“What puzzles me about the affair, tonight, is: How could Huayca get past us and go down the pass?” Cliff said. “Or—if those people down there are from Quichaka—how they got past us.”
It was dawn before they discovered the reality.
Then Bill, looking carefully over, to be greeted with a flung stone which, however, did not reach the ledge, made a statement.
“There are forty men down there,” he said. “They are not from Quichaka. They are men of some settlement: I can tell by their clothes.”
“Then Huayca must have passed us,” Cliff declared. “But how?”
“There must be another way around this ledge,” Mr. Whitley said.
“If we could find it——” Tom did not finish. It would give them a chance to escape, was the thought in his mind. But Bill shook his head.
“If they know it they are watching it,” he assured his friends.
One of the men on the lower road shouted up at them.
“Oho!” Bill said, interpreting. “He says for us to give ourselves up. He calls us robbers. Huayca must have gotten past us and told about the gold.”