Calaman involuntarily lifted his hands in astonishment as he saw that there was only one fresh hole, but that it went far into the skull—so nearly through, that some of the sand with which it was tightly stuffed filtered out at the back.
The priest turned toward the white men, just as Nick Carter spoke again, in a loud tone, as a new idea came to him.
“Stand where you are,” he requested of Calaman. “I’ll show you that the death stick can be made to strike closely without hurting anybody when we ask it to do so.”
Calaman stood still, as if he did not quite understand what was meant. Then Nick fired three shots so quickly that they sounded like the roll of a drum—one to the right, one to the left, and another a foot above the head of the priest. All three bullets just shaved him.
As the detective held up a hand and smiled, to indicate that it was all over, Calaman stalked toward him. He was outwardly calm, whatever may have been his thoughts. The old fellow was a past master in hiding his emotions.
“You held my life in your hands,” he said. “I saw that each of those little metal cases meant death, and I heard the whir as they passed by my head. Now, show me how to use them, and perhaps I will let the white man you seek go free. Besides, I may give you all many presents.”
“You say ‘perhaps’ you will let our friend, the white man in your city, go free,” rejoined Nick Carter. “Do you forget that you promised he should be delivered to us? Also you said that there was no enmity between us. I am showing you how we use our death sticks. I would not do that for one whom I believed to be an enemy.”
Calaman smiled inscrutably, and his dark eyes were almost hidden in their sockets for an instant. He looked the incarnation of cunning and malevolence.
“Show it all to me, and your friend shall go free to-night, in honor of the feast of the Golden Scarab,” he promised smoothly.
“Very well,” replied Nick Carter. But he was not blinded in the least by the priest’s sudden acquiescence.