"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 t9 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.
"Might there not have been survivors who managed to get away with the loot?" suggested Henry.
But at that moment, casting, his eyes from the bones to a survey of the chamber, Francis saw what made him say: "Without doubt, no. See those gems in those eyes. Eubies, or I never saw a ruby!"
They followed his gaze to the stone statue of a squat and heavy female who stared at them red-eyed and openmouthed. So large was the mouth that it made a caricature of the rest of the face. Beside it, carved similarly of stone, and on somewhat more heroic lines, was a more obscene and hideous male statue, with one ear of proportioned size and the other ear as grotesquely large as the female's mouth.
"The beauteous dame must be Chia all right," Henry grinned. "But who's her gentleman friend with the elephant ear and the green eyes?"