“Hello!” he said, as he paused at the end of a couple of hundred feet. “Gaze on that for workmanship! Look at the dressing of that stone!”
From beyond, gray light streamed into the passage, making matches unnecessary to see. Half into a niche was thrust a stone the size of the passage. It was apparent that it had been used to block the passage. The dressing was exquisite, the sides and edges of the block precisely aligned with the place in the wall into which it was made to dovetail.
“I’ll wager here’s where the old Maya’s father died,” Francis exclaimed. “He knew the secret of the balances and leverages that pivoted the stone, and it was only partly pivoted, as you’ll observe——”
“Hell’s bells!” Henry interrupted, pointing before him on the floor at a scattered skeleton. “It must be what’s left of him. It’s fairly recent, or he would have been mummified. Most likely he was the last visitor before us.”
“The old priest said his father led men of the tierra caliente here,” Leoncia reminded Henry.
“Also,” Francis supplemented, “he said that none returned.”
Henry, who had located the skull and picked it up, uttered another exclamation and lighted a match to show the others what he had discovered: Not only was the skull dented with what must have been a blow from a sword or a machete, but a shattered hole in the back of the skull showed the unmistakable entrance of a bullet. Henry shook the skull, was rewarded by an interior rattling, shook again, and shook out a partly flattened bullet. Francis examined it.
“From a horse-pistol,” he concluded aloud. “With weak or greatly deteriorated powder, because, in a place like this, it must have been fired pretty close to point blank range and yet failed to go all the way through. And it’s an aboriginal skull all right.”
A right-angled turn completed the elbow and gave them access to a small but well-lighted rock chamber. From a window, high up and barred with vertical bars of stone a foot thick and half as wide, poured gray daylight. The floor of the place was littered with white-picked bones of men. An examination of the skulls showed them to be those of Europeans. Scattered among them were rifles, pistols, and knives, with, here and there, a machete.
“Thus far they won, across the very threshold to the treasure,” Francis said, “and, from the looks, began to fight for its possession before they laid hands on it. Too bad the old man isn’t here to see what happened to his father.”