Hearts of Three

“And who in hell are you?” Henry demanded. “And what in hell are you doing here?”

“I don’t blame you,” the aviator grinned. “With a face swollen like that you’ve got a right to be rude. And who beat you up? In hell, I haven’t ascertained my status yet. But here on earth I am known as Parsons, Lieutenant Parsons. I am not doing anything in hell as yet; but here in Panama I am scheduled to fly across this day from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Is there any way I may serve you before I start?”

“Sure,” Henry nodded. “Take a tool out of that bag of yours and smash this padlock. I’ll get rheumatism if I have to stick here much longer. My name’s Morgan, and no man has beaten me up. Those are mosquito-bites.”

With several blows of a wrench, Lieutenant Parsons smashed the ancient padlock and helped Henry to his feet. Even while rubbing the circulation back into his feet and ankles, Henry, in a rush, was telling the army aviator of the predicament and possibly tragic disaster to Leoncia and Francis.

“I love that Francis,” he concluded. “He is the dead spit of myself. We’re more like twins, and we must be distantly related. As for the senorita, not only do I love her but I am engaged to marry her. Now will you help? Where’s the machine? It takes a long time to get to the Maya Mountain on foot or mule-back; but if you give me a lift in your machine I’d be there in no time, along with a hundred sticks of dynamite, which you could procure for me and with which I could blow the side out of that mountain and drain off the water.”

Lieutenant Parsons hesitated.

“Say yes, say yes,” Henry pleaded.

Back in the heart of the sacred mountain, the three imprisoned ones found themselves in total darkness the instant the stone that blocked the exit from the idol chamber had settled into place. Francis and Leoncia groped for each other and touched hands. In another moment his arm was around her, and the deliciousness of the contact robbed the situation of half its terror. Near them they could hear Torres breathing heavily. At last he muttered:

“Mother of God, but that was a close shave! What next, I wonder?”

“There’ll be many nexts before we get out of this neck of the woods,” Francis assured him. “And we might as well start getting out.”

The method of procedure was quickly arranged. Placing Leoncia behind him, her hand clutching the hem of his jacket so as to be guided by him, he moved ahead with his left hand in contact with the wall. Abreast of him, Torres felt his way along the right-hand wall. By their voices they could thus keep track of each other, measure the width of the passage, and guard against being separated into forked passages. Fortunately, the tunnel, for tunnel it truly was, had a smooth floor, so that, while they groped their way, they did not stumble. Francis refused to use his matches unless extremity arose, and took precaution against falling into a possible pit by cautiously advancing one foot at a time and ascertaining solid stone under it ere putting on his weight. As a result, their progress was slow. At no greater speed than half a mile an hour did they proceed.

Once only did they encounter branching passages. Here he lighted a precious match from his waterproof case, and found that between the two passages there was nothing to choose. They were as like as two peas.

“The only way is to try one,” he concluded, “and, if it gets us nowhere, to retrace and try the other. There’s one thing certain: these passages lead somewhere, or the Mayas wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of making them.”

Ten minutes later he halted suddenly and cried warning. The foot he had advanced was suspended in emptiness where the floor should have been. Another match was struck, and they found themselves on the edge of a natural cavern of such proportions that neither to right nor left, nor up nor down, nor across, could the tiny flame expose any limits to it. But they did manage to make out a rough sort of stairway, half-natural, half-improved by man, which fell away beneath them into the pit of black.

In another hour, having followed the path down the length of the floor of the cavern, they were rewarded by a feeble glimmer of daylight, which grew stronger as they advanced. Before they knew it, they had come to the source of it – being much nearer than they had judged; and Francis, tearing away vines and shrubbery, crawled out into the blaze of the afternoon sun. In a moment Leoncia and Torres were beside him, gazing down into a valley from an eyrie on a cliff. Nearly circular was the valley, a full league in diameter, and it appeared to be mountain-walled and cliff-walled for its entire circumference.

“It is the Valley of Lost Souls,” Torres utterly solemnly. “I have heard of it, but never did I believe.”

“So have I heard of it and never believed,” Leoncia gasped.

“And what of it?” demanded Francis. “We’re not lost souls, but good flesh-and-blood persons. We should worry.”

“But Francis, listen,” Leoncia said. “The tales I have heard of it, ever since I was a little girl, all agreed that no person who ever got into it ever got out again.”

“Granting that that is so,” Francis could not help smiling, “then how did the tales come out? If nobody ever came out again to tell about it, how does it happen that everybody outside knows about it?”

“I don’t know,” Leoncia admitted. “I only tell you what I have heard. Besides, I never believed. But this answers all the descriptions of the tales.”

“Nobody ever got out,” Torres affirmed with the same solemn utterance.

“Then how do you know that anybody got in?” Francis persisted.

“All the lost souls live here,” was the reply. “That is why we’ve never seen them, because they never got out. I tell you, Mr. Francis Morgan, that I am no creature without reason. I have been educated. I have studied in Europe, and I have done business in your own New York. I know science and philosophy; and yet do I know that this is the valley, once in, from which no one emerges.”

“Well, we’re not in yet, are we?” retorted Francis with a slight manifestation of impatience. “And we don’t have to go in, do we?” He crawled forward to the verge of the shelf of loose soil and crumbling stone in order to get a better view of the distant object his eye had just picked out. “If that isn’t a grass-thatched roof – ”

At that moment the soil broke away under his hands. In a flash, the whole soft slope on which they rested broke away, and all three were sliding and rolling down the steep slope in the midst of a miniature avalanche of soil, gravel, and grass-tufts.

The two men picked themselves up first, in the thicket of bushes which had arrested them; but, before they could get to Leoncia, she, too, was up and laughing.

“Just as you were saying we didn’t have to go into the valley!” she gurgled at Francis. “Now will you believe?”

But Francis was busy. Reaching out his hand, he caught and stopped a familiar object bounding down the steep slope after them. It was Torres’ helmet purloined from the chamber of mummies, and to Torres he tossed it.

“Throw it away,” Leoncia said.

“It’s the only protection against the sun I possess,” was his reply, as, turning it over in his hands, his eyes lighted upon an inscription on the inside. He showed it to his companions, reading it aloud:

“DA VASCO.”

“I have heard,” Leoncia breathed.

“And you heard right,” Torres nodded. “Da Vasco was my direct ancestor. My mother was a Da Vasco. He came over the Spanish Main with Cortez.”

“He mutinied,” Leoncia took up the tale. “I remember it well from my father and from my Uncle Alfaro. With a dozen comrades he sought the Maya treasure. They led a sea-tribe of Caribs, a hundred strong including their women, as auxiliaries. Mendoza, under Cortez’s instructions, pursued; and his report, in the archives, so Uncle Alfaro told me, says that they were driven into the Valley of the Lost Souls where they were left to perish miserably.”

“And he evidently tried to get out by the way we’ve just come in,” Torres continued, “and the Mayas caught him and made a mummy of him.”

He jammed the ancient helmet down on his head, saying:

“Low as the sun is in the afternoon sky, it bites my crown like acid.”

“And famine bites at me like acid,” Francis confessed. “Is the valley inhabited?”

“I should know, Senor,” Torres replied. “There is the narrative of Mendoza, in which he reported that Da Vasco and his party were left there ‘to perish miserably.’ This I do know: they were never seen again of men.”

“Looks as though plenty of food could be grown in a place like this – ” Francis began, but broke off at sight of Leoncia picking berries from a bush. “Here! Stop that, Leoncia! We’ve got enough troubles without having a very charming but very much poisoned young woman on our hands.”

“They’re all right,” she said, calmly eating. “You can see where the birds have been pecking and eating them.”

“In which case I apologize and join you,” Francis cried, filling his mouth with the luscious fruit. “And if I could catch the birds that did the pecking, I’d eat them too.”

By the time they had eased the sharpest of their hunger-pangs, the sun was so low that Torres removed the helmet of Da Vasco.

“We might as well stop here for the night,” he said. “I left my shoes in the cave with the mummies, and lost Da Vasco’s old boots during the swimming. My feet are cut to ribbons, and there’s plenty of seasoned grass here out of which I can plait a pair of sandals.”

While occupied with this task, Francis built a fire and gathered a supply of wood, for, despite the low latitude, the high altitude made fire a necessity for a night’s lodging. Ere he had completed the supply, Leoncia, curled up on her side, her head in the hollow of her arm, was sound asleep. Against the side of her away from the fire, Francis thoughtfully packed a mound of dry leaves and dry forest mould.

CHAPTER XVII

Daybreak in the Valley of the Lost Souls, and the Long House in the village of the Tribe of the Lost Souls. Fully eighty feet in length was the Long House, with half as much in width, built of adobe bricks, and rising thirty feet to a gable roof thatched with straw. Out of the house feebly walked the Priest of the Sun – an old man, tottery on his legs, sandal-footed, clad in a long robe of rude home-spun cloth, in whose withered Indian face were haunting reminiscences of the racial lineaments of the ancient conquistadores. On his head was a curious cap of gold, arched over by a semi-circle of polished golden spikes. The effect was obvious, namely, the rising sun and the rays of the rising sun.

He tottered across the open space to where a great hollow log swung suspended between two posts carved with totemic and heraldic devices. He glanced at the eastern horizon, already red with the dawning, to reassure himself that he was on time, lifted a stick, the end of which was fiber-woven into a ball, and struck the hollow log. Feeble as he was, and light as was the blow, the hollow log boomed and reverberated like distant thunder.

Almost immediately, while he continued slowly to beat, from the grass-thatched dwellings that formed the square about the Long House, emerged the Lost Souls. Men and women, old and young, and children and babes in arms, they all came out and converged upon the Sun Priest. No more archaic spectacle could be witnessed in the twentieth-century world. Indians, indubitably they were, yet in many of their faces were the racial reminiscences of the Spaniard. Some faces, to all appearance, were all Spanish. Others, by the same token, were all Indian. But betwixt and between, the majority of them betrayed the inbred blend of both races. But more bizarre was their costume – unremarkable in the women, who were garbed in long, discreet robes of home-spun cloth, but most remarkable in the men, whose home-spun was grotesquely fashioned after the style of Spanish dress that obtained in Spain at the time of Columbus’ first voyage. Homely and sad-looking were the men and women – as of a breed too closely interbred to retain joy of life. This was true of the youths and maidens, of the children, and of the very babes against breasts – true, with the exception of two, one, a child-girl of ten, in whose face was fire, and spirit, and intelligence. Amongst the sodden faces of the sodden and stupid Lost Souls, her face stood out like a flaming flower. Only like hers was the face of the old Sun Priest, cunning, crafty, intelligent.

While the priest continued to beat the resounding log, the entire tribe formed about him in a semi-circle, facing the east. As the sun showed the edge of its upper rim, the priest greeted it and hailed it with a quaint and medieval Spanish, himself making low obeisance thrice repeated, while the tribe prostrated itself. And, when the full sun shone clear of the horizon, all the tribe, under the direction of the priest, arose and uttered a joyful chant. Just as he had dismissed his people, a thin pillar of smoke, rising in the quiet air across the valley, caught the priest’s eye. He pointed it out, and commanded several of the young men.

“It rises in the Forbidden Place of Fear where no member of the tribe may wander. It is some devil of a pursuer sent out by our enemies who have vainly sought our hiding-place through the centuries. He must not escape to make report, for our enemies are powerful, and we shall be destroyed. Go. Kill him that we may not be killed.”

About the fire, which had been replenished at intervals throughout the night, Leoncia, Francis, and Torres lay asleep, the latter with his new-made sandals on his feet and with the helmet of Da Vasco pulled tightly down on his head to keep off the dew. Leoncia was the first to awaken, and so curious was the scene that confronted her, that she watched quietly through her down-dropped lashes. Three of the strange Lost Tribe men, bows still stretched and arrows drawn in what was evident to her as the interrupted act of slaying her and her companions, were staring with amazement at the face of the unconscious Torres. They looked at each other in doubt, let their bows straighten, and shook their heads in patent advertisement that they were not going to kill. Closer they crept upon Torres, squatting on their hams the better to scrutinize his face and the helmet, which latter seemed to arouse their keenest interest.

From where she lay, Leoncia was able privily to nudge Francis’ shoulder with her foot. He awoke quietly, and quietly sat up, attracting the attention of the strangers. Immediately they made the universal peace sign, laying down their bows and extending their palms outward in token of being weaponless.

“Good morning, merry strangers,” Francis addressed them in English, which made them shake their heads while it aroused Torres.

“They must be Lost Souls,” Leoncia whispered to Francis.

“Or real estate agents,” he smiled back. “At least the valley is inhabited. – Torres, who’re your friends? From the way they regard you, one would think they were relatives of yours.”

Quite ignoring them, the three Lost Souls drew apart a slight distance and debated in low sibilant tones.

“Sounds like a queer sort of Spanish,” Francis observed.

“It’s medieval, to say the least,” Leoncia confirmed.

“It’s the Spanish of the conquistadores pretty badly gone to seed,” Torres contributed. “You see I was right. The Lost Souls never get away.”

“At any rate they must give and be given in marriage,” Francis quipped, “else how explain these three young huskies?”

But by this time the three huskies, having reached agreement, were beckoning them with encouraging gestures to follow across the valley.

“They’re good-natured and friendly cusses, to say the least, despite their sorrowful mug,” said Francis, as they prepared to follow. “But did you ever see a sadder-faced aggregation in your life? They must have been born in the dark of the moon, or had all their sweet gazelles die, or something or other worse.”

“It’s just the kind of faces one would expect of lost souls,” Leoncia answered.

“And if we never get out of here, I suppose we’ll get to looking a whole lot sadder than they do,” he came back. “Anyway, I hope they’re leading us to breakfast. Those berries were better than nothing, but that is not saying much.”

An hour or more afterward, still obediently following their guides, they emerged upon the clearings, the dwelling places, and the Long House of the tribe.

“These are descendants of Da Vasco’s party and the Caribs,” Torres affirmed, as he glanced over the assembled faces. “That is incontrovertible on the face of it.”

“And they’ve relapsed from the Christian religion of Da Vasco to old heathen worship,” added Francis. “Look at that altar – there. It’s a stone altar, and, from the smell of it, that is no breakfast, but a sacrifice that is cooking, in spite of the fact that it smells like mutton.”

“Thank heaven it’s only a lamb,” Leoncia breathed. “The old Sun Worship included human sacrifice. And this is Sun Worship. See that old man there in the long shroud with the golden-rayed cap of gold. He’s a sun priest. Uncle Alfaro has told me all about the sun-worshipers.”

Behind and above the altar, was a great metal image of the sun.

“Gold, all gold,” Francis whispered, “and without alloy. Look at those spikes, the size of them, yet so pure is the metal that I wager a child could bend them any way it wished and even tie knots in them.”

“Merciful God! – look at that!” Leoncia gasped, indicating with her eyes a crude stone bust that stood to one side of the altar and slightly lower. “It is the face of Torres. It is the face of the mummy in the Maya cave.”

“And there is an inscription – ” Francis stepped closer to see and was peremptorily waved back by the priest. “It says, ‘Da Vasco.’ Notice that it has the same sort of helmet that Torres is wearing. – And, say! Glance at the priest! If he doesn’t look like Torres’ full brother, I’ve never fancied a resemblance in my life!”

The priest, with angry face and imperative gesture, motioned Francis to silence, and made obeisance to the cooking sacrifice. As if in response, a flaw of wind put out the flame of the cooking.

“The Sun God is angry,” the priest announced with great solemnity, his queer Spanish nevertheless being intelligible to the newcomers. “Strangers have come among us and remain unslain. That is why the Sun God is angry. Speak, you young men who have brought the strangers alive to our altar. Was not my bidding, which is ever and always the bidding of the Sun God, that you should slay them?”

One of the three young men stepped tremblingly forth, and with trembling forefingers pointed at the face of Torres and at the face of the stone bust.

“We recognised him,” he quavered, “and we could not slay him for we remembered prophecy and that our great ancestor would some day return. Is this stranger he? We do not know. We dare not know nor judge. Yours, O priest, is the knowledge, and yours be the judgment. Is this he?”

The priest looked closely at Torres and exclaimed incoherently. Turning his back abruptly, he rekindled the sacred cooking fire from a pot of fire at the base of an altar. But the fire flamed up, flickered down, and died.

“The Sun God is angry,” the priest reiterated; whereat the Lost Souls beat their breasts and moaned and lamented. “The sacrifice is unacceptable, for the fire will not burn. Strange things are afoot. This is a matter of the deeper mysteries which I alone may know. We shall not sacrifice the strangers … now. I must take time to inform myself of the Sun God’s will.”

With his hands he waved the tribespeople away, ceasing the ceremonial half-completed, and directed that the three captives be taken into the Long House.

“I can’t follow the play,” Francis whispered in Leoncia’s ear, “but just the same I hope here’s where we eat.”

“Look at that pretty little girl,” said Leoncia, indicating with her eyes the child with the face of fire and spirit.

“Torres has already spotted her,” Francis whispered back. “I caught him winking at her. He doesn’t know the play, nor which way the cat will jump, but he isn’t missing a chance to make friends. We’ll have to keep an eye on him, for he’s a treacherous hound and capable of throwing us over any time if it would serve to save his skin.”

Inside the Long House, seated on rough-plaited mats of grass, they found themselves quickly served with food. Clear drinking water and a thick stew of meat and vegetables were served in generous quantity in queer, unglazed pottery jars. Also, they were given hot cakes of ground Indian corn that were not altogether unlike tortillas.

After the women who served had departed, the little girl, who had led them and commanded them, remained. Torres resumed his overtures, but she, graciously ignoring him, devoted herself to Leoncia who seemed to fascinate her.

“She’s a sort of hostess, I take it,” Francis explained. “You know – like the maids of the village in Samoa, who entertain all travellers and all visitors of no matter how high rank, and who come pretty close to presiding at all functions and ceremonials. They are selected by the high chiefs for their beauty, their virtue, and their intelligence. And this one reminds me very much of them, except that she’s so awfully young.”

Closer she came to Leoncia, and, fascinated though she patently was by the beautiful strange woman, in her bearing of approach there was no hint of servility nor sense of inferiority.

“Tell me,” she said, in the quaint archaic Spanish of the valley, “is that man really Capitan Da Vasco returned from his home in the sun in the sky?”

Torres smirked and bowed, and proclaimed proudly: “I am a Da Vasco.”

“Not a Da Vasco, but Da Vasco himself,” Leoncia coached him in English.

“It’s a good bet – play it!” Francis commanded, likewise in English. “It may pull us all out of a hole. I’m not particularly stuck on that priest, and he seems the high-cockalorum over these Lost Souls.”

“I have at last come back from the sun,” Torres told the little maid, taking his cue.

She favored him with a long and unwavering look, in which they could see her think, and judge, and appraise. Then, with expressionless face, she bowed to him respectfully, and, with scarcely a glance at Francis, turned to Leoncia and favored her with a friendly smile that was an illumination.

“I did not know that God made women so beautiful as you,” the little maid said softly, ere she turned to go out. At the door she paused to add, “The Lady Who Dreams is beautiful, but she is strangely different from you.”

But hardly had she gone, when the Sun Priest, followed by a number of young men, entered, apparently for the purpose of removing the dishes and the uneaten food. Even as some of them were in the act of bending over to pick up the dishes, at a signal from the priest they sprang upon the three guests, bound their hands and arms securely behind them, and led them out to the Sun God’s altar before the assembled tribe. Here, where they observed a crucible on a tripod over a fierce fire, they were tied to fresh-sunken posts, while many eager hands heaped fuel about them to their knees.

“Now buck up – be as haughty as a real Spaniard!” Francis at the same time instructed and insulted Torres. “You’re Da Vasco himself. Hundreds of years before, you were here on earth in this very valley with the ancestors of these mongrels.”

“You must die,” the Sun Priest was now addressing them, while the Lost Souls nodded unanimously. “For four hundred years, as we count our sojourn in this valley, have we slain all strangers. You were not slain, and behold the instant anger of the Sun God: our altar fire went out.” The Lost Souls moaned and howled and pounded their chests. “Therefore, to appease the Sun God, you shall now die.”

“Beware!” Torres proclaimed, prompted in whispers, sometimes by Francis, sometimes by Leoncia. “I am Da Vasco. I have just come from the sun.” He nodded with his head, because of his tied hands, at the stone bust. “I am that Da Vasco. I led your ancestors here four hundred years ago, and I left you here, commanding you to remain until my return.”

The Sun Priest hesitated.

“Well, priest, speak up and answer the divine Da Vasco,” Francis spoke harshly.

“How do I know that he is divine?” the priest countered quickly. “Do I not look much like him myself? Am I therefore divine? Am I Da Vasco? Is he Da Vasco? Or may not Da Vasco be yet in the sun? – for truly I know that I am man born of woman three-score and eighteen years ago and that I am not Da Vasco.”