Kneeling beside the chest she reached into it and fished up a rudely fashioned tomahawk, the blade of which was merely a sharp stone.
“This, and this,” she again reached down and added a long, wicked-looking arrow-head to the tomahawk, “tell me that the people who really found the treasure were the Indians. Don’t you remember that Sir John wrote in the journal that he didn’t doubt that there were Indians lurking about in this jungle? They were watching when Sir John and his men buried the treasure. After they’d gone, the Indians came here and dug it up.”
“It seems queer that they didn’t just throw the chest away instead of burying it again with those queer weapons in it,” declared Mabel.
The Wayfarers were now down on their knees in a little circle about the chest, interestedly lifting and inspecting the few articles it still contained. There was another tomahawk, a murderous-looking mace and a number of stone arrow-heads of various sizes. This, then, was the treasure of Las Golondrinas. For it, one Fereda had taken many lives, and because of it, his descendants had wasted long years of bitter, unavailing search.
“It strikes me that the Indians of three hundred years ago liked to play jokes,” was Mr. Carroll’s opinion. “That seems to be about the only explanation of this stuff being here in the box. They took the treasure and decided to leave a grim message for the other fellows if they ever came back for their valuables. It was their way of saying ‘Stung!’ I guess.”
“We’ve all been stung,” giggled Patsy.
“Too bad it wasn’t that wicked old Camillo instead of nice harmless people like us,” said Bee.
“And we were going to give Dolores half of it,” mourned Patsy. “Now we’ve nothing to give her except a war-club and a couple of old tomahawks which she certainly won’t have any use for.”
This raised a laugh in which even Dolores joined. She had looked unduly solemn since the beginning of the expedition. Now for the first time her sober face lighted into its wonderful radiant beauty.
“For this I am glad,” she declared earnestly. “To find in this box gold and jewels would have been the sorrow, because such treasure cost some lives. So it was surely evil. Now we know all and thus Las Golondrinas which was always the unlucky place becomes the lucky. So shall good fortune stay here now, for always.