His thoughts returned to the American boy who had accompanied him, who now sat close beside him. During the previous day he had been taken to the boy’s room. There he had seen costly toilet articles, silver backed brushes, real tortoise shell combs, and genuine alligator skin traveling bags.
“He must belong to a rich family,” he thought. “How then does he chance to be here so far from the home of other Americans, with only a black man as his companion?”
As if reading his thoughts, the other boy began to speak. “My uncle,” he said, “has travelled much. He wishes me to know the world as he knows it. He is especially anxious for me to know much of Central America and her products. You see I am to be—” He paused, did not finish the sentence, stared away at the moon for a moment, then said quietly, as if the sentence he had not finished had really never been begun, “Uncle has had but one rule in all his travels: wherever a native, one who has always lived in the land he is visiting, will go, he will follow. That is the only rule he has laid down for me. My Carib is a native of this land. You saw how wonderfully he performed to-day.”
Pant nodded.
“Wherever the Carib will go, I may follow.”
A question leaped into Pant’s mind, “Would the Carib venture again into the fear inspiring Maya cave?” He doubted it, yet he wished very much to return. He did not wish to go alone, had hoped that his new found friend might return with him. The story he heard that night as he sat before the ruins of that ancient home greatly strengthened his determination to revisit the cave.
No place could be better fitted for the telling of a tale of buccaneers and Spanish gold than that scene of ruins beneath the golden moon.
It was the last Don himself who told it. He told it all in Spanish, with many a dramatic gesture, but Kirk, who appeared to understand Spanish as well as he did his mother tongue, interpreted so skillfully that it seemed to Pant that the aged Don, with his venerable beard and coal black eyes, was telling the story directly to him.
And this was the tale he told:
Soon after gold had been brought to Europe from the New World and the rush for riches had begun, Ramon Salazar, who had amassed a comfortable fortune as a trader in old Madrid, but in whose veins coursed the spirit of the Crusaders, sold all his possessions and, having invested them in trade goods, sailed for America.