“We’ll have to, for the sooner we lift it the better. Not that anyone will come.”
“You mean that the fever will come down?”
“No, but these Aracuis go talking: and news spreads. Shall we start, then? What do you say? Off saddle and at it?”
“I’d like to, frightfully,” Hi said.
“Well, here you are then,” the man said. “I’ll give you a third share in anything we find: very likely a million pounds.”
“I say, that’s generous. But before we start work,” Hi said, “I’d like frightfully just to walk along the building and look at it, from close to. I’ve never seen one of these places before.”
“Look your bellyful,” the man said. “I hoped you’d see sense when it came to the point. I’ll get the picks along.”
The man kept his eyes upon Hi, who took a pace back to consider the front of the building. He did not see the temple: it was all a blur of angry gods topped by a foam of flowers and the spears of palms in a glare of light as red as blood. He knew that the man was watching him: he knew that the man had killed Wigmore so that he might be alone in possession. The facts of the murder were all bright in his brain. Wigmore, the scholar, had found the place and cleared it. Then this man, the wanderer and waster, had come thither, by some Fate or chance, and had murdered Wigmore. Now that he himself had come thither, the man wished him to help in the finding and the raising of the treasure. If he refused, he would have a bullet in his brain within ten seconds. If he accepted, he would have a week’s or a fortnight’s toil: then the bullet. If he tried to escape, what hope had he, save to wander in the fever forest in the fever season till he died miserably or was lost in the marsh?
“We’ll start in that door where the tree was,” the man said. “It may not have been the main entrance, but the stone is all worn away there by people’s feet: it is a used entrance.”
“All right,” Hi said, with the words sticking in his throat. He did not know what he was to do; there was nothing that he could do. He felt suddenly that there was nothing for it but to plunge into the forest, cost what it might. “I’ll never get out of it,” he thought. “But anything to get away from this fellow.”