No sooner said than done. Heedless of sharp stones that cut their shoes and sharper cacti that tore their flesh, they sprang away over the intervening space that lay between them and the tumbled pile of debris that had once been a very happy home.
It was with a cry of great joy that Kirk found his good friends, the family of the last Don, gathered upon a little circle of green that lay before the ruins.
After a quiet greeting befitting such a moment of great sadness, the boys took their places beside them.
It was a strange and moving sight that met their eyes as they looked about them. Even Pant, who had seen and experienced much, felt a choking sensation about his throat. Sprawled about upon the ground in various attitudes of sleep were the servants. Not so the family. The aged grandmother sat rocking gently back and forth. The last of the Dons, who had returned from a trip down the river just in time to see his home crumble to ruins, walked slowly before them. With hands clasped behind his back, he paced ceaselessly backward and forward in the moonlight.
Sitting beside the two boys, the dark-eyed Spanish girl, granddaughter of the last of the Dons, stared dreamily at the moon. To her no tragedy could be quite complete, for was she not young and beautiful? Was not all the world fresh and new? Strong she was, too, and brave. Many the jaguar that had known the steel of her unfaltering aim, many the wild turkey brought in by her to be roasted before the fire.
“Now,” she said, and there was a note akin to joy in her tone, “we shall live like the savages in a house of thatched bamboo. Through the many cracks the morning sun shall peep at us as we awake. The rain shall fall gently upon our roof, the breeze shall play with my hair as I sit in our little castle of bamboo. The jaguar may look in upon us at night and the little wild pigs go grunting about our cabin. My good friend Kirk, and my new friend Pant, we will live like savages and life will be sweet for, after all, what is so romantic as a little home in the midst of a vast wilderness?”
Kirk smiled at her. He admired the courage of this child of an old, long lost race.
As for Pant, he scarcely heard her. He was thinking of the fragments of a tale that had come to his ears, the tale of the first Don and his box of beaten silver filled with priceless pearls.
“It may have been hidden in the walls of that very building which the rude shock of nature has wrecked,” he told himself. “I must have a look over those ruins.
“And then perhaps,” he thought more soberly still, “that may have been the box I saw on the rocky ledge just as the earthquake shook the world down upon my head. I wonder if that passage was closed? If it is not, was the box buried in the wreckage? Who can tell? I must know.”