"The chances are that we can never talk of it again. I know you that much! I told you this old hill of the temple was uncanny—bewitched,—and it is. You never would have mentioned this to me in civilized places."
"Perhaps not," agreed Keith. "And you're right—I could never speak of it again."
They never did. That night they talked only of Teddy's enterprise, and covered much paper with many figures, and made fine plans for the future.
The next day it was that Keith, hunting in the hills, heard an unusual blast from the mine, felt the ground tremble from the shock, and turning back on the trail, met a Mexican with a bleeding hand and a cut face, who urged him to hasten. It was the word of the padre!
He reached Teddy's side only in time to accept "Angela—poor little Angela—" as a life-long legacy. There had been an explosion. Graves were made for the young engineer and three of his Mexican miners on the side of the mountain. When it was all over, Keith Bryton climbed to the heights above, where the broken walls of stone showed white and gray among forest growth on the temple terrace. Below, and beyond the ranges, lay the world. In his isolation of grief, he felt as alone as the solitary mountain rising from the plain below, through which a river ran. Far down the river, miles away, gleamed a cross on the chapel of a convent. It was the old Mexican pueblo of which he had told Alvara. He remembered saying to the old man that he would never come back; yet here he was. How useless to say what one will or will not do in this world! One must make allowance for the moves fate insists upon in the game of life.
Back of him, on a slight elevation, stood some broken columns, and half an arch yet showed where an entrance had been, and under a dwarfed and twisted oak half covered with tropical vines a bench of marble gleamed. Two birds fluttered to the ground near him and turned inquisitive eyes on the intruder. He watched them carelessly, until one of them perched on a fallen block of stone ornamented with the sculptured sun of the Aztecs. It brought back like a flash that other day when he went from the presence of death to a ruined altar-place, where the Aztec sun and the cactus commemorated some unknown Mexican sculptor who cut the symbol of the faith of his people into the walls of a Christian church.
He closed his eyes, and the vision of that other day was only intensified. The wind in the oaks back of him sounded like the surf on San Juan's beach; and through it the slow, fateful words of a girl kneeling in her wedding-veil echoed in his ears as it had done a thousand times:
"So long—as—we—both—shall live!"
There were no weeping girls here, and no bells to toll out the death message; but otherwise the atmosphere of the place, and the illusion, were perfect. How—how had he chanced to enter into this half-pagan atmosphere of death? Unconsciously, automatically, he turned and re-turned on his finger the onyx ring at which Angela had laughed.
He was still seated there when the miners who had filled the graves came up the path, and with them the priest from the plains below. The Mexicans halted outside the broken walls. Only one Indian, who had followed at a distance, crossed the line of entrance, and stood apart, watching and listening in a furtive way—watching the American especially.