Near the center of the clearing, Pinto managed to shoot two curassows, huge, plump birds which looked and tasted much like turkeys. Leaving these with his companion, the Indian pushed on ahead for more. Suddenly he reappeared among the trees, and Will noticed as he hurried toward him, that his copper-colored face showed gray and drawn, while beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. As he joined the boy, Pinto placed his finger on his lips with a look of ghastly terror and led Will into the deepest part of a near-by thicket. From there, though hidden from sight, they had a view through the close-set bushes of the other path. Suddenly, from far down that trail, sounded a faint, but regular, clicking noise. As it became louder and louder, rising and falling in a regular cadence, Pinto slipped like a snake deeper into the long jungle-grass.
"Lie still for your life," he whispered in Will's ear, so faintly that the boy could scarcely make out the words. Then, in an instant, from out of the jungle not twenty feet away there strode along the dim path a figure of nightmare horror—that of a tall naked man, with gaunt and fleshless arms and legs, great knobs of bone marking his knee and elbow-joints. His sunken body was painted black, with every bone outlined in a chalky white, so that he seemed a living, walking skeleton.
Around the black and wasted neck, wrinkled like that of a mummy, hung a long string of small bones which, with a thrill of horror, the boy recognized by their nails as those of human fingers. It was these, striking together, which made the clicking noise that Will had heard. The face of the horror was painted black, except the lips and chin, which showed blood-red, while out of the holes at the corners of the lower lip protruded curved, gleaming peccary-tusks. These ornaments gave an indescribably brutish appearance to the countenance that they ornamented, while above them two snaky black eyes with an expression of implacable cruelty glittered like crumbs of glass from under overhanging brows. Like a specter, the shape disappeared among the shadows; but it was followed by another and another and another, until a long procession of terrible figures had passed.
As the ill-omened clicking died away in the distance Will sprang to his feet.
"No!" hissed the Indian. "Our only chance of life is to lie quiet. That is a Maya war-party on a man-hunt!"
"They'll meet the others on the Trail," whispered Will.
"Six men can't do any more against fifty than two," returned Pinto, practically. "We'll only throw away our lives and not save theirs."
"Stay if you want," returned the boy; "I'll live or die with them!" and he sped back at full speed along the path over which they had come. Just before he reached the Trail he looked back—and there was Pinto at his shoulder.
"Very foolish," the latter muttered, "but—I come too."
Down the Trail the two hurried, and, rounding a bend, burst in suddenly upon the rest of the party lying in the shade of the overhanging trees awaiting their return.