At length Calhoun murmured musingly: "God is up there—God and Peace. Even war couldn't disturb the eternal serenity of those Andes."
He spoke in Spanish. Both Calhoun and Pelton had a fairly complete mastery of that language.
Diaz leaned far forward in his chair: "God in those mountains, Señor? Ah, yes, perhaps in the great peaks far off; but do you see that one which is quite near? It is less than two thousand meters high and at its summit there is a small depression or crater. Madre de Dios—there indeed is the lair of Satan!"
A quizzical smile came over Calhoun's lips. He turned toward the Ecuadorian: "I'm afraid the gentleman you mention has gone north to help with the big row up there. But let's hear the rest of what you were going to say. I'm intensely interested and I think that Joe is perfectly willing to listen too."
"There is a legend about 'The Devil's Nest' which says that in ancient times the Indians made human sacrifices to the sun there," Diaz began in a low voice, while he toyed nervously with the ends of his curling mustache: "Certainly there is something dreadful about the place still, but no one knows what. In the memory of living men, only two have ventured into it. That was ten years ago. A certain youth named Pedro Menendez was driven by the spirit of adventure, which is the inherent possession of most boys, to scale the heights of 'The Devil's Nest.' He failed to return. Three days later his father ventured up the walls of the extinct volcano in search of him. No human eye has seen either of them since. Truly, it was as though Satan had swallowed up both."
"Men have gone up into mountains before, and failed to return," said Pelton: "There are places where footing is precarious, and crevices in which it would be almost impossible to find a human body. However, we have a little mystery here to solve—George, what do you say if we take a trip to 'The Devil's Nest' tomorrow?"
"Bully enough, old egg," returned Calhoun laughingly: "We've faced devils before, haven't we? They were real devils hurtling at us from out of the sky and shooting streams of poisoned lead dangerously close to our gills. They will probably get us anyway in a week or two and, if we get killed in the mountains, we will at least have the satisfaction of cheating them."
Seeing that argument was useless against such reckless hot-heads, their host merely muttered softly to himself: "They are rash—these soldiers of the United States."
The last pale light had faded from above the peaks of the Andes, a faint wind soughed through the trees. The conversation drifted to other topics.