“Br-r-r!” Leoncia shivered, clinging to both men. “The sacred things of the Mayas are deadly and ghastly. And there is a classic vengeance about it. The would-be robbers of the treasure-house have become its defenders, guarding it with their unperishing clay.”
They were loath to proceed. The garmented spectres of the ancient dead held them temporarily spell-bound. Henry grew melodramatic.
“Even to this far, mad place,” he said, “as early as the beginning of the Conquest, their true-hound noses led them on the treasure-scent. Even though they could not get away with it, they won unerringly to it.—My hat is off to you, pirates and conquistadores! I salute you, old gallant plunderers, whose noses smelt out gold, and whose hearts were brave sufficient to fight for it!”
“Huh!” Francis concurred, as he urged the other two to traverse the avenue of the ancient adventurers. “Old Sir Henry himself ought to be here at the head of the procession.”
Thirty paces they took, ere the passage elbowed as before, and, at the very end of the double-row of mummies, Henry brought his companions to a halt as he pointed and said:
“I don’t know about Sir Henry, but there’s Alvarez Torres.”
Under a Spanish helmet, in decapitated medieval Spanish dress, a big Spanish sword in its brown and withered hand, stood a mummy whose lean brown face for all the world was the lean brown face of Alvarez Torres. Leoncia gasped, shrank back, and crossed herself at the sight.
Francis released her to Henry, advanced, and fingered the cheeks and lips and forehead of the thing, and laughed reassuringly:
“I only wish Alvarez Torres were as dead as this dead one is. I haven’t the slightest doubt, however, but what Torres descended from him——I mean before he came here to take up his final earthly residence as a member of the Maya Treasure Guard.”
Leoncia passed the grim figure shudderingly. This time, the elbow passage was very dark, compelling Henry, who had changed into the lead, to light numerous matches.