“Gold, and perhaps a huge diamond,” Johnny speculated in spite of his anxiety.
Then he began to make the circle of the walls with his light. First the wall to the right of him was slowly and carefully surveyed, then the wall which had been to his back. No opening. His breath came short and quick. A third side was covered. In his agitation he set the light zig-zagging up and down. Was he somehow trapped? Who had screamed?
Half the last wall was covered, two-thirds. The suspense seemed unbearable. Then, with a sudden sigh of relief, he started forward.
Before him was an opening. It did not seem quite the same, but it must be the one. In his eagerness and anxiety he fairly ran.
Now he was half way across the room, and now at the wall. He was about to step forward and out to freedom and friends when, to his astonishment, his foot splashed down into water. It was with the utmost difficulty that he avoided plunging head foremost into a deep pool that lay just before him.
Once he had recovered from this shock he cast his light over the pool only to discover that the back side of the pool, which was some ten feet across, was solidly walled in, as was the room itself.
Obeying some unknown instinct, he dropped upon his knees and directed his powerful light straight down into the pool. For a moment he gazed intently downward, then started back in horror.
The thing he had seen almost made him faint. At the bottom of that pool he had caught the gleam of gold and the green light of jade ornaments, and in the midst of these a horrible, grinning human skull.
“This,” he told himself after he had control of himself again, “is a sacrificial pool. The gold and jade were a sacrifice. When? Who can tell? And the owner of that head? The door is closed. I am trapped. When will my time come?”
At that very moment there came, faint and indistinct, but unmistakable, the notes of a call: