined in the “tiger,” as he called it.
“Don’t say any more, doctor,” he cried. “That’s enough. I began to think you were playing fast and loose, and I said to myself, Doctor’s got too much shilly-shally, willy-nilly in him to make a good leader of this expedition, but I don’t now. I can see farther than I did, and that you’ve been weighing it all over and looking before you leaped. And that’s the right way to succeed. Gentlemen, and you two youngsters, we’ve got a grand captain—one that can lead us and guide us, and cure us, and set us up when we’re down. What more can we want? We’re sure to succeed. I won’t sell my share now for anything.”
There was a fresh cheer at this, and the party broke up to take the necessary rest.