"Anyway, I'll get you, Senor Buzzard," Francis pleasantly assured Mancheno, at the same time flourishing his pistol at him.
He leveled his weapon as Mancheno fled, but reconsidered and did not draw trigger.
"I've only three shots left," he explained to Henry, half in apology. "And in this country one can never tell when three shots will come in handiest, as I've found out, beyond a doubt, beyond a doubt."
"Look!" the peon cried, pointing to his father and to the distant mountainside. "That is why they ran away. They have learned the peril of the sacred things of Maya."
The old priest, running over the knots of the tassel in an ecstasy that was almost trance-like, was gazing fixedly at the distant mountainside, from which, side by side and close together, two bright flashes of light were repeating themselves.
"Twin mirrors could do it in the hands of a man," was Henry's comment.
"They are the eyes of Chia," the peon repeated. "It is so written in the knots as you have heard my father say. 'Wait in the foot-steps of the God till the eyes of Chia flash.'"
The old man rose to his feet and wildly proclaimed: "To find the treasure we must find the eyes!"
"All right, old top," Henry soothed him, as, with his small traveler's compass he took the bearings of the flashes.
"He's got a compass inside his head," Henry remarked an hour later of the old priest, who led on the foremost mule. "I check him by the compass, and, no matter how the natural obstacles compel him to deviate, he comes back to the course as if he were himself a magnetic needle."