“No—but I will.”
“Oh!” Nicky was quick to see the idea in Cliff’s mind. “At the Feast of Raymi—before the sacrifice—Caya’s sister.”
“Yes, if Mr. Whitley doesn’t get his chemicals to save the corn.” Nicky turned a handspring, with a hurrah!
CHAPTER XIV
GOLD, AND A SURPRISE
“Four days more and you will see your father,” Bill told Cliff. “He is much better. I saw him today.”
“If only I could slip away and see him, just for a minute.” Cliff spoke wistfully. Bill shook his head.
“I am afraid they would suspect something,” he said. “It was easy for me to see him, as I told you before; I pretended to know that there was a great, pale scholar from beyond the mountains whose knowledge I wanted to compare with mine. The chief priest often talked with your pa and he was glad to take me; and now I can go alone. You are supposed to be spending all your time pleading with the Sun-god to save their corn. I’m afraid to have you caught going through the tunnels.”
Quichaka was a city modeled very closely along the pattern of the ancient capital, Cuzco. As in that old place, so in Quichaka, the grounds beneath the temples were honeycombed with secret passages, tunnels that led to underground chambers.
In the fifteenth century Topa Inca Yapanqui had extended the borders of the flourishing empire of the Incas to the Maule River and his son had later subdued Quito and made it a part of his possessions; then the Spaniards had come into the country. Observing that these invaders had confiscated treasure, one of the many sons of the reigning Inca of the period had gathered much treasure and many of his nobles and their subjects and had found a way to the hidden valley where they had built up Quichaka during long years of labor until it almost duplicated the ancient glories of Cuzco, their former home.
“They don’t keep Cliff’s father in a dungeon, do they?” Tom asked Bill. Mr. Whitley was away, alone, in the foothills, searching for certain minerals. Bill shook his head in reply to Tom.