The Glacier Gate

                          An Adventure Story

                                  By
                         FRANK LILLIE POLLOCK

                               NEW YORK
                            CHELSEA HOUSE
                              PUBLISHERS




                           The Glacier Gate

                  Copyright, 1926, by CHELSEA HOUSE
                       Printed in the U. S. A.

   All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
                languages, including the Scandinavian.




                               CONTENTS

                      I. Determined Destiny
                     II. False Colors
                    III. Rockett
                     IV. Wrecked
                      V. The Digger
                     VI. Yuma Oil
                    VII. Her Father
                   VIII. Green Stones
                     IX. Unexplained Disappearances
                      X. A Generous Offer
                     XI. The Unwilling Tourist
                    XII. The Long Shot
                   XIII. Southward Bound
                    XIV. The Castaway
                     XV. An Unexpected Vision
                    XVI. Imprisoned in Snow
                   XVII. The Glacier’s Heart
                  XVIII. Camp of the Dead
                    XIX. Resurrection
                     XX. In His Own Net
                    XXI. The Knife
                   XXII. Tronador Light




THE GLACIER GATE


CHAPTER I

DETERMINED DESTINY


Destiny knocked at his door, but Doctor Rupert Lang was not at home.
At that very moment he was talking of his destiny to Miss Eva Morrison
in the glassed gallery of the Bayview Hotel, four miles out of Mobile,
where they had motored for tea.

It was not the first time they had drunk tea in this spot, and they
had usually come to talk of Lang’s dubious future, of what he might do
with what a series of catastrophes had left him. Nervous and ill, his
plans wavered. He had lately come to think of starting life afresh in
a country medical practice far back up State, in the “piney woods.”

“I’m not much good at general practice,” he said. “Surgery is all I
ever shone at. But up there they need doctors badly, men who can
handle a big, rough practice, rough-and-ready surgery of all kinds——”

“You mean to bury yourself alive!” Eva interrupted indignantly.

He looked at her with sudden, nervous irritation. She had said the
same thing before. Bury himself alive? As if he didn’t know it! But
what else was left to him?

Nothing else seemed to be left. He would not have believed that a
career could have been snuffed out so quickly. It was only a few weeks
ago that his future had been all golden; a great, growing Boston
reputation, even extending toward New York. He was one of the rising
stars of surgery, a coming man, a magician of the knife, one of these
modern gods who take men apart and reconstruct them with improvements.
Still well under thirty, he enjoyed the respect, the admiration, the
jealousy of men twice his age. His reputation increased; the big
checks came in.

And then—a little carelessness or ill luck, an unregarded scratch on a
finger that left it poisoned after an operation, and all at once he
was confronted with the danger of losing his right hand. Good work had
averted that; he recovered, but the poisoning left a slight stiffness
of the fingers and thumb, a nervous cramp that would have meant
nothing to a carpenter, but was ruin to the delicate craft of a
surgeon.

The bandages were not yet off his hand when the Automotive Fuel
Company collapsed, following the disappearance of Arthur Rockett, its
promotor, with all the liquid assets. Lang had spent the big checks
freely as they came, and his sole investment, amounting to twelve
thousand dollars, was in Automotive Fuel. The company had been touted
as a good thing by people who should have known better, and wiser men
than Lang were bitten.

For Lang the immediate result was a bad nervous breakdown. Winter was
coming on. He was ordered to seek a mild climate, a moist, relaxing
atmosphere, freedom from work and worry. Eva Morrison was acquainted
with all this story, except the fact of his financial collapse, and
she had no idea that all he possessed in the world was some fifteen
hundred dollars in the Mobile bank.

“You mustn’t give up. You mustn’t bury yourself,” she persisted.

“Why not? It’s as good a life as any, maybe. I was born here in
Alabama, you know—took my first diploma in Montgomery. I know the
piney-woods country, the big swamps, the bayous and the great rivers,
and the queer, good, primitive people. I’ll drive a flivver over the
sand roads, and hunt wild turkeys and never get my fees.”

She saw through his affected lightness, and looked at him gravely, her
chin on her hands.

“Your hand will get better. Your surgery will come back.”

“Never, or perhaps in years, and what good then? A surgeon has to keep
in constant practice, like a pianist.”

Failing to find him at his hotel, persistent Destiny tried again, and
a page summoned Lang to the telephone. He was away only a minute, and
came back with an odd smile.

“A call. A patient—the owner of a yacht out in the harbor somewhere.”

Eva made a delighted gesture, beaming suddenly.

“I declined, of course,” he added. “I referred them to another
physician. I’m not practicing in Mobile.”

“But you might—you could—you’re qualified!” Eva exclaimed, bitterly
disappointed. “You must be mad! A yachtsman—likely a millionaire!
They’ve heard of your reputation even here.”

“But I tell you I don’t want to practice in Mobile, or in any of these
towns!” Lang exclaimed, again in sudden irritation. “I dare say they
have heard of me. The doctors here know my name, and I don’t want to
face their sympathy for my comedown. I had enough of that in
Boston—the men who had always hated me, been jealous of me, coming
with their crocodile sympathy, hoping that I’d soon be fit again, and
praying that they’d seen the last of me. I’d sooner bury myself, as
you say.”

He checked himself, quivering, angry and ashamed at his lack of
control. Sick nerves know no reason. He looked at Eva Morrison again,
wondering once more how she had come so deeply into his confidence,
this girl of twenty, pretty as a picture, indeed, looking at him now
with grieved brown eyes. But he had known her less than a month, and
what could she understand, after all?

She had been a passenger on the steamer that he boarded at Boston for
Mobile. He had not remembered her at first; he did not want to know
anybody; but in the inevitable companionship of shipboard she reminded
him of past acquaintance. She had been a patient of his; he had
treated her for some slight injury received in playing basket ball at
the girls’ college she attended, and he had met her afterward at
somebody’s house.

She had made no impression upon him, but somehow they drifted together
in that six-day voyage, more and more together as the steamer rounded
Florida and the air grew warmer and they came into the Gulf seas. She
had heard of his breakdown, as he gathered; but it was not spoken of
between them until afterward, in Mobile.

He had a dim impression that she was to wait in Mobile for relatives
from the North who were to join her there; and Lang stopped there
because he did not know where else to go. He had no plans, but it was
imperative to make some at once. He thought at times of becoming a
ship’s surgeon, then of retreating into the upriver woods and he came
by degrees to talk over these plans with Eva, and so by degrees they
arrived at this extraordinary pitch of intimacy.

A week passed, and her relatives did not arrive. She had established
herself at the quiet Iberville Hotel, and Lang saw her almost daily,
and often twice a day. They motored, boated together, went to the
movies, dined out. Lang was by no means in love. Standing in the wreck
of all his life he was far from even thinking of love, but Eva was
restful and comforting and she soothed his tortured nerves and his
tormented spirit.

More than once he had been suddenly angry and rude to her, as just
now, and had had to apologize.

“Sorry!” he said repentantly.

She smiled with complete comprehension.

“I only wish I could influence you a little,” she said. “See, we must
go. It’s past five, and look at the bay.”

The mellow, springlike Alabama autumn of the early afternoon had
turned suddenly foul. Fine rain drove against the windows, and the
broad surface of the bay beyond was blurred with squalls of wind and
mist. They lingered, waiting for it to clear, and the small black page
who had called Lang to the telephone came again behind his chair.

“Gentleman to see you, suh,” he whispered confidentially. “Same
gentleman what telephoned. Mighty important, he says, suh!”

He had evidently been scientifically tipped, for, before Lang could
deny himself he perceived the persistent caller at the heels of the
page. He turned with some annoyance.

“I’m sure I hope you’ll excuse me, doctor, breaking in on you after
what you said on the phone,” said the caller hastily. “But if I could
speak to you just half a minute—— My name’s Carroll. I’m from the
yacht, you know.”

He was a good-looking young fellow, considerably less than Lang’s age,
brown-faced, black-haired, dressed in immaculate blue serge and fresh
linen like a yachtsman; and he had a most plausible and ingratiating
manner. Afterward Lang came to find the brown eyes rather hard, the
lips uncertain. But their smile was winning, and it was difficult to
resist Carroll’s address when he chose to please.

“Say what you like,” said Lang. “But you know I’m not practicing here.
There are plenty of good physicians in Mobile.”

“Sure. Not in your class, though. We know you’re not located here—just
passing through—saw it in the paper, and we simply couldn’t lose the
chance of getting you. It looked providential. As for fee, you
know—why we don’t mind a hundred dollars, or anything you like to
name.”

“There’s no question of that,” said Lang stiffly. “What’s the matter
with your patient? I couldn’t possibly operate.”

“Oh, I hope it won’t come to an operation. We don’t know what’s the
matter with him. He’s kind of paralyzed—some sort of stroke, I reckon.
He hasn’t moved or spoken for days, and don’t know anything. He’s on
his yacht, right out in the harbor.”

Lang glanced furtively at Eva. Her eyes beamed, and she made a little
surreptitious, imperative gesture: “Go—go!”

“Very well,” he decided. “How do I get aboard your yacht? I must take
this lady home first, of course.”

“I can go alone,” Eva said, eagerly; but Carroll broke in with still
greater alacrity.

“My taxi is waiting down below, and I’ll drive you and the lady
wherever you want to go. I’ve got a motor launch near the foot of
Government Street, and we’ll be aboard the yacht in no time.”

Plainly he was determined not to lose sight of his prize. Accepting
his offer, they drove rapidly into town and put Eva down at her hotel,
where Lang promised to come next day and report. Thence they went to
Lang’s own hotel, where he secured his black medical bag and a
raincoat, and then to the wharf.

Carroll’s boat was a small but speedy-looking craft, a trifle battered
for a yacht’s tender, but they got aboard, Carroll started the engine,
and they nosed out past a couple of moored freighters into the muddy
bay. The weather had become worse, and driving sheets of mist and fine
rain swept the water.

“I hope your yacht isn’t far,” said Lang uneasily.

“We’ll be there before you have time to get wet,” Carroll genially
assured him.

Lang looked all about the harbor to espy the trim, white-painted craft
he expected to board. The launch’s engines hummed and she gathered
speed, tearing down the harbor with a sheering wave thrown from her
bow. It was very wet. Lang could feel the rain dripping from his hat
brim, and he humped his shoulders and stared through the gathering
twilight and the mist.

They were well clear of the harbor proper. A black anchored steamer
loomed up, slipped past; a couple of bare-masted schooners lay still
without a sign of life aboard. Nothing was in sight ahead but another
big three-master lying close to the western shore. Dimly he made out
the lighted windows of the Bayview Hotel, where he had often sat with
Eva.

He leaned over and spoke to his pilot with some irritation. Carroll
muttered something cheerful about “There in a jiffy,” and let her out
another notch.

Lang huddled in his seat, wet, uncomfortable, growing more and more
uncomfortable and indignant. He was sorry he had come. The bay
widened; the shores were growing invisible, and the whole waterscape
was darkening rapidly.

“Look here, where are you taking me?” he broke out at last. “You said
it would be only a few minutes. I’d never have come——”

“For God’s sake, shut up!” Carroll snapped back at him.

Lang subsided indignantly, unwilling to risk his dignity in
altercation. Carroll suddenly sounded a siren that quavered and wailed
piercingly.

Nothing answered it. Again and again the horn screamed over the turbid
heave of the darkening water, and then the boat swerved in a wide
curve westward.

It kept this course for more than a mile, and then began to sweep an
equal curve the other way. At regular intervals Carroll blew the horn,
but half an hour passed, and they had made several more great curves
before a vast, hoarse roar sounded through the gloom, perhaps a mile
away.

With a relieved exclamation Carroll headed the boat toward it. Nothing
yet was visible, but the deep steam blast sounded again and again,
always louder; and finally a spark began to show through the misty
gloom ahead. It was not a ship’s side light, but it developed into a
lantern swinging close to the water, and suddenly there was a loom of
something huge and black moving slowly through the darkness, and he
saw a spot of great rusty steel hull in the glimmer of the lantern.

Some one shouted from high above. Carroll answered, slowing down,
approaching a side ladder now visible by the lantern. The big ship was
barely moving, and Carroll hooked on with a practiced hand. He
indicated the ladder to his passenger, and Lang, though much tempted
to refuse, managed to catch it as the trailing launch heaved and fell
alongside.

Dripping wet, and in a state of the most extreme irritation and
disgust, he scrambled up the ladder, felt himself gripped by the arm
and helped over the rail, where he almost tumbled upon the deck.

A group of men in wet, shining waterproof coats surrounded him.
Carroll had scrambled up at his heels. A light was turned on
somewhere.

“Here we are!” Carroll cried triumphantly. “Got him. Gentlemen—Doctor
Robert Long of Chicago!”




                              CHAPTER II

                             FALSE COLORS


Lang caught this amazing introduction, and if he had been less wet,
less ruffled, less indignant, he would probably have instantly denied
it. As it was, he shut his mouth, and limply shook hands with the
three or four men who greeted him warmly.

He knew well the name of Doctor Robert Long, of course, and was
thoroughly acquainted with that eminent Chicago specialist’s success
in nervous diseases. The resemblance of the name to his own had caused
confusion before, and now he recollected that Doctor Long was said to
be spending a vacation in the South, and might really be in Mobile.

The humor of the thing suddenly quenched his wrath. He had been half
kidnaped, but he had turned the joke on his captors. Let them take
what they had got, he thought. He would look at their patient, charge
them nothing, and go ashore again, recommending a good Mobile
physician. He knew well that Doctor Long would never dream of
accepting any such casual call.

He glanced sharply at the men before him, and up and down the
steamer’s dim-lit deck. Scarred planking, dirty paint, rusty metal
confirmed his suspicions. Whatever this ship was, she surely was no
yacht. The man they called “Captain” stood at his elbow, tall,
rough-featured, mustached, dripping in his wet oilskins; and another,
dimly seen, showed a smooth face, owlish with large tortoise-shell
glasses. Carroll stood in front, looking anxiously on. They were all
waiting for him.

“Well, where’s the patient?” he said sharply.

At once they were all alert to serve him. They guided him down the
stairs to the saloon—a long, dingy, shabby cabin, with grimy white
paint, and the usual fixed table, chairs, and a number of stateroom
doors opening from either side. There was a strong odor of cigar smoke
and spirits.

“The doctor’s wet, Jerry. Give him a touch of something, can’t you?”
exclaimed Carroll, bustling to take Lang’s dripping raincoat. Before
Lang could decline, the captain had produced a couple of bottles from
a cupboard, and was pouring strong doses into a rack of glasses on the
table; and, in spite of the doctor’s abstinence, the rest of the
company swallowed their drinks with alacrity.

“Better have some, doctor. It’s the good stuff. We called at Havana
last week,” Carroll advised.

Lang again declined, and looked over the company as they drank
standing by the table. Jerry, the captain, was tall and lean, with a
long mouth, bad teeth, a truculent eye, and a seaman’s heavy, horny
hands. He with the big spectacles, Lloyd or Floyd, was a smooth-faced,
neatly dressed man of over thirty, cool and contemptuous looking.
Carroll looked more of a gentleman than the rest of them. It was an
odd company, this “yachting” crew, and Lang thought ironically of
Eva’s hope that this might be the beginning of a wealthy practice.

One of the doors opened just then, and another man came out, whom he
had not seen before. He came with silent swiftness like a cat,
glancing furtively at the newcomer. He was not over twenty, lean and
slouching, with a nervous hatchet face and a bad-colored skin. Lang
recognized that skin tint that comes of cocaine and heroin. He had
seen that type of youth occasionally in his hospital work, generally
in connection with bullet wounds. It was not a type likely to be found
at sea, he thought, the youthful dope-addicted gunman and gangster;
and his presence threw a point of light, perhaps, on the whole unusual
company.

Nobody introduced the young man, who slipped behind the table and
poured himself a drink, then lighted a cigarette. Carroll put down his
glass.

“This way, doctor,” he said, and reopened the door from which the
young gunman had just emerged. Lang followed him in, and the others
trooped after.

It was a rather large stateroom, painted white, with one berth, a
rattan chair, and the usual basin, taps and stand. The port was open,
letting in a cool, moist freshness; and Lang’s eyes instantly fixed on
the berth’s occupant.

It was a big man, a man of perhaps sixty, with a great, rugged face
and short, grizzled hair. His eyes were shut and sunken; he was
considerably emaciated; he seemed to be asleep. A gray blanket covered
him to the chin, and one huge, inanimate arm lay outside.

The physician’s instinct awoke in Lang as he bent over the cot. He
touched the wrist a moment, pushed back an eyelid to look at the
pupil, sniffed at the man’s lips, and took out his clinical
thermometer. While it rested under the patient’s armpit he felt
carefully over the skull in search of a possible wound.

“How long has he been like this?” he asked.

“Nearly a week now,” Carroll returned.

“How did it start? What brought it on? Did he have any injury—any
great shock?”

“No injury. You might call it a shock, perhaps,” said Carroll. “It was
ashore. He dropped like dead; we thought he _was_ dead, at first. We
brought him aboard, and now we’ve been expecting him to come to for
days.”

“Can you bring him to, doctor? We’ve got to have him brought to,” put
in the captain, anxiously.

“No, I can’t,” said Lang, crisply.

“He isn’t likely to die, is he?” asked Carroll.

“Extremely so.”

“Hell!” the captain exclaimed in disgust. “Can’t you do something to
revive him—electricity or some kind of stimulant? We’ll send ashore
for anything you need. We’ve got to wake him up, enough to talk a
little anyway, before he dies. That’s what we got you here for.”

“You want me to rouse him violently, if I can. What if it cost him his
life?” Lang asked quietly.

“Even at the risk of his life,” said Floyd with a sort of energetic
coldness.

Lang looked curiously at the speaker, who looked back unblinking.

“No physician would attempt such a thing,” he said. “I want to give
this man a thorough examination. The room’s too full. Clear it out.”

They went out obediently, and Lang sat down behind the closed door and
studied the unconscious figure afresh. It was not at all his special
sort of case; Long of Chicago would really have been the man, but he
knew well enough how to make his diagnosis.

He tested carefully the knee jerk, the ankle clonus, all the reflexes,
finding nothing out of the way; he took the pulse more carefully,
listened to the breathing, and then bared the body and went over the
whole surface of the skin. Several ribs had been broken within a few
months, he noted, and knitted rather badly; and he discovered a large,
fresh burn on the left arm, which he dressed. But these injuries could
not account for this prolonged coma, and he could find no trace of
others.

A tiny clot of blood on the brain surface might produce these
symptoms, but only the X-ray could discover it. It might be a purely
nervous case; a neurasthenia, a brain shock, such as is called shell
shock in war. He felt doubtful for he had made no special study of
these puzzling maladies.

And he wondered all at once why these men wished the patient to be
brought to speech, even at the risk of his life.

He was aroused from his deep thought by a gust of cold wind and mist
driving through the porthole. He went to close it, and saw at once
that the wind must have changed—or the steamer moved. With his hand on
the steel-ringed glass he paused, startled, for he could hear the
thrash and beat of the propeller astern, throbbing swiftly, and he
felt the vibration of the engines under his feet.

Perhaps they were heading landward, to put him ashore; but he felt a
deadly certainty that it was not so. He tried the door. It was locked
on the outside. He beat on the panels—louder—kicked the door and
shouted. But it was fully five minutes before the door was unfastened
and Carroll appeared.

“Where are we going? Are you going to land me? Let me pass!” Lang
exclaimed, furiously.

“Hold on, doctor. We can’t land you right now, but—— Hold on!”

Blindly angry, and half scared as well, Lang forced past him, crossed
the cabin, and rushed up to the deck.

It was dark. Spray and mist drove in the air and he could see nothing
overside, but from the force and freshness of the wind, and the salty
smell, and the sense of space, and the great heave and fall of the
ship, he knew instantly that they were no longer in Mobile Bay, but
well out to sea.

He found Carroll and the captain at his elbow, and Floyd came hurrying
from forward.

“You were to put me ashore at Mobile. You’re heading out into the
Gulf. Turn round at once and put me ashore!” Lang stormed.

“Don’t get excited, doctor. You’ll get ashore all right.”

“You wouldn’t leave a patient like this?”

“You’re all right here, and we’ll pay you well.”

These soothing remarks only infuriated Lang the more.

“You damned kidnapers!” he spluttered, and, his excitement getting out
of control, he drove a right-hand lunge at the man nearest him.

It was the captain, who dodged it neatly, laughing. Lang smashed out
at Carroll, who ducked. Three pairs of hands gripped the unfortunate
physician, and urged him toward the stairway again, in spite of his
kicks and struggles.

“Easy, doctor. You mustn’t beat up your officers,” they adjured him.

They were extraordinarily patient with him, though he kicked their
shins and struggled in an almost foaming rage. They piloted him down
the stair, through the saloon and into a stateroom, still directing
upon him a stream of the most mollifying speeches.

“We had your room all ready for you, doctor,” said Carroll, as they
held him pinioned in the middle of the floor. “Here’s your bag.
There’s pajamas laid out on the berth, and there’s ice water and rum
and soda water, and if you need anything more in the night, just shout
for it. You’ll be called for breakfast. Be calm.”

They left him with a chorus of cheerful “Good nights,” and he heard
the door bolt click on the outside.




                             CHAPTER III

                               ROCKETT


Lang’s fury of wrath slowly cooled. He sat down on the berth, drank a
glass of water, and eventually laughed. These fellows had taken so
much trouble over him, had been so patient, and all to get the wrong
man. Evidently they intended to keep him on board, still hoping that
he could restore their friend to life, or at any rate to speech.

He removed his wet clothes and lay down, hardly expecting to sleep. He
listened to the throb of the screw, the wash of water, the occasional
trampling steps overhead. He dozed fitfully, waking with a start,
listening to the sea sounds, and at last found his room suddenly
flooded with light.

A brilliant reflection of sunshine from the sea came through the port.
He had slept after all, and more soundly than he had done for weeks,
and he had a half minute of stupid bewilderment before the full memory
of his predicament came back.

He rolled out of the berth, washed, dressed hastily, and was just
ending his hurried toilet when some one knocked gently, then the door
opened. A tall negro, clad in soiled white, appeared in the entrance
and addressed Lang with tremendous suavity.

“Good mo’nin’, doctah! De captain, he say yoh breakfus’ served any
time dat yoh desires fo’ hit, doctah, suh!”

“All right!” Lang returned, and pushed past the steward into the
cabin. No one was there; a white cloth was spread at one end of the
table, but he made for the stairway and ran up to the deck.

A blaze of sunshine met him, and a glitter of sky and sea. The weather
had cleared; the sun shone gloriously low in the east, and the ocean
rippled and sparkled, frothing delicately in long, white-crowned
lines. The air itself was warm, sparkling, exhilarating; it went
through Lang’s system like a stimulant. No land was in sight anywhere,
unless a faint cloud astern meant the coast, and at first he saw no
one on the deck.

Then, walking forward, he espied the youthful gangster, in a white
jersey and cloth cap, a cigarette butt in his mouth, slouching over
the rail. He glanced aside at the doctor, nodded furtively, and seemed
to sidle off. Close to the bow Lang now perceived a couple of negro
deck hands busied over something, and two men on the bridge.

He found Carroll unexpectedly at his side, but it was no longer the
dandy yachtsman of the day before. Carroll now wore a faded greenish
sweater, “pin-check” trousers and soiled tennis shoes, but he greeted
the physician with the same extreme amiability.

“Well, are you ready to put me ashore?” Lang demanded, with an
implacable air.

“Oh, come on, now, doctor!” Carroll pleaded. “Don’t go back to that.
Ain’t you comfortable here? You wouldn’t leave a sick man on our hands
like that? He’s desperate sick—you said it yourself.”

“This is no yacht. Why did you say it was?” Lang pursued.

“Ain’t it? Say, Floyd, he says the _Cavite_ ain’t a yacht,” said
Carroll, addressing the spectacled member of the crew who just then
sauntered up.

“Well, what’s a yacht?” Floyd returned. “The _Cavite_ isn’t anything
else in particular, and she’s got no business, and she isn’t going
anywhere, and what’s that but a yacht?”

“No business? Nothing in wet goods?” inquired Lang.

“I don’t know what you mean,” returned Carroll blankly. “Had
breakfast? We told the steward to call you. No? Come down and eat,
then. A man shouldn’t talk on an empty stomach—apt to say things he
don’t mean.”

Lang had had no supper the previous night, and he felt very empty. It
was not a breakfast to be despised, he found, when the suave steward
produced it.

When he had finished he stepped into the sick room to glance at his
patient. There was no change, except that they had turned the man over
for greater comfort. Lang stood looking down at that massive,
powerful, oblivious countenance, and went back to the saloon with his
resolution fixed.

“What do you think? Is there any chance?” demanded Carroll anxiously.

“I think that you know more about this case than I do,” said Lang. “I
can’t find any physical cause for his condition. Before I go any
further I’ll have to know the history of the case—just what happened
to him; how he came into this state. I want to know who this man is,
and”—he hesitated, and then went on firmly—“why you are so anxious for
him to speak before he dies.”

Floyd blew a cloud of smoke, and glanced at the physician with a
queerly mocking eye.

“I’m not surprised that you’re curious,” said Carroll directly. “It
must look a queer mess, to an outsider. We talked it all over last
night, and agreed that you’d have to be told sooner or later.”

He stopped and glanced at Floyd’s imperturbable face.

“You’ll pledge yourself to the strictest secrecy, now and afterward?”
he said.

“A physician doesn’t make such pledges,” said Lang stiffly. “His
patients trust him, or they don’t.”

“Oh, we trust you, all right, doctor,” Carroll hastened to say. “It’s
a matter of professional honor; we’ll leave it at that. This man——” He
hesitated again. “Did you ever hear of the Automotive Fuel Company of
New Jersey?”

Lang barely repressed a startled movement.

“I have,” he said calmly.

“Arthur Rockett, its president, wrecked it, and disappeared with
around a quarter of a million.”

“So I have heard. But what has that to do with this case?”

“Just this,” said Carroll, motioning toward the stateroom door. “That
man in there—that’s Arthur Rockett.”

Lang’s brain suddenly seemed to swim slightly, yet he controlled his
voice.

“Are you sure?” he said. “Rockett was supposed to have got away to
South America.”

“Absolutely sure,” said Floyd, with his voice of cold certainty. “I’ve
seen him often enough in New York to know him. I ought to—I had twenty
thousand dollars in his cursed company.”

“And I lost all I had saved up,” put in Carroll eagerly. “It wasn’t so
much—only about seven thousand dollars. Rockett broke us all, the
captain, too. Jerry had to mortgage his ship.”

“And your young friend in the white sweater?” Lang inquired. “Has he
lost his savings, too?”

Floyd smiled faintly.

“That’s Louie Bonelli—‘Louie the Lope,’ they call him in Harlem. No, I
don’t think Louie ever had any savings, but he’s been very useful to
us, as you’ll see, and he’s going to share with the rest of us.”

Lang leaned back, trying to look indifferent. He had never seen the
fraudulent promoter, whose flight had taken all his own savings, but
he had seen newspaper portraits, and he vaguely remembered an elderly
man with a heavy, big-boned countenance, who might very well be this
very man aboard the _Cavite_. This unconscious patient of his had a
strong, audacious face, such as would have fitted the great wrecker.

“Dr. Long,” said Floyd impressively, “all we want is justice. We only
want to get our own back. We never expected to get a dollar out of it.
It came by chance. Carroll and I were in New York. Louie was down
around New Orleans, for reasons best known to himself, and he happened
to spot Rockett at Pass Christian.

“All the cops were sure he’d left the country, but he hadn’t. He’d
grown a little beard, and browned his face and arms, and he had a
bungalow and a fruit-and-truck ranch on the Gulf coast, and he dressed
in overalls and really worked at his fig trees and orange grove. He
must have had it all ready for months before, and it was the best sort
of hide out, considering the sort of high roller he’d been up North—a
spender, a prince, a man who couldn’t walk but had a new car every
week.

“Louie wasn’t quite certain, but he sent for Carroll and me, and we
came down. It was Rockett, right enough. Then we called in Jerry
Harding, who was running his little freighter along the coast. We held
a council. We knew Rockett had his plunder planted somewhere, and was
lying low till the storm blew over a little. Well, what do you suppose
we’d do? What would you’ve done yourself? Have him arrested, and take
a chance of getting a dividend among the creditors—five cents on the
dollar? We didn’t see it that way. We studied his movements, his way
of life. We hauled the ship close inshore one night, went up to his
shack, and held him up. He lived all alone, and it was a mile to the
next house. We put it to him—what was he going to do about it? All we
wanted was what we’d lost. He could keep the rest, for us.

“He was as stubborn as the devil. Can’t you see it in his face? He
denied that he was Rockett, denied everything. Finally he turned
silent, and wouldn’t speak at all. So we gave him the third degree.”

“You mean you tortured him?” cried Lang, remembering the burn upon
Rockett’s arm.

“I wouldn’t call it torture, exactly. Louie did it. We worked over him
nearly all night. Maybe Louie got a little too rough at the last. We
were all rather on edge. Anyhow, all at once he heaved up out of the
chair where he was tied, and went over sidewise on the floor.

“He seemed to be stunned, but he didn’t come to. We tried everything,
but no use. It was getting daylight and we were afraid to wait any
longer; so we searched the house without finding anything, and brought
him on board here.”

“We expected him to wake up any minute,” Carroll went on, as Floyd
stopped. “We watched him day and night. We knew he couldn’t really be
hurt. We tried an electric battery—thought he might be shamming. Then
we got scared that he was going to die on us. He seemed to be getting
weaker; twice we thought he’d passed out. We couldn’t let him die till
we found out where he’d planted the stuff. So it looked like a godsend
when we heard that you were in Mobile, and read about the great work
you’d done on just such cases.”

“Yes, we were at our wits’ end, doctor,” said Floyd. “You mustn’t hold
a grudge against us for half kidnaping you. Really it’s a compliment.
And you won’t lose anything. If you can help us, and get Rockett to
talk, and we find out what he’s done with his loot—why, you can ask
for what you like, and get it.”

They fixed intense eyes on the doctor. Lang shrugged his shoulders.

“I can’t revive him, not at this stage anyway,” he said. “I couldn’t
if I would, and I wouldn’t try.”

“But we’ve _got_ to make him talk!” cried Carroll. “What’s the chance
that he’ll come round?”

“About an even chance, I should think, whether he gradually improves,
or gradually sinks and dies without ever regaining consciousness. Of
course a moment might come when he could be revived with
stimulants—you can’t predict in these cases.”

“But you won’t desert us?” Floyd pleaded. “You’ll see us through?”

Lang puffed his cigar, as if thinking about it. But he was not in any
doubt. It was the most stupendous piece of luck, and Eva Morrison had
been more than right when she urged him to accept this call.

Not that he believed half the story. He did not believe that any of
this ship’s company had ever owned Rockett’s stock. They did not look
like an investing class. Somehow they must have discovered Rockett’s
hiding place, and were trying to “hijack” him; or they might have been
Rockett’s own confederates, now turned against him. But however this
might be, Lang was determined not to let Arthur Rockett out of his
sight.

“It’s an interesting sort of case,” he said, with admirable
detachment. “Yes, I’ll stay with you till he speaks—or dies.”




                              CHAPTER IV

                               WRECKED


So began Lang’s strangest professional experience. He got rid of his
companions as soon as he could, returned to the hospital room, and
studied the unconscious man with a doubled and most passionate
interest. He could see no change in his condition; but he set himself
to make a fresh and even more careful examination, recording
temperature, blood pressure, pulse, reflex action on a sort of chart
which he pinned to the wall for continual reference. When he had
finished he pondered a long time, unable to make up his mind whether
the state of coma was the result of some injury he had not discovered,
or whether it was pure shock, neurasthenic paralysis, brought about by
the strain of the “third degree.” Neither theory was quite justified
by the symptoms, and Lang even considered the possibility that the
unconsciousness was shammed, but this was incredible. To feign a week
of complete paralysis would require a nerve control simply superhuman.

He went on deck afterward, still turning over the problem in his mind.
He encountered Carroll, who took him up to the bridge, where Captain
Harding kept a negligent watch, with a negro quartermaster at the
wheel. Louie presently crept up the iron ladder also, looking silent
and furtive as usual, and then Floyd came with a bottle of rum and a
pitcher of fresh orange juice. It appeared that the bridge was the
accustomed lounging place, for within half an hour the engineer off
duty appeared also. He was a sallow man in grimy overalls, whom Lang
had not previously seen. He stayed only a few minutes, however.

The rest drank their rum and chatted openly, since it was understood
that Lang had thrown in his lot with them. They were all deeply
disappointed that by some medical miracle Rockett could not be
suddenly jerked back into consciousness. In fact, they still hoped for
some such performance, and seemed to take it for granted that Rockett
could be induced to part with the desired information as soon as his
speech was restored. But Lang was doubtful. The face of the old
wrecker was not that of a man easy to coerce.

“That bird’s got two hundred grand planted somewheres,” Louie
muttered. “Leave me alone wit’ him, and I’ll make him talk.”

And suppose Rockett talked—suppose the plunderer recovered—what would
become of Rockett then? Lang had already judged his shipmates to the
point of believing that a dark night at sea and a man overboard might
solve the difficulty.

And his own position, for that matter, might prove difficult, in spite
of all the lavish promises of the gang, when the time came for Rockett
to speak or die.

But for the present he was safe enough, and the ship’s company
cherished him like gold. He felt in better health and spirits than for
a long time. A new thrill of adventure entered into him. He had been
violently wrenched away from the consideration of his own misfortunes,
into a dangerous game whose stake might be anything, and his spirit
had reacted to it. He thought with vivid anticipation of the tale he
would have to tell Eva Morrison when he should at last present his
promised report.

He lounged about the _Cavite’s_ decks, trying to kill time, and his
mind reverted much to Miss Morrison. He missed her extraordinarily. It
was wonderful how, within but a few days, she had come to be a comrade
whom it was hard to lose even temporarily. Of course he was not in
love with her. In the desperate condition of his affairs it was no
time to think of love, much less of marriage. Hard work and hard
struggle must be his program for the coming years. And then it crossed
his mind that if he recovered his twelve thousand dollars he could
really think of love and marriage, too. It would be a very respectable
starting capital for a country doctor.

But it was not a middle-aged wreck that Eva Morrison was destined to
marry. He was startled at his own chain of thought, and went again to
look at Rockett. The defaulter lay motionless, breathing slowly,
unchanged in anything. Lang touched the grizzled head that must hold
the secret of so much rascality and so much money.

“If you die, you’re dead. If you wake up and talk you’ll be murdered,”
he murmured. “Better stay just as you are, my friend.”

He went back to the deck and basked in the fresh, warm sea air and the
sun. It was hard to kill time on the _Cavite_. There seemed to be no
books of any sort on board, but finally he discovered a pile of
tattered old magazines in the cabin, and languidly turned them over in
his deck chair. Every hour or so he visited his patient, without ever
discovering any change. He dozed a little in the sun. Carroll and
Harding seemed to spend most of the day on the bridge. Floyd
disappeared into his cabin; and from time to time he caught sight of
Louie prowling about the ship on affairs of his own, silent, secret,
venomous.

There was a game of poker in the cabin that night, in which they all
took part but Lang, leaving the steamer apparently in charge of the
negro crew. Lang watched the game for some time, and went to bed late,
but throughout the night he heard fitfully the mutter of voices, the
rustle and click of cards and chips, the ring of glasses, and once the
sound of a sudden, sharp altercation, which was immediately stilled.

They were a rather weary and heavy-eyed crew at breakfast. Carroll
told him afterward that Floyd had won heavily; that he almost always
won; that Louie was a bad-tempered loser, and that they always had to
take his gun away from him when they played cards.

After breakfast Lang again visited his patient, and methodically took
pulse and temperature, recording them on the chart. He looked again
into the blind eyes, tested the reflexes, and found no change. He had
been turned over, and that was all. Some one visited him periodically,
every hour or two, Carroll had said, in hopes of a change, and this
had been kept up day and night ever since he came on board.

That day was very much a duplicate of the one before it. The ship’s
company left him to himself. Carroll invited him to the bridge, but he
did not care for these rum gatherings, and declined, lounging in his
deck chair, smoking, meditating. The company gathered for dinner and
scattered again; and the _Cavite_ continued to plow forward, at half
speed, through ever-bluer seas where porpoises plunged looping, and
flights of flying fish glittered past. They were heading nowhere. It
was a real yachting cruise after all, Lang thought, complicated with
medicine and something like piracy.

It turned hazy toward sunset and they ran into fog. All the same there
was poker in the cabin that evening, though to Lang it seemed
monstrous that the navigation of the ship should be abandoned to an
ordinary sailor in such weather. It was hot and damp; the cabin reeked
with whisky and tobacco smoke, and when Lang went on deck about nine
o’clock he found the air close and muggy, and so dense with fog that
each of the ship’s lights glowed in a cottony ball of vapor.

He looked on at the card players for an hour, tried to read, went on
deck again, took a last look at Rockett, and finally went to his
berth, trying to believe that Jerry Harding knew his business.

The noise of the gamblers beyond the door kept him awake for some
time, but he slept soundly at last. A frightful roar awakened him that
seemed to shake the whole earth. It was their own siren, blowing
appallingly up above, and he heard startled exclamations in the
saloon, a crash of glasses upset, and a rush of feet to the deck.

The next moment another steam whistle mixed with the bellowing uproar
of their own—right overhead, too, it seemed—and as Lang jumped from
his berth he was pitched across the stateroom by a terrific shock.

The floor tilted under him, heeling over, over, till it seemed as if
the ship were capsizing. He heard a tumult of yelling that seemed over
him, under, he knew not where. And then, with a terrible grinding and
rending, the _Cavite_ reeled back to an even keel, and he heard a
great splashing of water.

Lang righted himself, too, pulled on trousers and coat and rushed out
and up, barefooted, to the deck. The ship’s electric lights went
suddenly out, flickered, and then shone again. He could still hear an
uncertain throbbing of the engines.

A dark scrimmage of men surged over the deck, apparently to no
purpose. The fog hung blindingly close, but perhaps a quarter of a
mile away loomed and shone a vast glare of white light. It was the
vessel that had run into them, her outlines invisible in the fog. He
could hear her steam blowing off with a roar, and even the sound of
furious shouting aboard her; but she showed nothing but the diffused
glow of all her lights.

The _Cavite_ was still moving ahead slowly, under her momentum now,
for her engines had stopped. Lang could hear water cascading into her.
It sounded as if she had been cut half in two. She was lower in the
water already; and Lang suddenly remembered his patient below, who was
likely to be drowned like a rat in his berth.

He rushed down to the cabin again. The lights were out, and he slipped
on spilled liquor and scattered cards, and groped into the hospital
stateroom. At the door he stopped short, as if he saw a resurrection
from the dead.

Rockett was sitting up, on the edge of the berth. There was a dim glow
in the room from the porthole. He was moving; he seemed to be trying
to get to his feet.

The next instant it flashed upon Lang that the shock of the collision
had worked a miracle; had startled the stunned nerves out of their
paralysis. He rushed to the berth and seized the man around his big
chest.

“Are we—going down?” he heard a thick, lifeless whisper.

“I think so,” said Lang, too flurried to realize the queerness of the
colloquy. “You must get on deck. Here, lean on me. Can you stand?”

“Hold on,” said Rockett, in his thick mutter. “Got to—beat these
pirates. Listen—you know—north of Persia——”

“Do you want to tell me where you’ve hidden the money? Be quick!” said
Lang sharply.

“Wait. Six to—nine. Twelve o’clock. Remember—noon——”

A rush of feet outside, and Carroll plunged into the room. He stopped
short with an astounded cry, as Lang had done.

“By God, he’s alive! He spoke. I heard him. What did he say?”

“Delirious. Raving,” Lang snapped. “Here, help me get him on deck.”

A sudden wild stampede of yelling men thundered across the deck
overhead. There was no time for talk. Between them they gripped the
big man around the body, and half dragged, half carried him across the
cabin. He was enormously heavy, and seemed to sag back into paralysis
again, so that it was with the utmost breathless straining that they
got him up the stairs to the deck, where all hell seemed to have
broken loose.

The other steamer, more distant now, had turned a searchlight on her
victim, dimly illumining the _Cavite’s_ decks, and began to sound her
roaring siren again, as in desperate signaling. Lang’s first glance
saw the black water. It seemed almost up to the level of his feet.

A dark scrimmage of men was surging about the motor launch that was
hoisted in amidships. They hacked savagely at the tackle, with curses
and shrieks, black faces and white, a shifting, squirming medley. Lang
caught a glimpse of Harding hitting out. Knives flashed. A figure in a
white sweater was shot out of the mob, falling on the deck. Louie
raised his arm and projected two tiny red flashes, the reports drowned
by the uproar.

Then the motor boat went over with a great splash, and the wave of its
launching surged over the _Cavite’s_ deck.

“Keep out of that. This way!” Carroll was saying, dragging him toward
the other side.

Here hung the other boat, seldom used, and forgotten at the moment.
Letting go Rockett, Carroll strove to loosen the tackle, which seemed
jammed. The _Cavite_ lurched heavily forward. A surge seemed to wash
clear over her.

Lang snatched a life belt and slipped it over Rockett’s shoulders. He
could see no other. Carroll was still wrenching desperately and
swearing at the boat. Leaning heavily on his shoulder, Rockett
muttered hoarsely in Lang’s ear.

“I’m going under. Remember—I trust you. Go to—my house north of
Persia. See six and nine—the digger—twelve o’clock. Noon. Remember—the
negro digger——”

The whole deck suddenly tilted forward as the ship plunged bow first,
till Rockett and Lang tumbled together down the slope into black
water. Lang went under, came up, but Rockett had gone. Everything was
black, and in terror of being drawn down with the sinking ship he
struck out desperately, blindly.

He was no great swimmer, but he made headway with sheer energy. He
found himself suddenly clear of the ship. A long way behind him she
towered up, standing on end, her stern rising yards into the fog,
towering like a skyscraper, as she hung balanced before finally
sinking. He saw the rusty hull, the screw, the rudder hanging high
overhead. He took it all in with one terrified glance, and the same
glance showed him a floating object a yard away, a big deck chair
which he gripped.

The next minute the nightmare figure of the steamer plunged down, in a
vast flood that seemed to carry him with it. He clung like death to
the wooden chair frame, almost beaten out of consciousness, holding
his breath, hardly realizing it at last when he found himself afloat
again. A heavy swell went over him; another heaved him and dropped
him; and his misted eyes saw again the great blurred glow of the
strange steamer, much more distant now, and all around him a frothing
welter.

He still held the chair, but he was almost too weak to cling to it.
Boats would be coming, he knew; he had only to keep afloat a few
minutes more. The swell of the _Cavite’s_ sinking was subsiding, but
his hands slipped from the chair frame; he almost went under,
recovered himself with a wild clutch, almost gave up hope. Dimly he
heard a shout. Something was floating within a few feet. It was an
overturned boat, with a man dimly outlined astride the keel. Lang
could never have reached it unaided, but somehow, he knew not how, he
found himself supported, assisted, half dragged upon the rounded boat
keel.

“Where’s Rockett?” his rescuer shouted in his ear. It was only then
that he recognized Carroll, but Lang was too exhausted to do more than
shake his head feebly.




                              CHAPTER V

                              THE DIGGER


Late the next afternoon they were taken into Gulfport on board a Grand
Cayman schooner laden with Jamaica timber.

What had become of Rockett, or of any of the rest of the _Cavite’s_
crew they had not the slightest idea. From the upturned boat the sea
was a blur of fog. They must have been drifting with some current, for
the far-away steamer seemed continually to grow more distant.
Expecting her boats, they shouted with what faint voice they could
muster; but nothing came of it. If she had sent boats they were
invisible; and after nearly an hour they heard the starting of the
steamer’s engines, and her pale glow melted into distance.

Tropical though the latitude was, it seemed bitterly cold that night.
Lang wore only a coat and trousers over his sleeping suit, and he felt
numbed and stiff to the bone. He might have perished, but Carroll, who
was fully dressed, had a pocket flask of rum, and pulled him
periodically back to life with fiery sips. The bottom of the boat was
a most awkward refuge, for they were in constant danger of slipping
off; and once Lang, faint and dozing, did go into the sea, to be
hauled out again by his companion.

That night seemed longer to Lang than all the rest of his life. The
shore seemed a remote impossibility, but he did not know that
much-frequented part of the Gulf. When the sun rose there were no less
than three ships in sight, all miles away, indeed, but the sight of
them was enough to put heart into him, together with the warming
effect of the strong sunshine. Carroll, who had expected rescue, was
not surprised; and seemed only impatient at the delay before the Grand
Cayman schooner came alongside, and her crew with the kindliest
solicitude took them aboard, and appropriated the _Cavite’s_ boat as
salvage.

During that endless, freezing, hopeless night the two castaways had
scarcely exchanged a dozen phrases, yet Lang’s mind had continually
reverted in a numb way to Rockett’s last incomprehensible words.
“Twelve o’clock—nine and six—the negro digger——” There was no sense in
it, and yet the defaulter had evidently been trying to convey some
meaning. His house—to the north of Persia—what could that have to do
with Automotive Fuel? No meaning could be tortured out of it, and yet
Lang’s dazed mind circled round and round the insoluble problem.

But on the schooner, warmed and fed and smoking a Jamaica cigar, he
conceived more hope. Rockett had said he trusted him—Heaven knew why!
He had said to go “to his house,” and Lang determined to go, if he
could find out where that house was. Yes, and he would be there at
noon, at nine and at six, and see what these mystic hours might bring.

He turned this over in his mind while, with his surface faculties, he
idly discussed with Carroll the probable fate of their shipmates. They
had no idea whether the motor boat had been successfully launched, or
whether any one had escaped in it. As for Rockett, his fate was hardly
even doubtful. Unless picked up at once he could never have survived
the plunge and exposure.

“He did speak, you know,” said Carroll suddenly. “I heard him say
something to you. What was it?”

Lang felt no call to share his knowledge, such as it was, nor his
shadowy theories.

“Clean out of his head, apparently,” he replied. “He muttered about
the time of day—said it was nine o’clock and six and noon at his house
in the north of Persia. And something about a negro. Has he ever been
in Persia?”

Carroll seemed to reflect, and observed Lang’s face with a sidelong
glance.

“Persia was Rockett’s post office,” he said at last. “It’s a country
store west of Gulfport and about a mile north of the coast road. He
lived about two miles north of Persia. We went up the bayou in the
launch on our visit; it took us within a hundred yards of his house.”

“A shack and a truck farm, you said?” remarked Lang, trying to look
indifferent to this priceless information.

“A little bungalow, rather neat, painted brown with green trimmings.
It had an iron fence in front and two magnolia trees at the gate, and
a grove of small orange trees at one side. There was a little garage
with a Ford in it, too. We left it there.”

“I suppose all that will be sold for the benefit of the creditors,”
said Lang.

“I suppose so, if they ever discover that Rockett was the truck
farmer. It may be a long time before it’s noticed that the house is
deserted. Few people come that way, and the next house is a mile or
more away.”

Lang was afraid to fish for more information lest he rouse Carroll’s
suspicion. They continued to chat at random, of the _Cavite_, of her
crew, of the failure of their whole scheme, to which Carroll now
seemed entirely resigned. They sighted land about the middle of the
afternoon, and it was toward sunset when the good sea Samaritans put
them ashore on the lumber wharves at Gulfport, refusing any suggestion
of reward.

In fact, Lang had only fifteen dollars, which happened by luck to be
in his trousers pocket, and he urgently needed to buy a shirt, collar,
hat and footwear, though the sailors had given him a worn-out pair of
tennis shoes. He walked with Carroll from the water front up to the
main street, and there they halted.

“Well, it’s all over,” said Carroll. “I’m going to New Orleans. What
do you do? I suppose you’ve lots of friends who’ll be worrying about
your disappearance, and medical societies and meetings waiting for you
to give them speeches, Doctor Long.”

Lang softened a little to that parting smile. After all, they had been
through peril together, and Carroll had almost, if not quite, saved
his life after the shipwreck.

“I’m not Doctor Long,” he said with unpremeditated frankness.

Carroll’s expression hardened. He fixed Lang with a sudden, intense
stare.

“Then who the devil are you?”

Lang explained briefly, almost apologetically.

“The most curious thing,” he finished, “is that I’m really one of
Rockett’s creditors myself. I’ve got twelve thousand dollars of
Automotive Fuel certificates in my trunk. You can imagine how
interested I was, then, when you——”

Carroll listened, and then exploded into the most uncontrollable
laughter.

“Double crossed, by gad!” he ejaculated, choking. “What a—a stroke of
luck! You one of Rockett’s suckers? But say, it’s a good thing you
didn’t let it out on board that I’d brought the wrong man. Louie’d
have put a bullet into me.”

“It made no difference, after all.”

“Not a bit. Lang or Long, it’s all the same, and it’s all over now,
and no harm done to anybody, except that we’re all out the money we
might have got. But mind, not a word, now! Professional secrecy, you
know.”

“Trust me,” said Lang. “I’m not proud of the affair.”

Carroll shook hands with him and went off, still laughing. Lang
proceeded to make his few purchases, secured a room at a cheap hotel,
where he made himself as presentable as he could, and had himself
shaved. He thought of wiring to Eva Morrison, but reflected that he
would surely see her the next day. He dined at the hotel, a much worse
meal than he had been accustomed to aboard the _Cavite_, strolled
about the street for an hour, and found himself dead weary.

He went to bed before nine o’clock, unstrung and exhausted. He would
have to get up long before daylight, he knew, for he was determined to
be at Rockett’s bungalow, “north of Persia,” from six to nine.

He needed sleep, but sleep would not come. By fits and starts he
dozed, waking from nightmares of the wreck and horrible suggestions of
incomprehensible peril, hearing again Rockett’s thick mutter in the
darkness, feeling the heave of the drifting boat. Toward morning he
did sleep soundly for an hour or two, awakening in terror that he had
overslept, but a struck match showed him that it was hardly four
o’clock by the dollar watch he had bought the evening before.

He got up wearily, feeling now that he could sleep forever. He dressed
and went downstairs, and out upon the dead and deserted streets. An
all-night lunch room provided him with breakfast, and, feeling a
trifle refreshed, he boarded the west-bound inter-urban electric car
that skirts the coast between Biloxi and New Orleans.

He was the only passenger, and he dozed again in his seat, until the
conductor told him where to get off for Persia. The east was turning
pale as he started up the road leading inland, a sandy road in the
twilight, plunging apparently into a dense forest. It turned out
merely a belt of swamp bordering a deep, narrow bayou, very likely the
one which Carroll’s crew had ascended to reach Rockett’s dwelling.
Beyond it the road ascended a little, and the air grew momentarily
more transparent. The wayside objects came out ghostly, then solidly,
trees, scattered shacks, trim bungalows at far intervals; then in the
gray light Lang perceived a wayside store, shuttered and sleeping,
with two or three small houses close by.

This must be Persia, and beyond it the dwellings grew more rare. There
were strips of pine woods, stretches of peach orchard, fields of last
fall’s cornstalks or cotton shrubs, silent and dewy in the pallid
daybreak. Lang’s blood quickened and his spirits rose as he tramped on
through the intense freshness of the air. Incredible possibilities
rose in his mind; things that he might unearth at “six, nine and
twelve o’clock,” and he glanced every few minutes at his watch to make
sure that he was going to be in time.

He passed a belt of tall, long-leaf pines, stately as palms, a quarter
of a mile of desolate, picked cotton bushes, and then he halted, with
a sudden catch of his breath.

It must be the place. There was the iron fence, the two magnolia trees
at the gate, the plantation of small orange trees, and, fifty feet
back from the road, a trim brown bungalow with green doors and window
casings as it had been described to him. All the blinds were drawn; it
looked empty and dead. But, for that matter, so had all the houses he
had passed.

Lang glanced furtively up and down the road, and stepped inside the
gate. He felt uncommonly like a criminal as he skulked up the walk,
and stepped on the veranda, shooting scared glances in every
direction. It took all his nerve to lay hold of the door-knob. It
gave; he drew a hard breath, opened the door, whipped inside, and
closed it quickly after him.

He was in a small square hall, almost entirely dark, with a door dimly
visible on each side. He listened; the house was dead silent. He
cautiously pushed open the door at his right.

The air was heavy and rank with stale cigar smoke. All the blinds were
close drawn, and the room was dim, but he knew at once that he had
come to the right place.

Apparently this was the dining room, square, well furnished, but in
great disorder. The round table was shoved back against a wall, and
smeared with cigar ash. The rug was kicked into a heap; the
sideboard’s drawers stood wide open, half their contents on the floor.
A paper rack, a shelf of books, had been thrown pell-mell; and the
brick open hearth held a pile of wood ashes and was littered with
innumerable cigar stubs.

“This must be where they questioned him—tortured him,” Lang reflected,
picturing that scene of ten days ago; and then beyond he saw the open
door of the bedroom where they must have awakened him.

The bed was tumbled back, as Rockett must have been dragged out, with
a flash light and a pistol in his face. A lamp stood on the small
table, with a pipe, a pouch, a turned-down book—a work on geology, as
he noticed with surprise. This room also had been ransacked, the
bureau drawers emptied on the floor, the clothes closet turned out,
with the contents of a trunk and a couple of suit cases in a huge,
mixed heap of clothing and all sorts of miscellanies.

Beyond the dining room was the kitchen, into which he merely glanced.
Returning to the hall, he opened the other door, which let him into a
room containing little furniture beyond a tripod easel and a palette
lying beside it, smeared with caked colors, a chair or two and a table
littered with paint tubes, brushes and all the apparatus of an artist.
On the walls were pinned a score or so of sketches, not clearly
visible in the curtained room, but each of them bore a numbered paper
label, as if in reference to a catalogue.

Lang was astonished to find that Rockett had dabbled in art, but the
room contained nothing of significance. Beyond it was another bedroom,
torn pell-mell like the first.

The crew of the _Cavite_ had found nothing, nor did Lang, and he did
not clearly know what he had expected to find. He went back through
the other side of the house, into the kitchen, and let himself out the
back door to have a look at the exterior.

The air was wonderfully sweet after the foulness of the close rooms.
The yard was of smooth, hard sand, running over to a row of peach
trees, with a long strawberry plot beyond it, and the orange grove lay
beyond. A bed of brilliant cannas grew by the house, and a driveway
led toward the rear, to a small garage, empty now, with wide-open
doors.

There was a shed with a quantity of gardening tools. Farther back
stood an unusually large wild-orange tree, with dozens of the glowing
golden globes still hanging in the glossy foliage. Beyond it stood two
cement posts, perhaps intended for a future gateway, each overgrown
with a climbing rose vine; but the earth between them had been made
into a bed of winter lettuce, just sprouting aboveground.

Lang glanced at his watch, and saw that it was five minutes to six. He
darted back into the house, sat down in the dining room and waited,
almost holding his breath, watch in hand.

The pointer crept slowly past the XII on the dial. Five minutes
past—ten. The silence hung dead. Nothing happened. He did not see how
anything could happen in this deserted house, but he sat, still
waiting, though he put the watch away, till suddenly he had a
revelation.

He saw the negro digger!

It hung on the wall in front of him, over the mantel, in a brown
frame. It was a vigorous, if somewhat crudely painted sketch in oils
of a negro laborer, barearmed and barenecked, up to his waist in a
hole in the earth. An orange tree full of fruit was over his head; on
either side was a pillar thick with climbing roses. He was looking
upward at the sun with a pleased grin, and the title was painted on
the picture frame: “Twelve o’clock.”

Time for dinner; that point was plain enough. Plain enough, too, was
the scene—the cement gateposts Lang had seen behind the house. With a
glimpse of the reality, he rushed into the studio room again, pulled
up the curtains, and looked at the sketches numbered from six to nine.
They all represented the same spot in the garden, from different
angles, but without the digger.

Lang caught the hint, unmistakable now. He ran back for another look
at the digger, then burst out through the kitchen into the garden. He
seized a spade and pick in the tool shed, hurried to the rose-crowned
posts, and began to dig between them.

The earth was soft and sandy, easy digging. He threw it out furiously,
going down a couple of feet without striking anything but stones. Then
he lengthened the excavation like a trench and got into it, using the
pick now. He went another foot deeper, sweating and excited, and then
the tool struck something hard, and slipped. He had it uncovered in
another moment; it seemed black and square, and, getting the spade
under it, he heaved it out.

It was a metal box, about a foot square and six inches deep, one of
those sheet-steel boxes used for valuables. He heard something rattle
inside it, but it was not very heavy; and it was disappointingly
evident at once that it could never hold all the plunder Rockett was
said to have carried away. It was locked, of course. He fumbled with
it for a moment, and then, becoming conscious that he was in full view
of the road, he hastened into the house to examine it.

He put it on the kitchen table, and brushed off the clinging earth.
The lock did not look very elaborate, and he took out his own bunch of
keys that had luckily stayed safe in his trousers pocket all through
the wreck, and began to try one after another.

One of them almost fitted. He could feel the lock give, but it stuck.
He was twisting it to and fro, wholly absorbed in the effort, when the
front door of the house suddenly, sharply opened and shut again.

Every atom of breath seemed to leave his body. He sat benumbed with
fright, as paralyzed as Rockett himself had been, unable to get up, or
escape or try to conceal the box. A quick step crossed the dining
room; the door opened, and Carroll stepped into the kitchen, surveying
Lang smilingly and without surprise.




                              CHAPTER VI

                               YUMA OIL


The blood rushed through Lang’s veins again. His face, which had been
cold, felt suddenly flaming.

“Just as I expected,” said Carroll. “I see you’ve found his cache.
Don’t look like much, does it?”

“So you trailed me out here?” Lang found voice to say.

“Not at all. I didn’t trail you. I was sure you’d be here early this
morning. Of course I knew the old man passed some kind of tip to you.
That was why I was so careful to tell you just how to find the house.
Didn’t have any trouble, did you?”

Lang had a humiliating consciousness that he had been played with, and
he kept angrily silent.

“Let’s have a look at it,” Carroll continued, coming to the table.
“Keys won’t open it? Let me try.”

He fumbled with the lock for half a minute and gave it up. Searching
about the kitchen he found a heavy steel screw driver, and by
inserting the blade at the back he was able to break a hinge. The
other followed, and the lid swung open, still held by the lock.

Together they peered in eagerly. Lang had had visions of bales of
yellow-backed notes, but there was nothing of the sort in sight. There
were a few envelopes like old letters, a thick package of engraved
documents resembling bonds, a couple of smaller packages, and several
lumps of metallic-looking rock.

Lang snatched out the larger bundle. The papers were not even bonds.
They were stock certificates—hundred-dollar shares in the Yuma
Southwestern Oil Company, a name which he had never heard, but which
had a most worthless sound. The ten thousand dollars’ worth of scrip
was probably worth less than as many cents.

Carroll glanced briefly at the certificates, smiled, and went on
examining the other parcels. One was a package of small water-color
drawings, apparently by Rockett’s own hand, depicting a series of
rocky and forbidding coast scenes. Another packet contained
photographs of much the same sort of landscapes; the third had
negatives, in labeled groups, and the odd envelopes held more
sketches, photographs, and a couple of rough sketch maps.

Lang was bitterly disappointed. There was no value in the whole box.
He had approached burglary for no reward. Carroll looked up with a
smile at his disgust.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he remarked. “I never expected to find much
plunder planted here, anyway. Let’s see that stock again. Gad! that
old man always was lucky. He must have had a private tip. Bought it
outright, too.”

“It isn’t worth anything, is it?”

“It’s worth what it’ll bring. It was selling at around twenty-five a
few months ago, when Rockett must have picked it up. The last I heard,
it was about sixty. It’s a manipulated stock, fixed to sky-rocket and
then break, I guess.”

“This block of stock may be worth six thousand dollars, then?” said
Lang, with more interest.

“Can’t say. It mayn’t be worth anything. We must see a broker about it
right away.”

He crammed the sketches and photographs into his pockets, and tipped
up the box. Nothing was left but the bits of rock, dark stones bearing
greenish crystalline veins and nodules. Carroll looked at them with a
good deal of interest, and pocketed them with the rest.

“Some sort of specimens, I suppose,” he commented. “The old man was
bugs on rocks, I’ve heard. You can keep the valuables and I’ll take
charge of this truck. Let’s get out of here.”

Lang was overjoyed to get out of there. He was in terror lest some one
else should enter unawares. He had cold chills at the thought of being
arrested for housebreaking, a newspaper exposure, his career doubly
ruined. He tucked the stock certificates in his inside pocket, and
after reconnoitering the road they slipped out and started for the
Gulf coast shell road.

It was still early morning when they reached the electric car line and
rode into Biloxi; and still early in the day when the railway placed
them again in Mobile. Carroll was impatient to visit a brokerage
office at once; he knew the cashier at Norcross & Dixon’s, he said;
but Lang insisted on a delay while he revisited his hotel room and
changed his water-stained suit, had a shave and his shoes shined, put
on a better hat, and made himself look fit for business negotiations.
Afterward he congratulated himself a thousand times on this
forethought.

Norcross & Dixon dealt principally in cotton and grain, and there was
a flurry on the cotton exchange that day. The customers’ room was
crowded; prices were rushing up. Farmers, planters, smart city men,
shabby hangers-on, bulls all of them, watched the blackboard and
applauded wildly at every advance, and the wires to New Orleans were
hot with orders.

Lang looked on while Carroll went to find the cashier he knew, and
presently Carroll came back and conducted him to Mr. Dixon’s office.
The broker was a little dapper man, with a pointed black beard, and a
dry, punctilious manner. He looked wary and nervous and tired, and he
acknowledged the introduction curtly.

“How’s Yuma Oil?” Carroll inquired.

“It closed yesterday at 63; opened this morning at 60-1/2. It’s now
at”—he went to look at the ticker—“the last quotation was 59-3/4.”

“We want to sell,” said Carroll promptly.

“It’s a lively proposition just now. I’d have to ask ten or fifteen
points margin.”

“Oh, we’ve got the certificates,” Carroll returned. “Get them out,
doctor.”

Lang had not expected to be rushed into action so quickly. He produced
the stock reluctantly.

“I don’t know—what would you advise?” he hesitated.

“Oh, you’ve got the scrip,” said the broker, flipping the papers over.
“A hundred. If you want to sell you’d better be quick. We never advise
our customers. We only give them the facts as we see them. But the
bottom’s dropping right out of it.”

Still wavering uneasily, Lang gave the order to sell.

There was nothing then but to wait till it was executed. They lighted
cigars and added to the volume of smoke that swirled through the
excited room of the cotton gamblers. The market was still going up;
the excitement was crescendo. But Lang and Carroll continually
returned to watch the New York stock ticker.

Yuma Oil read 59-1/4, then 59-1/8, then 59, then up an eighth, then it
broke all at once to 58-3/4. At what price their stock had been sold
they could not tell.

But they got quick action, after all. Within half an hour Dixon
announced that he had sold at 58-1/4. By the time they got the news,
the stock had sunk to 57-1/2. Clear of all commissions, the sale would
net about five thousand eight hundred dollars.

“Good!” exclaimed Carroll. “But this is only a start. It’s going
lower—a lot lower. Now’s our chance for a killing!”

He spoke in an intense whisper; his face was flushed. The broker came
back holding the slip.

“Do you want your check, gentlemen, or are you trading again?”

“Again? That’s all the stock we have,” said Lang, not understanding,
but Carroll broke in eagerly.

“We’ll go short now. She’s going lower. What margin——”

“I’ll sell for you on a ten-point margin. Yes, I’ll make it eight
points, on this market. I’m selling myself.”

Dixon’s manner was perceptibly livelier. Lang protested, startled at
the idea of using the money as gambling margin.

“Oh, just as you like,” said the broker with impatience. “I never
advise customers. I only tell ’em what I think. I think the time has
come for Yuma Oil to break. The ring up North has let go. I think it’s
good for ten to twenty points down. I’m playing it across the board,
myself.”

“Don’t be a fool!” insisted Carroll explosively. He chewed his cigar
in one corner of his mouth and spoke with the other, feverish,
hungering. “Don’t you see the chance we’ve got? With a run of luck
we’ll wipe out Rockett’s whole loss.”

The excitement of the game was beginning to gain upon Lang himself. He
made a rapid calculation.

“Eight points? We might sell—let’s sell five hundred shares, then.”

If they lost it there would be still nearly two thousand dollars left.
Dixon snapped at the order slip and had it almost instantly on the
wire. They got it executed at 57, and the stock was still falling by
eighths. Then in a flurry it dropped half a point at a time, rallied a
little, and broke heavily to 55, then to 54, and within fifteen
minutes to 53. They were two thousand dollars ahead—on paper.

As comparatively high players now, Dixon installed them in armchairs
in his private office, close to the New York ticker. His cold
punctiliousness of manner broke down; he hurried from them to his
cotton customers, almost excited, almost talkative, and they watched
the clattering tape slowly spinning out its cabalistic figures
straight from the great gambling house in lower New York.

Fifty-two and a half—51—and then it rallied strongly, and almost
touched 53.

Dixon came and stood holding the tape, looking anxious. For some
twenty minutes the stock held firm, up an eighth, down an eighth, and
then broke half a point, and then another. The broker let out an
explosive sound of relief.

“That’s its last dying kick. It had me scared for a minute. But she’s
on the toboggan slide now, and she won’t stop till she hits bottom.”

Lang had held his breath while the wheel of fortune had seemed to be
turning the wrong way. Triumphant excitement rushed over him again as
the downward rush of the stock was resumed. Every point lower meant a
win of five hundred dollars. He fixed his eyes on the printing point
of the tape, impatient as other stock quotations came out, hardly
hearing the racket of the cotton speculators, watching for the letters
YU OIL—52—51—50-1/2—49. They had made eight points. They had doubled
their money.

Then all at once, as he watched the unrolling paper, a destructive
thought came to Lang’s mind. It was not his money. It belonged to the
general assets of the Automotive Fuel Company. He could not take his
losses out of it. It would be his duty to turn every cent in to the
official receivers.

His legal share of these gambling gains would be hardly anything. The
golden prospect turned blank. He forgot the game for a moment.

“Sell another thousand. We’ve got enough ahead to margin that much,”
said Carroll, poking his side.

“Sure you have. That’s the stuff I like. Make it or lose it!”
exclaimed Dixon.

Lang made no objection, though he had a dull sense that he ought not
to risk his fellow creditors’ money. But they did not seem to be going
to lose it. The order was put in at 48, and within ten minutes it was
at 47-1/2, and thence dropped by quarter points.

Lang began to forget again that it was not for himself that he was
winning. The fascination of the game took hold on him. He imagined the
swirl and flurry at that moment on the New York Exchange, where some
manipulation must have culminated, where mighty operators had come out
into the open and were devouring their prey as it ran. With their tiny
speculation they were jackals on the edge of that killing.

Down it went—46—45. Dixon had sold a large block for his private
account. Flushed and excited, he camped beside the ticker, ceasing to
take any interest in the cotton market, chewing a dead cigarette to
pieces, talking incessantly. Lang and Carroll ceased to be
“gentlemen.” He called them “boys,” and Carroll addressed him as
“Dix,” and hit him furiously on the back when the stock made a
half-point drop at once. With a thousand shares at stake, every point
down meant a win of a thousand dollars.

Where would it stop? Where was the bottom? Forty-four—43—42-1/2—43
again.

Lang drew himself painfully out of the pit of fascination.

“We must get out of it—cover our sales. It’s rallying,” he exclaimed.

“Nonsense! Don’t be a quitter!” Carroll snapped.

“Don’t worry,” said Dixon. “It’s only the rally before the closing
market—people taking profits. I expected it. It’ll open down to 40
to-morrow morning. Let it stand over night.”

Forty-three—43-1/8—43-1/4, then down an eighth, up a quarter, a rally,
forty-four.

“Sell out!” insisted Lang.

He had a sudden amazement at what he had done, at what he had risked.
Suppose they had been wiped out—how could he ever have explained the
transaction?

Carroll protested wildly, drunk with winning. It was the chance of a
lifetime; they stood to clear a fortune; but Lang was inflexible.
Desperately anxious to close before the stock could rally further, he
insisted on instant buying in, and Dixon sent the order.

While they waited, the stock swayed up and down by fractions, and
their covering was not made at one point, but between 39-1/2 and
44-1/2. Dixon calculated the commissions, and wrote the check. It came
to twelve thousand five hundred and twenty-seven dollars—just enough
to cover his losses in Automotive Fuel, Lang reflected.

The sunlight and air seemed strange after those smoky, excited rooms.
Lang felt slightly dizzy and drunk, and remembered that he had eaten
nothing since before dawn. The bank where he had his small deposit was
only a block away, and they went there at once, while he wondered
uneasily as to the next development. Carroll assuredly expected the
money to be divided; and, slight as his own rights in it might be,
Lang was perfectly convinced that Carroll had none at all.

The check was made out to them jointly, and they both indorsed it.
Lang presented it to the cashier, who knew him, and who made no
difficulty. The money was counted out in hundred-dollar bills, a
hundred and twenty-five of them, with the twenty-seven dollars odd.

Lang separated the five hundred and twenty-seven dollars from the
rest. It did seem that they deserved as much as that by way of
commission. Carroll clung to his shoulder as he moved from the wicket,
his eyes on the money. Lang handed him half the share he had
separated, which Carroll took, looking puzzled.

“We’d better not split it here,” he murmured. “Let’s go to your hotel,
or somewhere.”

Lang stowed the rest of the money in his inner pocket.

“Look here, Carroll,” he said, “this money isn’t ours, you know. We
can’t split it. I’m going to turn it all in to Rockett’s receivers,
all but the odd sum, which perhaps we might stretch a point and hold
out.”

“Are you joking—or crazy?” exclaimed Carroll, looking absolutely
dumfounded.

“Neither. I’m sane and serious. We can’t keep this money. I’m going to
put it in safe-keeping till I find out where I ought to deliver it.”

Carroll’s handsome face turned ugly.

“Great heavens, what a bluff to try and pull! I think I see you
turning any of it in to the creditors! Want to put it in safe-keeping?
I guess not. I’m not a fool. Come now, split that cash, fifty-fifty,
or—well, it’ll never do you any good. Do you hear, damn it?”

He had raised his voice, his temper out of control. Several men turned
to look. A uniformed bank guard, who had been watching, moved over to
them.

“Now, gentlemen!” he said.

“I want to rent a safe-deposit box,” said Lang, seizing this
opportunity. “Please show me the wicket.”

“You can’t put that across——” began Carroll furiously, then stopped
and followed Lang and the porter to the vault office, where he again
began to protest. The clerk looked dubiously at the two of them.

“It’s trust money that I want to put away,” Lang explained. “This
gentleman here has some claim on it, but I’ve no authority to pay any
of it. I’m a customer of this bank. Here’s my card.”

The clerk surveyed them both again—Lang immaculate in a freshly
pressed suit and white linen, Carroll still in the faded sweater and
shapeless trousers that he had worn through the wreck, wrinkled and
stained with sea water. He looked both alarmed and threatening and
evil, while Lang had assumed his utmost professional dignity of
manner; and appearances carried the day, as usual.

“We can’t refuse to rent boxes,” said the clerk to Carroll. “It’s not
our business what’s put into them. If you want to, you can leave your
name; and you can get an order from the courts to have the box sealed
and your claim adjusted. Please sign this, doctor.”

Lang went back into the vault, and delayed as long as possible in
stowing away the twelve thousand dollars, but when he came out Carroll
was awaiting him on the steps of the bank. He had calmed his temper,
but his voice was hard and menacing.

“Don’t you touch any of that money, Lang,” he said. “Leave it where it
is. Don’t think of sending it to Rockett’s creditors. You don’t know
what you’re monkeying with. I tell you, it’ll fly up and hit you.
You’ve no idea of the inside of this business yet, and don’t you do
anything foolish till you get your eyes open.

“I’ll be at the St. Andrew Hotel,” he added. “You’ll see me again.
Take my tip or you’ll regret it all your life, Doctor Lang.”

He went down the street, leaving Lang really impressed by his tone of
cold earnestness. He did not blame Carroll for being bitter and
disappointed. He was bitterly disappointed himself, and of course it
looked plain to Carroll that he was confiscating all the profits of
their common gamble.

He felt tired and irritable, and knew that he must be famished, but
when he went to a restaurant he could swallow nothing solid. He
managed to take a glass of hot milk, and went wearily home to his
hotel room, where he called up the Iberville, and asked for Miss
Morrison. It seemed the only bright spot in a disappointing world.

She was out. She had left the hotel. The clerk did not know whether
she would be back. She had left town, he thought. Her address? He
could not say, but any letters would be forwarded.

He hung up the receiver, in a state of weary disgust that was like
prostration. Eva’s relatives had called for her at last; they had
taken her away. He would not see her again. He might write. But what
was the use?

The whole thing was over, the farce—drama—tragedy. He had taken risks,
nearly lost his life, skirted the edge of crime, all for less than
nothing. He was back where he had started, _minus_ several dollars, a
suit of clothes, a gold watch and a medical case. Then he recollected
his half of the odd five hundred and twenty-seven dollars—a gain,
indeed, but it was not pleasant money. He felt disposed to give it
away, to clear away the whole wretched business, which, according to
Carroll, he had not yet fully plumbed.

He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. The chatter of the stock
ticker echoed in his ears—forty—forty and an eighth—forty-one——

He awoke and found the room pitchy dark. It was hardly five o’clock
when he had lain down. He must have fallen into a dead slumber. He got
up drowsily, switched on the light, and found to his amazement that
his watch said nine o’clock.

He was still stupid with sleep, and he decided to go definitely to
bed, began to undress, and removed the small articles from his
pockets, as he most methodically did every night. He wound up his
dollar watch, laid it on the bureau, took out his money, felt for his
bunch of keys.

They were not in his trousers pocket. He must have left them in the
other trousers when he changed. The crumpled, sea-stained clothes from
the _Cavite’s_ disaster lay on a chair, but the bunch of keys was in
none of the pockets. He had had them last in Rockett’s bungalow, while
trying to unlock the box, and he realized with cold consternation that
he must have left them there.

It was not the loss of the keys, but the fact that the key ring bore a
celluloid tag with his full name and address. It would be found,
sooner or later, along with the disordered house, the smashed strong
box, the hole in the garden—evidence enough to convict him of burglary
several times over.

He cursed himself for his carelessness. Chance seemed determined to
seize every opening to ruin him. Now there was only one course—to go
back to that house and recover the keys before any one else could find
them.

He shrunk horribly from the thing. He would have rather done almost
anything else, but there was no possible choice. Grimly he resumed the
garments he had taken off, and went downstairs to consult the night
clerk about trains to Biloxi.

There was none, it appeared, before five next morning. Lang could not
wait. He wanted to finish with this whole episode, clear it away
forever. He telephoned for a taxi, specifying a good car and a good
driver, for a long-distance trip.

While he awaited it he went to the lunch counter, hungry now, and
consumed coffee and thick ham sandwiches. This refreshment reanimated
him. He remembered that he would need a flash light, and he brought
one down with an overcoat as the car arrived.

It turned out to be a really good car, and, once out of the city and
upon the good shell road they made fast time. Lang told the driver to
cut loose, and he dozed periodically behind the closed curtains as the
big machine roared and swayed down the coast road, past Grand Bay,
Pascagoula, Biloxi, steadily through the quiet night, with the sea
occasionally flashing on their left. Good luck was with him for once,
for without a single breakdown and only one stop for gas and water
they came to the side road that led up to Persia.

Lang was afraid to drive to Rockett’s bungalow and he feigned that
Persia was his destination. The car was to wait till he came back—till
morning, if necessary. He got out and walked around the store in the
dark to conceal his direction from the driver, and started rapidly up
the road.

He was stiff and sleepy, and it was barely light enough to see the
road. All the houses along the way were dark; it was well after
midnight. Strangely enough, a man seems to walk faster at night than
by day, and he reached Rockett’s house before he expected it. There
was no light; it looked dim and deserted. He had no doubt that no one
had approached the place since he and Carroll had left it that
morning, though it seemed an eternity ago.

He did not approach the front door. He knew that the keys must be in
the kitchen, whose door, he was sure, was not locked. It held when he
tried it, however, and then yielded suddenly with a loud crack that
echoed through the empty house.

Lang paused, his heart thumping. Dead silence followed. He entered the
room, turning on the flash light.

The keys were not on the table, as he had expected. They must have
fallen to the floor. He stooped, crawled under the table, turning the
light this way and that, growing more perturbed. He was on his knees,
groping along the wall, when he half heard something like a light
step. Before he could rise, a brighter flash light than his own
blinded him with its blaze in his face.

For a moment he crouched there, paralyzed with the shock and the
terror. He could half see the dim figure behind that white beam. He
expected a threat, or a bullet, but he heard nothing except a sound
like a faint moaning.

Then with the courage of despair he turned his own light on the
antagonist.

Eva Morrison stood there, in a long blue dressing gown, one sleeve
falling back from the arm that held the light, the other hand holding
a little shiny revolver half hidden in the folds of the gown. The two
light rays crossed like swords between them; the girl’s face looked
deathly pale, and he heard, tongue-tied himself, again that faint
moaning from her lips.

“You! You!” she whispered, and the horror and amazement in her tone
were echoes of Lang’s own emotions.




                             CHAPTER VII

                              HER FATHER


The flash light dropped out of Lang’s hand. The girl’s light shifted;
he heard a quick movement, the scrape of a match, and the yellow glow
of a lamp shone out. She set it on the kitchen table, and stood gazing
at him, still amazed, as if beyond speech.

“Is it possibly you, Doctor Lang?” she said unsteadily. “I found—I
thought—— Oh, what does this mean? Are you insane?”

“I came back for the keys,” Lang stammered. It was all he could think
of to say. He tried to pull himself together, and got upon his feet.
What was she doing here, for that matter, in Rockett’s house?

“It’s all a mistake,” he tried to explain. “Rockett himself told me to
come here—his last words. It wasn’t for myself. The creditors’
money——”

“I don’t know what you mean. Creditors? Why did you come here at all?”

“Well, if it comes to that, how do you come to be here yourself?”
returned Lang, driven to defense.

“Here? In my own father’s house?” she exclaimed in the most genuine
amazement.

Lang’s brain almost turned dizzy again. The wildest suppositions
flashed through it. Was Eva really Morrison, or was Rockett really
Rockett? Could she be the daughter of the Automotive Fuel defaulter
without knowing it?

“Oh, I want to know what it all means!” she cried pitifully. “I waited
in Mobile for my father. He never came. At last I came out here, to
our house. Thieves had been through it; it was turned upside down.
Father’s money box was in this room, burst open. I found the keys—with
your name. I couldn’t believe it. I thought they had been stolen from
you. I can’t believe yet. Why don’t you speak?” she cried
passionately. “Say it—it wasn’t you!

“You must know something,” she went on, after waiting in vain for Lang
to answer. “Father had been here; his things were here; his bed had
been slept in, and he’s gone. Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Lang groaned. He was so bewildered that he felt
incapable of clear thought. “It isn’t as bad as it looks. Don’t think
the worst of me. I didn’t ransack the house. I had authority to come
here, and I have the money safe.”

“I don’t care about any money. It’s my father!” she reiterated. “Have
they murdered him?”

“I don’t know!” exclaimed the surgeon in despair. “Wait—who was your
father? What was he like?”

“You don’t know?” She stared amazed. “Why, Edward Morrison, the
explorer. Don’t you know his books?”

She turned and ran into the next room, returning immediately with a
large volume, and showed a portrait frontispiece. It was a book of
South American travel and archæology. Lang remembered Edward
Morrison’s name very well now, though he had never read any of his
books. But he did not think of that at the moment; for the half length
of the portrait, though well clad, healthy, with open, frowning eyes
and resolute countenance was beyond any doubt the figure of the
haggard and unconscious patient of the _Cavite_.

“Oh, Lord!” Lang groaned, taking this in.

“You know him? You’ve seen him?”

“Yes—I’ve seen him.” Lang cast about for softening phrases. “I was
aboard a steamer with him, only the other day. Why,” he cried,
remembering, “it was the yacht, you know—that call that you urged me
to accept. He was the patient I was to treat, only they didn’t tell me
his right name.”

“My father?” said Eva, dazed. “How did he get on a yacht? But that man
was very ill—paralyzed.”

“Yes. Not seriously, though, as I think now. But—but the yacht was run
down two days later, in a fog. I helped get your father on deck; I
tried to save him. The ship went down under us. I never saw him again.
I don’t know whether anybody was saved but myself and one other.”

He felt the cool bluntness of his story, but he could think of no
other words. Eva Morrison searched his face with wide, imploring eyes
which he could not meet. She turned about slowly, and went back into
the darkness of the dining room, putting out her hands as if blinded.
She did not come back.

Left alone with his confusion and wretchedness, Lang waited for
several minutes. He thought he heard a suppressed noise, hesitated a
little longer, and then took the lamp and went after her. The
devastated room had been put into order again, and Eva was huddled on
a wide couch, her head buried in her arms, trembling with gasping
sobs.

He spoke gently to her. She did not move, perhaps did not hear him. He
stood over her uncertainly for some seconds, tortured.

“Don’t sorrow so—not yet,” he tried to comfort her. “We don’t know
that your father is lost at all. Most likely he has been picked up, as
I was. That ocean swarms with ships. I’d have plenty of hope. He may
be ashore by this time.”

Still she made no sign whatever of having heard, except that her
convulsive sobbing subsided a little. Unbearably wrung by her
suffering, Lang knelt down impulsively and put his arm over her
shoulders.

“Don’t grieve so, for God’s sake!” he said. “I’ll help you—everything
I can do. Have courage! Your father can’t be drowned.”

She did not move from him; in fact she seemed to nestle into his
protective arm. She grew quieter, presently turned her head, and sat
up.

“Do you think there’s any—any hope?” she stammered, looking at him
helplessly.

It was no time for truth. Lang lied boldly.

“Every chance. There were boats out at once. Your father is most
likely ashore now.”

He had a vivid mental picture of the semiparalyzed man on that dark
deck, as the _Cavite_ plunged bows down. He shuddered, but Eva seemed
encouraged, and spoke more collectedly.

“Oh, I hope it may be so!” she said. “I won’t give up, yet. Couldn’t I
telegraph to all the places where he might have come ashore?

“But—but,” she faltered, shaky again, “to think that I hadn’t seen him
at all for nearly a year! Father and I were always such friends and
comrades. My mother died years ago. We two were everything—just all
each other had. I let him keep me up North at college when I should
have been with him. But he was away on his expeditions so much. He
built this house for us to live in; we made plans for our life here,
and he was just beginning to get credit for the great work he’d
done—for all his exploration in South America—and now, to have it cut
off—it leaves all the world empty. But it can’t be; he can’t be
drowned!”

“Of course not!” Lang cried. “Nobody could have missed being picked up
on that sea. Why, it’s almost like a crowded street, with ships. We’ll
telegraph to all the ports, as you said. Good idea! I think you’d
better go back to Mobile with me. I’ve got a car down the road. You
can’t stay alone here.”

“I’m not afraid. I’ve been here alone before,” said Eva. “But,” she
went on, “I don’t understand yet how you came to be here. And then,
what was my father doing on board that yacht? It all seems a puzzle.”

“It’s more than a puzzle.”

Anything to distract her mind now, and he plunged into an account of
his adventures on board the _Cavite_. He had to tread warily. He
suppressed the fact that her father had been tortured, that he was
unconscious and paralyzed. He represented that Morrison had been
obstinately keeping silence. And when he came to the man’s last
incoherent instructions, Eva interrupted, anxiously.

“He wanted you to find something important. He must have meant you to
pass it to me. What did you find?”

“It was that steel dispatch box; it had some stock
certificates—nothing else but a bundle of drawings and photographs. We
sold the stock. I didn’t understand, of course. I thought it was for
the Rockett creditors. We were lucky enough to catch it just at its
high point and we—well, we speculated on it a little. Eventually we
got out with over twelve thousand dollars. It’s all in the bank at
Mobile. It’s all yours, of course. I’ll have it transferred to you
to-morrow.”

What luck, he thought, that he had neither split it with Carroll nor
turned it in to the courts.

Eva was reflecting gravely. “That was the money for his next
expedition. It’s more than he often had. His expeditions generally
cost far more than they brought in. He’s just come back from southern
Chile, you know. He was going again this season, and he was going to
take me with him, as far as Valparaiso, anyway.”

“Well, the money is here all waiting for him,” Lang returned.

“And the photographs and sketches you spoke of—have you them safely,
too?”

“No, I believe Carroll still has them,” he admitted. “I’ve not thought
of them since. But I’ll get them back for you. Do you suppose that
gang imagined that your father had large quantities of valuables
hidden? Surely they didn’t take all that trouble for his little block
of oil stock. Why should they have carried him off against his will?
Or, did they? What were they trying to get out of him? Have you any
idea?”

Eva seemed to reflect long, and then shook her head silently.

“Is it possible that they really thought he was Rockett?” Lang
surmised, thinking hard; and in the ensuing silence the little clock
on the mantel tinkled three times.

“Three o’clock!” he exclaimed. “Too late to talk of all this any
longer. You can’t stay here alone. I’ve a car waiting, and I’ll take
you back to town with me. Get your things together.”

“No, I’ll stay here, at least till to-morrow night. If father should
be found word will probably be sent here. I’m not in the least afraid,
and you were the only burglar, after all.”

Lang tried hard to persuade her, but she insisted. He gave up at last.
After all, the night was nearly over.

“You’ll be back at the Iberville in Mobile to-morrow without fail,
though,” he said. “If you’re not I’ll be out here to bring you.
To-morrow I’m sure we’ll have good news.”

He did not feel equal to any more argument or encouragement. Eva
jumped up and came after him as he turned to go, holding something in
her hand.

“I’m so glad you did come—even as a burglar,” she said, with a faint
smile. “You’ve been very kind and cheering, and—here are your keys.”

Lang groped down to the gate in the twilight, and looked back at the
lighted window blind. He could not quite make up his mind to leave the
girl alone with her grief, nor could he venture to go back. He
lingered about the gate, and finally sat down on the ground, with his
back against a tree.

The light in the house presently went out. Eva had gone to
bed—probably not to sleep. Lang felt an extraordinary tenderness and
pity for the girl. She was brave; she had come out boldly with her
flash light and revolver when she heard him in the house. Her father
was almost surely drowned. He would have to help her through the
coming bad days, as she had helped him through his own.

He half dozed, wondering why the _Cavite’s_ crew had wanted to make
her father talk. He would see Carroll and get the truth out of him—get
the photographs, too. He dozed again, awoke and dozed, till the pale
dawn caught him asleep.

He got up, cramped and very cold. Morrison’s house was dim and dead in
the dawn. He started down the road, shivering, sleepy, half starved
and irritable.

He found his taxi at Persia, the driver asleep on the cushions. The
long drive back to Mobile was too much to contemplate. He told the man
to drive to the nearest hotel, and dozed off in the car.

He awoke among streets, trees, houses. He did not know where he was,
nor care. A greasy all-night lunch counter met his eye, where he
swallowed rolls and hot milk. They told him that there was a hotel in
the next block. He never learned its name, but he woke up the night
clerk and secured a room. He felt incapable of thought; the
Morrison-Rockett imbroglio in its last development was too much for
him. He tore off his clothes in a sort of fury of perplexity and
fatigue and tumbled between the sheets, where he fell instantly into a
deathlike sleep.




                             CHAPTER VIII

                             GREEN STONES


He slept right through the morning, dimly heard noon whistles blowing,
and slept again. About two o’clock he awoke, rising out of a deep pit
of utter unconsciousness, with a vague feeling of awful and momentous
things impending.

Then his mind dropped into gear. As in a flash of moving pictures he
saw the last crowded hours— the sinking steamer upheaving in the
water, the night on the cold Gulf, his housebreaking, the excitement
of the stock gamble, and, strangest of all, his midnight encounter
with Eva Morrison and the amazing revelations.

He felt rested; the stiffness had been slept out of him. He jumped out
of bed, having no idea where he was. Peeping through the window blind
he saw an asphalted street in the sun, moving automobiles, palms and
giant cacti, and he found himself ravenous for food.

When he went downstairs he learned that he was at the Hotel Royal in
Pass Christian. It was too late for lunch, but he went out, found a
restaurant, and ate two meals in one. Refreshed and walking in the
sunlight, he came back to a sense of reality, after the phantasmagoria
of unlikely happenings.

That meeting in the lonely bungalow last night seemed now half
incredible. But it was real, and half horrible and half poignantly
sweet. Mystery still involved it, and suffering was bound to come
after it. Morrison was dead, and his daughter would have to be helped,
comforted, looked after. She had said that she had no one in the world
but her father. Well, she would have now what he could do. He could
help her with money, at any rate; and he blessed the luck now that had
led him to play for the fall in Yuma Oil, and even felt softened
toward Carroll for having urged it.

Carroll would have to surrender those photographs, those mementos of
the dead. And explanations were due from him also, in plenty. Lang was
eager to get back to Mobile at once. He wanted to be there before Eva
should return, but the first train was at three forty-five. It was a
fast train, but it went all too slow for his impatience. However, when
he arrived at the Mobile depot and telephoned the Iberville Hotel he
was told that Miss Morrison had not yet returned.

He left a message for her, requesting her to call him up as soon as
she came in; and went up to his own hotel where, he reflected, he was
paying twenty dollars weekly for a room which had lately been of very
little value to him.

At the desk the clerk told him that a gentleman had been twice
inquiring for him that day; in fact, the gentleman was perhaps
somewhere about the lobby at that moment. Lang looked. Only one man
was likely to be seeking him there, and he was not surprised to sight
Carroll seated beside a pillar at some distance, at a strategic point
to observe the desk.

Lang went to him at once. The young adventurer had a new suit of
clothes, and looked very different from the shipwrecked mariner of the
day before. He had lost, or controlled, his resentment, too, for he
rose and gave the physician an affable greeting. Lang did not wish to
quarrel, and he accepted it on the same terms.

“I wanted to see you,” he said immediately. “Those things in the iron
box—photos and such—I think you have them. I want you to give them to
me.”

“Not quite, doctor,” Carroll returned, blandly. “You put it over me
once, but I have a safe-deposit box of my own now.”

“It isn’t for myself. I promised Miss Morrison that I’d get them for
her. They were her father’s, of course.”

Carroll took it without blinking.

“Miss Morrison?” he said, questioningly.

“His daughter. Why,” Lang added, “you’ve seen her. She was the lady
who was with me at the Bayview Hotel, when you came to call me to your
‘yacht.’”

At this Carroll did look startled.

“You say that was Morrison’s daughter? Great heavens! The devil’s in
this whole thing, Lang!”

“That’s what I think. And now, come out with it. Why did you give me
that faked tale about Rockett? What did you want Morrison to tell you
before he died? What was his secret? Were you after his Yuma Oil?”

“Oh, I’ll tell you, all right,” said Carroll. “I meant to, anyway. We
can’t talk here, though.” He looked vaguely about the noisy hotel
lobby.

Lang led him up to his room.

“What has that girl told you?” Carroll asked cautiously.

“Enough for me to check what you say. I’ve got to have the truth this
time, Carroll. You’ve lied to the limit, so far. Suppose I put the
whole matter into the hands of the police?”

“Oh, you couldn’t do that. You’re implicated almost as deep as any of
us, you know. Besides,” he added, without boastfulness, “the bulls
have found me hard to catch before now. But I’ll hand you the straight
goods. I knew I must. There’s only us two left in it now, and we’ve
got to come to an understanding.”

“We’ve got a long way to go. Proceed,” said the doctor.

“Well, of course we handed you a ghost story when you came on the
_Cavite_, but we had to tell you something. And then you let us go on
thinking you were Long, so that squares that.

“It all came through Floyd. He was in South America, he had some kind
of job up in the copper mines, and got fired. He was on the beach at
some Chilean port when he met up with Morrison. The old professor was
out on an expedition. I expect you know he was an eminent exploring
guy and book writer. Morrison wanted another white man with him who
knew something about prospecting, and he made a deal with Floyd to go
with him, on a fifty-fifty basis of any mineral or anything valuable
they located.

“They didn’t locate anything for a while. They had a sort of small
schooner and coasted down, going ashore every day or so, and sometimes
camping for a week, while the old professor explored. It’s an awful
country—according to Floyd—all rough islands and narrow channels, and
the mountains right down to the sea, rocks and big glaciers, and fog
and rain all the time. It was early in the spring; they have their
summer down there in the winter, you know.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Lang, dryly. “But what did Morrison locate?”

“Well, it seems he went ashore one morning at the head of a little bay
that split right into the hills. There was a valley beyond, and a big
glacier coming down like a wall right across the valley. Floyd left
him there, and was to come back with the boat to bring him off in the
evening.

“He went back around sundown, and found the old man down and out. He’d
been climbing up on the rocks and ice, and had fallen and busted
several ribs, and was stunned and bruised all up. He had a lot of bits
of rock in his sack, stones full of green crystals. You saw some of
them in his box the other day. And in his pocket he had a couple of
big green stones the size of small potatoes.”

“Floyd went through his pockets while he was insensible?”

“Sure he did. He pocketed one of the big stones, too. He left the
other. He was on a half-share basis, you know. Then he got Morrison
back on the schooner, and they fixed up his hurts.

“He asked Morrison about the stones when he was better, but the old
professor said they were mere crystals that weren’t worth anything.
Floyd thought different, though, and spent a good deal of time going
ashore by himself and hunting around, but he never could find where
Morrison had located them. It might have been anywhere within a mile.

“The old man never seemed to remember that one of the stones was lost.
He was too sick, maybe. His ribs didn’t heal very well, and they had
to make for Valparaiso, where there were doctors.

“In Valparaiso, Floyd took his green stone to the best jewelers there.
It was just as he thought; it was an emerald.”

“Nonsense!” Lang interrupted. “Emeralds don’t come in those sizes.
Why, it would have been worth a fortune.”

“So it would—only it was plumb full of little hairline cracks and
flaws and veins of rock. It wasn’t worth a nickel. The one Morrison
had was the same. But, as I said, it was the size of a little potato.”

“Floyd said that?” Lang inquired.

“No, I saw it myself. Floyd had it with him. It went down in his
pocket with the _Cavite_, I expect. We had two of the best jewelers in
New Orleans look at it, too, and they said the same as the Chilean
ones.

“Floyd kept after Morrison to live up to his agreement, and go back
and clear out the emerald mine between them. But Morrison always
stalled him off, and at last he slipped away and came north before
Floyd knew he was gone.

“Floyd followed him up, of course, and located him here on the coast.
Of course he knew the old man was getting ready to go back to Chile
after the emeralds. Then he ran across Jerry Harding and Louie and me
at New Orleans. We’d all known him before, and we made up a
partnership.”

“Your crowd had been rum running, I take it?” said Lang.

“Jerry owned the _Cavite_,” replied Carroll, after a pause. “He’s in
her at the bottom of the Gulf now, and Floyd, too, and what we used to
do is nobody’s affair.”

“Why didn’t Floyd go back to Chile by himself? He knew the way.”

“He was broke. He hadn’t the money for any sort of vessel. We were
going to sail the _Cavite_ there. Besides, he didn’t know the way.
It’s all a tangle of islands and channels, that Chilean coast. You’d
lose yourself in an hour, unless you’re a good seaman with good
charts. And besides that, if he got to that glacier valley he couldn’t
tell where Morrison dug up the stones. It might have been two or three
miles from the sea. He’d been away all day.

“So you see,” he went on, “that we had to make Morrison talk. We
offered him a third share to go back and guide us. I don’t think
anything could have been squarer. Well—you know about all the rest.
When he had his stroke, or whatever it was, we tried every way to
bring him to. At last we pinned all our hopes to the great Chicago
specialist, Doctor Robert Long, and got him aboard!”

“Long couldn’t have done a bit more than I did,” said Lang
abstractedly, thinking hard. “But now Floyd and Morrison are both
gone—the only men who knew anything of the place. There’s no chance of
finding it. The game is up, it seems to me.”

“Ah, that’s the very point!” cried Carroll. “I knew, as soon as I set
eyes on them, what those photos and pictures in the iron box must be.
I’ve gone over them all. There’s a series of photos of the coast, the
glacier valley—water-color drawings, too—and a couple of sketch maps.
I’m no sailor, but I know I can find my way there; and if I once get
to that valley, I’ll find the emerald mine, if I have to turn over all
the ground with my bare hands. It can’t be far, after all, and the old
professor did no blasting nor digging.”

“Carroll,” said the surgeon, “so far you’ve told me nothing but lies.
This yarn is the wildest-sounding of all. I’m damned if I believe a
word of it!”

“Good God!” Carroll cried. “Can’t you recognize truth when you see it?
Of course I told you a crooked yarn. We couldn’t have let out the
truth then, could we? But now it’s different. There’s just you and me
left in it. I’ve got the maps and prints. You’ve got the money, and
half of that is coming to me, you know very well. It’ll take five or
six thousand dollars to fit out our expedition. I’ve got less than two
hundred dollars in the world. Neither of us can do anything alone.
Why, man, in a case like this you’d make a partnership with the devil,
wouldn’t you?”

“Well, that’s as it may be,” said Lang. “But you’re making one great
mistake. That money in my trust box isn’t mine. It belongs to Miss
Morrison. If there’s anything in this emerald story, it belongs to
her, too. I have absolutely nothing to do with the whole thing. Go and
talk to her about it.”

“I don’t talk to any woman about such a thing!” Carroll ejaculated,
staring. “Are you clear crazy, Lang, or are you trying to put another
bluff over me? Look here, if that stone of Floyd’s had been perfect it
would have been worth fifty thousand dollars. Emeralds come high; they
rank next to diamonds. We’ve been studying up about them. Most all the
emeralds of the world come from the west coast of South America.
There’s an enormous mine in Colombia. I’ve got all the right dope.
Morrison hit on a pocket, or deposit. Those bits of rock were what
they call emerald matrix. There’s dead sure to be plenty more where
those big stones came from, and good ones, too. It wouldn’t take many
of that size to make a million dollars.”

Carroll’s olive face was deeply flushed. His eyes positively glowed
with earnestness, and his hands trembled. Lang was secretly impressed
and less incredulous than he appeared. It was impossible that any one
could so feign emotion.

“I tell you that I’ve got nothing to do with it,” he said again. “It’s
all in Miss Morrison’s hands.”

Exasperated, baffled, evidently believing not a word of it, Carroll
looked at him.

“Give the girl the price of the oil stock,” he said. “Half the money.
That’s all that’s really coming to her, anyway. We’ll use the rest for
the trip. Oh, give her a share, if you want to. Let her have a third
of what we find. I won’t do it for less. If you won’t meet me on that
you’ll never see any of those papers of Morrison’s again. I’ll raise
the money somehow myself.

“Look here, do you know Louie’s ashore? Yes, he is. He’s in Mobile
now. I saw him myself. He came ashore in the motor launch—the only man
in it. I told him the emerald game was up. But if you go back on me
I’ll call him in. Now I don’t want to do any crooked work. I’ll share
with you fifty-fifty, or thirds all around with the girl, but if not,
then I swear I’ll have the whole thing, crooked or straight!”

Lang shook his head. “I can’t bargain. The police will make you give
up those photos, you know, if it comes to that. Maybe Miss Morrison——”

The bell of his room telephone interrupted him. He went to its stand
and took the receiver. The clerk at the Iberville was calling. Miss
Morrison had just come in, and left word that she would be glad to see
Doctor Lang.

He hung up, delighted, impatient.

“I can’t make any sort of deal with you,” he said to Carroll. “I’ll
put it before Miss Morrison if you like. You’d better think it over
and let me hear to-morrow. Now I’ve got to go out.”

They went downstairs together and parted at the hotel entrance. Lang
felt Carroll’s eyes following him as he went up the street.




                              CHAPTER IX

                      UNEXPLAINED DISAPPEARANCES


Lang was astonished to find that Eva had already gone to the Mobile
police headquarters and induced the authorities to telegraph to all
the Gulf ports and coastguard stations for news of her father. His
respect for her practicality increased immensely. She had had no
replies as yet, but she looked hopeful, cheerful, and glad to see him
when she came down to the little sitting room on the second floor,
where they had often met in the past fortnight.

“That’s the right spirit,” he encouraged her. “Don’t be disappointed
if we don’t get any news at once. Your father had a life belt on and
would float for hours. And the Gulf is a tropical sea, you know—not
cold like the Atlantic.”

Remembering the night he had spent in it himself, Lang wondered that
this lie did not freeze on his lips. He hurried past it.

“I hope you slept last night—this morning, rather.”

“I’m afraid, not very much; neither did you.” An uncontrollable smile
curved her lips, and then she laughed outright. “I looked out the
window before daylight and saw you.”

Lang felt his cheeks reddening.

“I hated to leave you all alone,” he stammered. “I wasn’t much of a
sentinel, though—went to sleep on my post.”

“It was awfully foolish of you, and—and simply wonderful,” she said,
no longer laughing. “I nearly cried. I went to make hot coffee for
you, and when I came back you were gone.”

“I wish I’d known. I drove to Pass Christian and slept nearly all day.
I’m a dormouse when I get a chance. Enough of that. I’ve got something
to tell you.”

“Some news? Something about father?”

“No news. About your father, in a way. It’s a romantic tale that
Carroll has just told me. It’ll amuse you at least. You’re going out
to dinner with me and I’ll tell you while we eat.”

“Do tell me now,” she pleaded.

“No, it’ll be for a digestive. I’m the doctor. We’ll go out for a
short walk now for an appetizer, please. I know what’s best for you.”

She went to get her coat and hat, obediently. Lang had planned to take
her to the largest hotel restaurant in the city, with the masculine
idea of cheering her, but at the sight of the great dining room,
tricked with palms, crammed with Michigan tourists, deafening with the
shriek and clash of a jazz orchestra, she turned in horror and begged
to go to another place. Discomfited, Lang led her in search of quiet,
and after long wandering, they came into a little, rather shabby,
unfrequented eating place on Royal Street.

Here was quiet at any rate. It was growing late and not another table
was occupied. They had a wholesome, vulgar meal, fairly cooked, badly
served, and Lang saw to it that his companion ate. He also ate, being
again surprisingly hungry, but he refused to tell his story till they
had almost finished.

Then, over a cup of coffee, he lighted a cigarette, and recounted
Carroll’s revelations, which he had come more and more disposed to
consider a work of imagination.

Eva listened with the utmost attention, but without comment. She did
not display quite the surprise that he expected; and at the end she
fixed her eyes upon him and asked:

“What do you think of it?”

“I don’t believe it. The question really is, what’s under it? For it’s
obviously designed to conceal something else, like Carroll’s first
romance of Rockett and the yacht.”

Eva appeared to ponder, looking down at the spotted tablecloth.

“That story is all true,” she said at last.

“What? You think so?”

“I know it. You see—father wrote me from Valparaiso, while he was ill
there. He told me he’d been hurt and was coming north; and he said he
was on the track of a deposit of precious stones that would make us
rich. I was to meet him in Mobile. But he didn’t say anything about
any man named Floyd.”

“Well, that puts a different face on it,” said Lang, greatly taken
aback. “As for Floyd, of course he may merely have learned of the
thing by some chance.”

“I know father wouldn’t have engaged any mining prospector,” Eva went
on. “He wasn’t interested in such things. He was an explorer, an
archæologist. He believes that the old Inca civilization extended away
south into Patagonia, and perhaps originated there, and that is what
he’s trying to establish. He has gone farther toward deciphering the
Inca _quipus_—the knotted-string records—than any other man. He must
have merely chanced on the emeralds.”

“Well, now it seems that Carroll has the only clew to where they are,”
said Lang, reviewing the situation mentally. “It’s my fault; I
shouldn’t have let him pocket them; but just then my mind was full of
nothing but Rockett’s money. I suppose you don’t feel inclined to
accept his proposition of going shares on the enterprise?”

“Shares with that man? I should think not!” she exclaimed. “Why, you
know he’s a thief, almost a murderer. He nearly killed my father.
Fancy what father would say when he found that we’d given a share in
his discovery to the man who robbed him!”

“Carroll’s got a strong position, though. We might buy him off.
Possibly he’d accept five hundred dollars or maybe a thousand dollars
for the maps and photos, if he was made to see that there was no
better to be had.”

“But why should we,” rejoined Eva, “when my father will be back here
soon, and he will know the way exactly to that place in South
America?”

There was no possible answer to this. Lang could not tell her that
Morrison would never come back to guide them, and he began to wonder
if he had not been too lavish with his optimism.

The astonishing fact that Carroll’s tale was substantially true had
hardly yet established itself in his mind, but now it began to grow
and develop its glittering possibility. An almost incalculable
treasure in emeralds, emeralds as big as small potatoes—it was
romantically incredible. Yet it might be so. Indeed, lives had been
lost, crime committed, a ship sunk for its sake already, and without
knowing it he had himself been circling on the vortex of its
fascination.

But Eva did not seem much interested in it. To her, everything in the
world was postponed until Morrison’s return. Now she was growing
restless, afraid that telegrams might have come to the hotel for her,
and presently Lang took her back to the Iberville.

Replies had, indeed, come in from the police at Pensacola, Fairhope,
Bayou la Batre and Pascagoula, but nothing had been heard of any
castaway coming ashore. Eva, however, was disappointed but not
discouraged, and Lang wondered apprehensively what the final reaction
would be when hope had to be given up.

He stayed with her for an hour in the second-floor sitting room,
talking casually and cheerfully, and then left her. He would see her
again in the morning, but for once he was impatient to leave her. He
wanted to be alone, to think.

Eva evidently had no comprehension of the case. Her whole mind was
fixed on her drowned father; everything else was excluded. She would
delay, let the moment slip. And Morrison’s find was not a thing to
trifle with.

Magnificent plans had risen in the back of his mind even while he
talked to her. He might buy off Carroll himself. He would have no
scruple in utilizing a portion of Eva’s twelve thousand dollars thus
for her own good. He might even gamble a part of his own slender
capital on it. Once in possession of the guiding charts he would go
south himself, hire a schooner, find the treasure, return and hand it
over to Eva—quarts of emeralds as large as potatoes. What he would get
out of it himself did not trouble him.

It was boyish and impracticable. He laughed at himself, though still
fascinated by the idea. At any rate he felt that Carroll must be dealt
with at once, and he went to the St. Andrew Hotel on his way home, but
the young adventurer was out.

He found him next morning, at a late breakfast in the hotel dining
room. Carroll greeted him with his never-failing smoothness, did not
seem surprised, and offered coffee, which Lang declined.

“I’ve come to have an understanding with you, as you said.”

“Good. Well?” said Carroll, alert.

“I’ve talked to Miss Morrison. She’ll give you five hundred dollars
for her father’s papers and photos.”

“Nothing doing!” Carroll returned.

“You’ll have to give them up anyway, you know. Miss Morrison can
identify them. So can I. You don’t want to be arrested, I take it?”

“And how will Doctor Lang like having his part brought to light?”
Carroll inquired ironically. “Burglary. Gambling with Morrison’s
stock.”

“What I did was under Morrison’s orders. His daughter will testify to
that. She’ll back up everything I say. I told her you’d probably
refuse her offer, and she agreed to go the length of one thousand
dollars, but that’s the limit. I advised calling the police at once.”

“Never in my life did I see a shark like you, Lang,” said Carroll
earnestly. “I show you how to make ten thousand dollars and you hog it
all. I tell you where you can make maybe a million, and now you try to
hog that, too. I thought doctors were supposed to be an unselfish
class! Now I tell you, you can’t hog this. I’ve told you my
terms—one-third shares. Otherwise I’ll take it all. You can’t do
anything without what I’ve got. But if you insist on cutting your own
throat, why, go to it.”

“Well, you can consider whether your record will stand police
investigation,” said Lang. “I’ve given you our terms, too. Will you
make an offer, if they don’t suit?”

“I’ve told you—a third of the haul. You won’t consider that? Then do
go away; you’re spoiling my breakfast.”

As he went, Lang was doubtful whether he had been diplomatic enough.
He was unaccustomed to negotiations with criminals, and to big bluffs.
It was really a bluff; the police could hardly recover what Carroll
chose to hide; but he still expected the adventurer to come to terms.
And then a consideration flashed upon him which he had overlooked
entirely.

Carroll undoubtedly would have all the photos and other matter copied
before he sold them. Thus he could sell them and still keep them.

Even so, however, Carroll would be badly handicapped by lack of
capital. If it came to a race Lang felt confident that he could win.
But this new consideration made him sure that, within twenty-four
hours, Carroll would come to sell.

Going to the bank, he took out ten thousand dollars from the vault and
deposited it in Eva Morrison’s name, reserving two thousand dollars
for possible emergencies. He called at the public library, secured a
large atlas and studied with some apprehension the tangle of islands
and channels belting the south Chilean coast, and later he asked for
Miss Morrison at the Iberville.

He found her looking worried, and she admitted that she had slept
little. She had dark lines under her eyes, and her beauty was in
eclipse. He made her go out with him. They went first to the bank,
where she completed the formalities of taking over the account; and
then on a motor run for ten miles down the bay road. She had received
several more replies from the Gulf ports—negative, all of them; but
she persisted in an appearance of optimism.

“You’re wonderfully good to me,” she said gratefully, as they returned
to the city. “You mustn’t take up all your time with my affairs.
You’ve your own concerns—your own plans to make.”

“My concerns, my plans are all for you,” he almost answered, but he
restrained himself wisely.

“I haven’t any,” he said. “I’m not a physician any more. I’m an
adventurer, a chevalier of industry, a burglar, a stock gambler, a
treasure hunter—all my boyish dreams come to life.”

She smiled. “How about your medical practice up in the woods?”

He had almost forgotten it. That scheme now seemed utterly remote and
impracticable, tame and unalluring besides. But her words reminded him
sharply that life was life, after all, and that he would have to think
of unalluring and practical matters. Much depended on Carroll, and
again he regretted having been so crudely unconciliatory with that
young man.

He fully expected to hear from Carroll that night, but no word came.
He did not want to make advances again. He waited till the next
morning. Again he took Eva out, once for a long walk, then across to
Fairhope on the afternoon boat. She looked more depressed than ever,
did not respond to his cheerfulness, and he foresaw the moment when
hope would die.

That evening he took the step of telephoning to the Hotel St. Andrew,
and was told that Carroll had departed the day before, leaving no
address.

Violently Lang cursed his own clumsiness. Carroll was frightened off,
with his indispensable documents. For a moment Lang pictured him
starting immediately for South America; but this could hardly be,
unless, with Louie’s assistance, he had managed to commit some
lucrative crime. But he had passed out of sight, probably forever, and
Lang felt deeply thankful that he had told Eva nothing of his
high-flown projects, now made impossible.

Lang put in a bad night himself, but the morning mail brought a
letter. It was a brief note from Carroll, posted in New Orleans, and
with no address but the general delivery. Lang breathed more easily as
he glanced over it.

    Meet me at the St. Charles here Friday afternoon. We can
    make a deal, if you bring fifteen hundred dollars cash—no
    checks. If I am not there, wait a day. Am going out of
    town and may be delayed. This is your last chance.

It was then Thursday. Lang spent part of that day with Eva as usual,
mentioning casually that he was going out of town for half a day or
so, and left for New Orleans late that night.

He established himself at the Hotel St. Charles, and was not
disappointed to find Carroll not known there. All the next afternoon
he spent within sight of the desk, or in his room, with instructions
to have any caller sent up to him immediately; but he waited in vain.
The evening was equally blank. Carroll had said he might be delayed,
and Lang repressed impatience and growing doubt until the whole of the
next day had passed. He spent that night with a feeling of being
somehow taken in, but next morning he was given a note.

It had been brought in very early by a negro boy, was scribbled in
pencil and bore no date nor address. It said:

    Sorry to keep you waiting, have been delayed. Will meet
    you to-day sure. Hope you have brought the money.

                                                            C.

Reviving in hope, Lang waited all that Sunday, again in vain, and the
morning brought neither message nor caller. Fuming with wrath, he left
a curt and angry note for Carroll at the desk, and took the train back
to Mobile, certain now that he had been maliciously played with.

At his hotel among his letters, he found one with the stamp of the
Iberville, which had been personally left. He knew at once who had
left it, and he tore it open with a sense of dream.

    Dear Doctor Lang: Father is alive. I have just had a
    message from him at Colon. He was picked up by the ship
    that ran you down, and has been very ill. I am to join him
    at Panama. There is a ship from New Orleans to-morrow
    which I can catch if I hurry. I am so sorry not to have
    seen you. I tried everywhere to find you. I am too excited
    and overjoyed to write, but I will send you word from
    Panama. I took all the money out of the bank.

    Yours most gratefully and joyfully,

                                               Eva Morrison.

Emotion and haste were in every line of the shaky script. She had
passed through New Orleans while he waited there. Lang put the letter
in his pocket, glad, indeed, but with a crushing sense of finality.

She was gone, Carroll was gone; so far as he was concerned, the
emerald treasure was gone. Life returned to its normal, blank and
uninteresting outlines.

Doubtless she would write to him from Panama. She would go to Chile
with her father; doubtless she would return. But Lang had a feeling
that, even if he met her in the future, this episode was ended, closed
like a magic ring that could never be reopened.

He must leave Mobile. He was a poor man now and must make his living.
The prospect looked dreary. He had not realized how the green glow of
the Chilean stones had dazzled him. He had been thinking of late like
a millionaire, and dimes and dollars were now his standard. He was no
longer an adventurer.

He left his hotel and moved to an inexpensive boarding house. He
called on some of the local physicians, made inquiries about
professional prospects. The idea of work in the piney woods did not
attract him now. He was restless; he thought of going West. Though he
quailed at the idea of handling a scalpel, he could practice medicine
well enough in one of the new towns in Texas, he thought.

No word came from Eva. He still lingered in Mobile, unable to come to
a decision. More than a week had passed when he received a cablegram
from Panama.

    Will you come to Panama first possible steamer, at my
    expense? Important.

                                            Edward Morrison.




                              CHAPTER X

                           A GENEROUS OFFER


Lang arrived at Panama, hot and sticky and full of mixed expectations.
He had not delayed a day; he had taken the first steamer for Colon,
with the remaining two thousand dollars from Yuma Oil belted round his
waist. From Colon he had traveled by the Isthmus Railway and his mind
was still dazed with heat and hurry, and the unfamiliar Spanish talk,
and the wild scenery of the Isthmus and the glimpses of the great
engineering work that seemed the sole interest in everybody’s mind.
And he scarcely ventured to foresee what he might be going to meet.

He had not the slightest idea how to find Morrison, but he was told
that he could find anything at the Hotel Tivoli. Taking a taxi at the
landing stage therefore, he was driven to this ornate establishment,
where he found that Morrison’s name was indeed known. He was not at
the hotel, but at Mrs. Leeman’s boarding house, which seemed to be
also a well-known institution. Lang engaged a room, had his baggage
sent for, and requisitioned the Ford again.

It was half an hour’s drive, by what seemed devious ways. He felt
oddly, nervously in suspense. His lips were dry as the car stopped in
front of a huge, rambling bungalow, screened on all sides by a vast
veranda, heavy with vines and gay with great red blossoms.

He went up the walk. A barefooted Jamaican negro was pottering about
some duties at the steps, and he paused to make inquiries. He hardly
understood the queer, clipped half-English accent of the servant, but
just then a white-dressed figure came quickly around the corner of the
house, on the dim veranda. It was Eva.

She stopped short, in silence. As he saw her Lang felt suddenly full
of brimming satisfaction, a pervading, full content, such as he had
never known before in his life. They gazed at each other in silence,
for a single, magnetic instant that seemed full of mysterious
implication. Then Lang, a trifle dazed, saw that Eva was holding out
her hand and greeting him with hurried words that he barely took in.

“I never thought I would see you again,” he stammered awkwardly.

“You haven’t much faith in me.”

“I have far more faith in you than I have in anything else in the
world,” he returned.

She searched his face for a moment, looking almost startled,
hesitated, and then turned quickly, still holding his hand as if to
guide him.

“Come this way and see father. He’ll be so glad you’ve come. We didn’t
look for you for days—the next steamer.”

She conducted him back round the corner of the veranda, and far toward
the rear of the building a big man, dressed in white duck, was sitting
in a steamer chair, a litter of newspapers around him. He looked up
sharply. An immediate look of recognition came over his face, and he
put out a big, bony hand.

It was a very different man from the haggard, unshaven, blind-eyed
Rockett whom the physician had studied with such intentness on the
_Cavite_; but he recognized that big, grim, but not wholly unkindly
countenance, though the piercing gray eyes were, of course, strange to
him.

“Your patient again, doctor!” said the explorer, still with a slight
stammer and thickness in his articulation.

“Not my patient any more, I hope. You seem to have made a recovery,”
said Lang cordially.

“A little shaky, a little t-tongue-tied yet. I was in the—the w-water
half an hour, and it d-didn’t d-do me any good. Better, though, than
when I used to s-study you through my eyeglasses and t-try to size you
up on that damned steamer.”

“So you weren’t unconscious at all. I half suspected it at times,”
Lang exclaimed.

“Oh, partly, partly. I was d-dopy a good d-deal. I must have had”—he
stopped and seemed to collect himself—“some sort of fit or stroke
ashore, when those pirates were—er—cross-questioning me. I didn’t know
about being taken to sea—couldn’t make out where I was. Came to myself
slowly—couldn’t move at first—afraid to try to speak—decided it was
safest to play dead——”

“I think you shouldn’t talk much now,” Lang interposed. “You can tell
me all the story when you’re a bit better.”

“Then when I tried to speak to you at the last, wanting to give a
message to Eva, I couldn’t get the words together. The——”

“Hush!” Eva put in. “I’ll tell it. Father had seen Floyd a few days
before at Biloxi, and knew that he must be hunting him. So he buried
the things hurriedly, for fear of anything happening, and he painted
the negro. He knew that I would catch the idea. It used to be a game
with us, you know—puzzle pictures. Father has been an artist all his
life. Isn’t it strange? He was at the bungalow all the time we were in
Mobile, and we didn’t know it. There had been some mistake about the
dates. He didn’t expect me South till two weeks later—but we’re mixing
the story all up. Of course you know why he sent for you now?”

“Well, I might make a guess,” Lang admitted.

“It’s like this,” Morrison began again, haltingly. “I’m getting better
fast, but the doctor here says I can’t travel for a week, and that I
must avoid exertion for a month. I can guide, but I won’t be much good
else. Eva says you’re temporarily out of medical work. Fate has thrown
you in with us, and you might as well go the rest of the way. I pay
expenses; you’re chief mate, and you get a one-third share of whatever
we find. What do you say?”

“There isn’t any doubt about what I’ll say,” said Lang. “It’s a
remarkably generous proposition. Too generous, I’m afraid, for I don’t
know anything about mining work. But I’ll do my best, and I’ll climb
rocks and chop ice till I drop. I suppose,” he added cautiously, “that
there isn’t any doubt about the genuineness of the emeralds? I could
hardly believe the story.”

“Absolutely none. I had them ex-examined by the best men in
Valparaiso. In fact, the word g-got out that I’d made an emerald
strike, and I had all sorts of fellows after me. When we start again
we’ll have to be secret or we’ll have a fleet trailing us down the
coast.”

“By Jove! we may have some one before us,” Lang exclaimed, suddenly
remembering. “Carroll has all your maps and photos, and he’s
disappeared—Lord knows where.”

“It doesn’t matter. He’ll never find it,” Morrison declared. “It isn’t
where any one would think. It’s a wild, g-glacier——”

He stuttered, and stuck fast.

“It’s a wild, rough coast,” Eva took up his words. “Small mountainous
islands, a steep slope, and a rainy climate. They had trouble to find
anything dry enough to burn for their fires, until they came on an
outcrop of coal right on the coast. There’s a long valley running to
the sea, and a wall of ice right across it, like a great gate—the head
of the glacier that goes away up the mountain to the top, where
there’s a pass. It was the pass that made father stop to examine it.
He thought there might be traces of an ancient seaport—his prehistoric
Chileans, you know.

“The glacier was melting away at the bottom, of course. The valley was
choked with gravel and stones that the glacier had cast out through
years and years. Here he found an old copper knife, and then he found
the emeralds, right at the foot of the ice. They had come out of the
ice.”

“Out of the glacier?” Lang exclaimed.

“It’s my belief,” Morrison broke in again, “that the glacier had
gathered them up with all their surrounding rock and gravel, somewhere
high up the mountain. The ice had torn up an emerald pocket, carried
it down slowly, maybe through centuries, till at last it came near the
bottom, and was washed out by the melting. Streams of water were
flowing out of the glacier wall everywhere.

“Floyd stole the best of the two stones I found. He lied if he said
that he was working on shares with me. I was paying him two hundred
pesos a month, and nothing more. Those emeralds—would—would have——”

He stuck again, and glanced hopelessly at Eva.

“Father means,” the girl assisted, “that they could have been cut to I
don’t know how many hundred carats if they hadn’t been flawed, and
they would have been worth at least twenty thousand dollars apiece. He
didn’t have them examined till after he was out of the hospital at
Valparaiso. He would have gone back then, but he wasn’t strong enough,
and besides he didn’t have the money. He had to go North to get that
oil stock and sell it. He had bought it for thirty dollars a share,
and was told that it would go to one hundred dollars.”

“That reminds me that I have about two thousand dollars from that
stock in my belt now,” said Lang.

“Keep it, for the present,” said Morrison. “Plenty of time. We have a
week here to wait for me. I’ll tell you the whole story of the thing
to-morrow, perhaps, if my tongue loosens up. You must be completely
confused with these snatches and scraps.”

There were many points that Lang wanted badly to have explained, but
he postponed them. Evening was falling, suddenly, darkly, like a
velvet curtain. Over a decorative row of palms in the distance he
caught a glimpse of a fiery red streak of sky above the sea. He had
heard several other men coming up the steps to the house—no doubt Mrs.
Leeman’s boarders. The sudden heavy roar of a steamer approaching the
Canal made the dead, moist air vibrate. It was almost dark on the
shaded veranda.

“Is is far south of Valparaiso?” he asked. “How do we go?”

“A long way—over a thousand miles. It’s between Punta Reale and La
Carolina, about halfway. We must get a comfortable craft; I’m not in
condition for roughing it, this time.”

A gong boomed mellow toned from indoors.

“That’s for dinner,” Eva exclaimed. “We’ll let the rest of the story
and all the plans wait till to-morrow. Doctor Lang will stay and dine
with us, of course. Mrs. Leeman will give you a better dinner than the
Tivoli, and afterward you can telephone for a car to go to the hotel.”

Lang did not hesitate to accept, and Mrs. Leeman, a plump and
obviously prospering Los Angeles widow, made him welcome. There were
three other boarders besides the Morrisons—two young American
engineers from the harbor, and the second officer of an American
steamer in port, who always spent his days ashore at this house.

The dinner was good, an attempt at American cooking in the tropics,
and every one was jovial. Lang felt in tremendous spirits; the future
suddenly had turned rainbow colored again. He astonished himself with
his own hilarity, and even Morrison released a somewhat saturnine and
stammering vein of chaff. Eva said little, laughed, looked happy, and
her beauty had come back as vividly as when he first knew her.

Afterward the men went out to the veranda to smoke, and Lang became
involved in argument with Findlay, the American officer, as to the
effect, on white constitutions, of prolonged living in the tropics. It
was cut short, however, by Findlay’s departure. His ship sailed that
night, and his leave was over. Morrison also, by medical orders, had
to go to bed at nine o’clock, and Lang assisted him to his bedroom,
and, returning, telephoned to the hotel for a taxi to be sent
immediately.

Eva presently came out of her father’s room, and walked outdoors with
him as he waited. It was hot and cloudy; spicy, musky scents seemed to
hover in the air. Away in the city a band was playing faintly.

“Your father has placed a great confidence in me,” he said. “I’m going
to try to deserve it.”

“He took my word for you. But he’s a good judge of men besides. I
think all’s going to be well now. If he says there are emeralds, there
will be emeralds. He’s never wrong.”

“And you’ll be rich and I’ll be rich and we’ll all be rich together.
What difference will it make, I wonder?”

“Much, to my father. He’ll have proper funds for his work, for the
first time.”

“And much to me. Never did I need it more.”

“And nothing at all to me,” she returned. “There’s your car.”

“Good-by, till to-morrow.”

The car roared up; he took her hand. He might have kissed it; in that
Spanish country it would have been courtesy. The car flashed a
blinding glare over them as it wheeled.

“Come early and lunch with us,” she cried.

He waved his hand back at her as he got into the car, noticing that
the side curtains were closed, and the machine exploded into motion
again and panted down the dark street.

It was insufferably hot in that closed interior. Lang spoke to the
driver, dimly silhouetted against the windshield, but got only a shake
of the head. He resolved to endure it for the short ride to the
hotel—too jubilant, besides, to care much about small inconveniences.

The rickety little flivver rattled and pounded, mostly through dark or
ill-lighted ways. It seemed to take a long time to reach the hotel. He
spoke again to the chauffeur, who seemed to understand no English; and
then the taxi slowed down and stopped. The door was opened, and a man
pushed darkly inside.

“What the——” ejaculated Lang, amazed at this intrusion.

The driver left his seat and came quickly to the other door. In dismay
Lang recollected the two thousand dollars in his belt. He carried no
weapon, and as he still hesitated, a strap dropped neatly over his
head and shoulders and drew tight, pinioning his arms firmly to his
side.

“Got him, Louie? Hold him a minute,” said a voice he recognized.

Too late, Lang kicked out and struggled desperately. There was no room
for defense. In the darkness of that hot little compartment, sweat
streaming down all three of them, they forced him back, down on the
cushions, and Louie sat down firmly on his chest. Half smothered, Lang
let out a tremendous yell for help.

“Cheese that!” Carroll commanded. “There ain’t a cop within a mile,
anyway. You damn’ fool, we’ve had our eyes on you ever since you
struck Panama. I know the old professor’s handed you all the dope.
What do you say, now? Come in with us, share alike, or——”

“Or what? Damn you, Carroll! What do you take me for?” Lang spluttered
indignantly, too angry to be frightened. “You’re out of it. Why can’t
you drop the thing?”

In answer he felt a cloth dropped across his face, then after a
gurgling sound he smelled a most familiar odor—the scent of
chloroform. He flung his head back, turned it from side to side, threw
off the drugged towel. It is not easy to chloroform a man against his
will, and he struggled so violently that Carroll let go, cast an
impatient word to his assistant, and busied himself with something
taken from his pocket.

The cloth had fallen off and Lang breathed deeply, gathering his
forces. It was only ten seconds. Carroll turned back, picked up Lang’s
defenseless arm, and he felt a penetrating prick.

“A hypodermic!” he thought, with dismay.

He shrieked again at the top of his voice, but he felt the numb
influence of the drug passing through his veins, deadening his will to
live. In spite of his resolution he grew limp; the sense of struggle
blurred, grew dreamy. Consciousness passed out of him.




                              CHAPTER XI

                        THE UNWILLING TOURIST


Lang awoke with the pain of an aching head and a sick stomach. He was
in a bed that swayed beneath him; at first he fancied himself back on
the _Cavite_. He heard trampling and loud talking, and a lacerating
sound of discordant music.

He opened his eyes; there was a ceiling two feet above his head. He
tried to heave himself up, failed and sank back dizzy, but the glimpse
he got brought him immediately struggling up again, full of
stupefaction and bewilderment.

He was lying fully dressed in a dingy bunk, one of a double tier of
bunks that seemed to surround a rather large room. The low,
dirty-white ceiling was crossed by iron beams. In the imperfect light
he saw heads emerging from the berths, human figures moving, there was
much talk and tobacco smoke, and at the other end some one played
shrilly on a mouth organ.

Within six feet a ragged, brown-faced man was violently sick. The air
was foul. To Lang’s dizzy mind it seemed that he had descended into
Hades. He got somehow out of the bunk, his head swimming, incapable of
comprehending where he was or how he had got there.

A negro in a white jacket was sweeping up banana peels from the floor,
and Lang clutched his sleeve.

“What’s this place? Where am I?”

“Where you think you might be?” retorted the sweeper. “Ain’t you got
over your drunk yit? On board de _Lake Tahoe_, dat’s where you is.
Bound fer Seattle,” he continued, gratified by the sound of his own
voice. “Reckon you don’ remember comin’ on board. Had to carry you in;
you an’ yo’ friends, an’ I put you in your berth myself. It was shore
one peach you had. Dat bootleg rum ain’t no stuff to go to sea on.”

Lang stared at him, bewildered, his head too sore to think or
remember. The rough crowd in the cabin were beginning to look at him
and laugh. He caught sight of an iron stairway, struggled toward it,
made his way up.

A gust of divinely fresh air met him, and a blaze of sunshine. A
limitless blue sea sparkled. He was on a steamer’s forward deck, the
steerage deck. A score or two of ragged humanity, white and brown and
yellow, swarmed about him. He pushed past to the rail and stood
leaning on shaky legs, his head in his hands, trying to collect
himself.

Just aft and above him loomed the bridge, with uniformed officers on
watch. Also above him rose the first-class deck, where passengers
promenaded. A light breeze broke the ocean into long surges; the ship
rose and fell, and a long trail of smoke blew back toward the sun. Far
astern, in the brilliant light, he saw a faint shadow that must be a
distant shore.

The bracing air settled his nausea. His head cleared. He remembered
now—the dinner at the boarding house, the attack in the cab—and with a
gasp he plunged his hand under his shirt.

The money belt was gone. His watch was gone, too, and his pocketbook,
and everything that had been in his pockets, and now he noticed that
his clothes were torn in shreds and soiled as if he had been dragged
through mud.

Fool that he had been to carry that money about Panama. He had been
drugged, robbed, and put aboard this steamer, bound for—where had the
negro said? They must have paid his fare, too. They wanted to get rid
of him badly, but he was still so stupefied that for a little he could
not think why this should be. It came back to him all at once—Eva,
Morrison, the emeralds, the glacier. With the two thousand dollars of
the money belt Carroll had capital now. He would have a long start,
with Lang at sea for a week, perhaps more.

The fright and anger of this thought put energy into him. He would not
be beaten so. He had not come willingly aboard this ship; they would
have to put him ashore, somehow, he cared not how nor where.
Fortunately they were not many hours out.

He swayed away from the rail and found another steward in white.

“I’ve got to see the captain!” he exclaimed. “Or the purser. Take me
up to them. I didn’t take passage on this ship. There’s a—a mistake.”

“You can’t see none of dem officers,” the negro returned insolently.
“Dey’re busy. You go down below, man, an’ sleep it off.”

He shrank back from the furious glare that Lang gave him, and turned
away muttering. The surgeon looked up at the sacred upper decks, where
no steerage passengers might go. He walked aft, glanced round to see
that he was not watched, and climbed over the barrier cutting off the
steerage deck. Some one shouted angrily after him, but he made a rush
for the stairway leading above.

He heard some one running after him, but he almost made the top when a
deck hand seized his leg from behind. He kicked violently back,
releasing himself, heard an oath and tumble, and sprawled out on the
upper deck, to be grasped immediately by another deck hand.

He tore away, ripping his already torn sleeve entirely off. A couple
of ladies standing near cried out in alarm. The deck hand gripped him
again, shoving him toward the stair, tussling and squirming
desperately, and a group of passengers was running up, when the
stateroom door at the top of the stair opened suddenly and a
gold-laced officer emerged in an official rage.

“What the devil’s all this?”

Lang hoped for a second that it was the captain. At the next glance he
saw that it was even better. He recognized the officer with almost a
shriek of thanksgiving.

“Findlay!” he exclaimed wildly. “Thank the Lord! Don’t you know me?”

“No, I don’t!” the officer snapped. “What do you want?”

“Don’t you remember—last night—dinner—at Mrs. What’s-her-name’s place?
Morrison—I argued with you how—how the tropics aren’t healthy?”

“God bless me!” Findlay ejaculated. “The doctor! Healthy?” He exploded
into a roar of laughter. “Sure looks as if they ain’t healthy for
you!”

“I don’t know how I got on board,” Lang hurried on. “Give me five
minutes, Findlay. I must see the captain. I’ve got to be put ashore.”

“Come inside,” said Findlay, opening his cabin door. “I’ve got to go
on duty in ten minutes, but I’d rather be late than miss the juicy
sort of story you seem to have.”

He shut the door on the gathering group of passengers, and listened to
Lang’s tale with appreciation, and not without sympathy.

“Shanghaied, by gad!” he commented. “Hard luck, for a fact. Paid your
fare and took your last copper. I suppose you’ve got more money
somewhere?”

“Oh, yes, in my Mobile bank. But that isn’t the point. I’ve got to get
ashore. It’s a business matter; it may cause a huge loss——”

“Oh, that’s clean out of the question,” said Findlay, looking at him
with indulgent compassion. “The captain would have a fit if you
suggested such a thing to him. Why, we’re six hours out. I don’t doubt
it’s important, but then it’s important for our passengers to get
quickly to Seattle. Send a boat ashore? Impossible. No, you’ll just
make up your mind to go on to Seattle with us.”

“I can’t do that!” Lang muttered, appalled. What would the Morrisons
think of his disappearance?

“At least I must send a wireless to Panama,” he said quickly.

“Sorry. Our wireless is out of fix. We can receive, but we can’t send
till we get some new parts at Seattle.”

“Oh, Lord!” Lang groaned.

“Don’t worry. Your friends in Panama’ll know you’re all right. It’ll
only be a few days. I’ll introduce you to the purser and the doctor,
and we’ll get you out of the steerage and make you comfortable. I
guess your credit is good for that. You’ll like the old _Lake Tahoe_.”

Every moment was taking him farther from Panama, and Lang had to
submit. Findlay introduced him to the ship’s doctor, who happened to
have heard of Lang’s Boston record, and was proud to afford
hospitality to a distinguished confrère. Between him and the purser
they got together a miscellaneous outfit of fresh clothing for him,
and moved him up into the cabin, on credit, and even got him placed at
the captain’s table at dinner.

They did what they could for him, and there were pleasant people on
board, and the weather was fine, but Lang took no pleasure in any of
it. He counted the miles that the ship reeled off day by day, all too
slowly. Carroll and Louie must be well on their way to Chile now, he
felt certain. Morrison had been sure they could never hit on the
location of the emerald deposit, but Lang had thought of something
that made him much less certain of that.

It was summer now in Chile, and the glacier must be melting fast. The
whole pocket of emerald-bearing rock was likely to be melted out to
plain sight, even perhaps to be washed down into the gravel below the
ice wall. It could not have been very deep in the glacier, since part
of it had washed out already.

Carroll might find the whole treasure ready for the picking up.
Perhaps Morrison had thought of this. What would they think of his
disappearance? Would Eva still trust him? Would she doubt him? He was
afraid to think, and he walked the deck nightly for miles, so that
fatigue might bring sleep, and pass another night’s run.

He would have been even still more perturbed if he could have known
that Eva Morrison, growing uneasy, had finally telephoned the Hotel
Tivoli late the following afternoon. She was informed that Doctor Lang
had sent a messenger for his baggage, canceled his room, and had, they
thought, left for South America by a steamer very early that morning.

It struck her like a thunderbolt. Morrison, when she told him, swore a
single, tremendous oath.

“I did think that man was to be trusted,” he said. “Now, sick or well,
we take the Tuesday boat for Valparaiso.”

Arriving at last in longed-for Seattle, Lang had a telegram filed for
Panama within fifteen minutes of landing. Naturally, he received no
reply, but while waiting, he had Findlay introduce him at a bank which
arranged to transfer his Mobile account by wire.

When he had purchased some new clothes and paid the difference between
steerage and first-class fare on the _Lake Tahoe_ he had about
thirteen hundred dollars left. It was his whole earthly capital, and
he was risking it on a rather long shot.

Hope of a reply to his telegram faded with the hours. There was a
steamer leaving the next day but one from San Francisco for Panama,
and he booked his passage. This boat carried an efficient wireless,
and after a couple of days out he could not refrain from sending a
second message to Morrison, which remained unanswered like the first.
Days of tedious, feverish waiting followed. But it was a relief to be
going in the right direction at any rate, and at last he was landed
again at the Canal entrance.

From the wharf he telephoned at once to Mrs. Leeman’s house and that
lady herself answered him. Doctor Morrison and his daughter had gone.
They had sailed a week ago, or about that—somewhere to South America,
she thought. Valparaiso, perhaps, or Callao. Doctor Morrison was
better, but had been much upset about something.

Lang had no difficulty in guessing what had upset him. He walked back
to the landing stage, and gazed out across the sunny water, full of
indecision.

“Do you know when there will be a steamer for Valparaiso?” he asked a
khaki-clad Zone policeman.

“Well, there’s one right now,” returned the officer, in a strong Texas
accent. “She’s out yander. But you’ll have to look right smart to get
her, for she sails in about an hour.”

Lang owned no baggage but a single suit case, and he was aboard her
and interviewing the purser within twenty minutes. Fortunately there
were plenty of empty staterooms, and in less than two hours after
entering Panama he was sailing out of it again. He had spent crowded
moments there, but it seemed a place that he was destined to see
little of.

Then followed a repetition of the wearisome and suspense-laden delay
of the other two voyages. It was longer this time. The passengers grew
excited over crossing the equator, but Lang condemned this
geographical boundary. He did not care to go ashore at Callao or at
Iquique or anywhere else. He tried to give his mind to the acquisition
of Spanish, having borrowed a phrase book from the barber, but the
words would not stick in his mind, and he could not bring himself to
talk with the Spanish portion of the ship’s company.

From the equator the climate tapered off to cooler, to spring.
Sometimes, far away to the east, he caught a glimpse of a white, sharp
point in the sky—one of the snow peaks of the Andes piercing the
clouds. It tormented him with the vision of that Chilean ice barrier,
the glacier gate, which he might never see opened. Carroll would
surely be first at that icy bar, but Lang promised himself to be not
far behind, and at the thought of possible collision, of bloodshed,
even, he had nothing but a thrill of fierce expectation that was
almost pleasure. This time he would know how to defend himself, and
attack in his turn.

Mist and rain veiled the wide harbor of Valparaiso as the steamer
swung into it. Only by glimpses he saw the crescent of the lower town
along the shore, and the shelving terraces on which the city climbs to
the hills. Rain drove over the wet docks; tugs churned in the mist,
blowing acrid coal smoke over the dripping, misty hulls of the moored
ships.

The barelegged _roto_ stevedores swarmed along the wharves as he was
put ashore. There was a terrific uproar of wheels on the muddy
cobbles, and a tumult of harsh Chilean Spanish when he emerged from
the customs with his suit case, and fell among the cab drivers. He
could not understand a single word of their fierce ejaculations, but
he surrendered to what looked the best of them, and was driven away to
a hotel whose name he did not know.




                             CHAPTER XII

                            THE LONG SHOT


Lang had had an idea that his troubles would be mostly ended when he
reached Valparaiso. The first thing was to locate Morrison, who must
surely be there; he could take no steps before that. The explorer was
well known in the city, he knew, and between the hotels, the American
consulate and the Anglo-Saxon population it should be easy to get on
his traces.

It was still early in the day. He had drawn bad luck with his hotel,
which turned out to be an establishment likely to provide a minimum of
comfort at a maximum expense. However, it would do for a few days, and
he did not want to waste time in finding better quarters.

He had a list of the chief hotels, and he had thought of telephoning
to them all, but his first struggles with a Spanish central dissuaded
him from this plan. He went out and hired a horse-drawn cab by the
hour, and started through the rainy streets on his round of the
hotels.

He went first to the American houses, the Hotel New York and the Great
Western; then to the Prince of Wales and the Savoy, the English
hotels; and finally to the Berliner and the Santiago and the Imperiale
and the Kosmos. He drove from place to place as the day passed, and
his hopes darkened. Morrison was not known to be in the city. Several
of the hotel managers knew him, but did not remember having seen him
for at least six months.

He had great hopes of the American consulate, however. He found indeed
that the consul knew the explorer well, but had no idea that he might
be in Valparaiso. Sooner or later, however, Morrison would be sure to
call at the consulate, and the consul gave Lang a list of American
residents and foreign boarding houses where something might be
learned.

Lang spent the rest of that day in searching these out, and drew a
blank every time. He finished on the heights east of the city, where
he had ascended by one of the _escalidores_, having been forced to
abandon the cab. The sun had gone down; dusk was falling, and the wet
weather had cleared. Below him lay Valparaiso, a crescent of white
lights on the bay, with the red stars of riding ships farther out, and
beyond them again, vaguely perceived, the immensity of the Pacific.

He had come into temperate latitudes again, and a chill wind pierced
his thin tropical clothing. He had a sudden lonely sense of being
homeless and lost and in danger. He had broken into his last thousand
dollars. A little more and he would be “on the beach,” penniless in a
foreign land.

It was a sort of peril he had never had to face before, and the most
paralyzing to a man who has not been trained to meet the rough face of
the world. Lang felt his courage collapsing, and it was a medical
training that suggested the practical remedy of plenty of food and
drink. He returned to the lower town, located the best restaurant and
ate a good dinner, regardless of expense. Considerably cheered by
this, he went to bed early, with a pint of hot lemonade laced with rum
as a preventive of chill, and this treatment temporarily stunned his
discouragement and assured him a night of the sleep he needed.

Next morning he felt once more capable of grasping the situation by
its thorniest end. He called again at the consulate, and then circled
the business section by the water front, making inquiries at the
American warehouses and importing agencies, and passed the whole day
in these researches. He exhausted the field; he could think of nowhere
else to look. He began to doubt whether Morrison had ever come to
Valparaiso. And time was important.

He felt intensely worried, harassed, working in the dark. At a loss
what to do, he wandered the whole length of the long curving water
front. There were all sorts of vessels, and a tremendous rush and
noise. A big freighter from Australia was unloading; the squat, sullen
Indian roustabouts sweated and toiled. The mail boat he had come on
was still in the harbor, and he looked at her, wondering when he would
take that northward road again.

The end of the harbor shaded off into shacks, fishing boats, rotten
little wharves, and he turned back again. He was walking slowly when
his eye was caught by a gasoline cruiser moored beside a pier. He
thought he had seen it before, but it had been deserted then, and now
seemed to be making ready to go somewhere.

Lang knew a little of motor boats, and once had nearly bought one.
This craft must have been an elaborate and expensive cruiser at one
time, but was growing old and unkempt and paintless, as if she had
fallen on evil ways. She was named the _Chita_, must have been some
forty feet long, slim and shapely in lines, with a comfortable cabin
and a glassed pilot house, and it occurred to Lang that she would be a
most comfortable vessel for the expedition south, provided her engines
were in good order.

A man was working over them then, stooping over some adjustment. A
second man was stowing away boxes and small crates which a couple of
stevedores were unloading from a truck. He too was stooping, but he
straightened up and Lang met his eyes full.

It was rather intuition than recognition. The man had a full inch of
stubby black beard all over his chin and jaws; he wore a green jersey,
rough trousers and boots, and he looked every inch a Chilean sailor.
He met Lang’s eye stolidly; but some subconscious shock startled a cry
from Lang’s lips.

“What—Carroll?” he almost shouted.

The man at the engine looked up quickly—instantly bowed his head
again; but not before Lang had had a glimpse of a thin, sullen young
face that he knew for certain. Louie’s face was deeply browned and his
rather light hair dyed black, but he was a type hard to disguise. Lang
looked back at the deck hand, positive now.

“I’ve caught up with you, Carroll,” he said. “What are you doing here?
Where’s Morrison?”

He was astonished at his own coolness, for this was the crisis; the
collision that he had anticipated.

The man continued to stare unblinkingly.

“_No hablo ingles_,” he growled at last.

His assurance was so extreme that Lang would have doubted, but for
surely having recognized the young gunman.

“You can’t bluff it out, Carroll,” he insisted. “Louie the Lope, too.
I’ve got to have that money back now that you took off me in Panama.
What are you going to do about it? Are you ready to talk?”

The man spread out his hands with a furious, characteristic Chilean
gesture.

“_Malediction!_” he snarled, broke into a gust of unintelligible
Spanish, spat violently over the side, and turned again to the freight
he was handling.

Lang gazed, really almost staggered for a moment; then turned and
slowly walked away. He was no longer in the dark; he could see his way
now, and he wanted to think. He heard a step behind him, and a
triumphant voice spoke quickly in his ear.

“I’ve got ’em right with me. The old professor’s eating out of my
hand. Nothing doing, so far’s you are concerned, doc. They’ve got your
number. They know how you tried to double cross ’em, and they’ve got
no further use for you. You can go back to the States.”

It was all shot out almost before Lang could turn. Carroll turned back
to the cruiser with a malicious grin under his black beard, and in
that instant Lang believed his words implicitly.

They had the sound of truth; it was a revelation. For the first time
he grasped that the Morrisons must really think that he had tried to
forestall them, to beat them to the south. What else could they think?

His excited mind instantly reconstructed what must have happened.
Morrison and Eva had hurried to Valparaiso. Carroll, already on the
spot, had met them, induced them to hire this power boat, was
preparing, along with Louie, to go south with them. Their disguise was
reliable. Lang, knowing them well, had barely penetrated it.

The emeralds would be mined out of the ice. And then—— What he knew
for certain was that neither Morrison nor Eva would ever see
Valparaiso again.

That was if the ingenious plan worked. But Lang felt that he had the
checkmate now in his power. He vowed never to lose sight of that boat.
Sooner or later, before sailing, Morrison must come down to inspect
its readiness. A chance to speak to the explorer was all he wanted.

He walked away without glancing back, circled a block, came back and
established himself at a sidewalk café where he had a fair view of the
_Chita_, distant a hundred yards. Here he sat, sipping inferior
Chilean beer, intently spying.

A continual stream of boxes and crates and gasoline tins came down to
the boat. Carroll and his confederate were working hard; they appeared
and disappeared in and out the cabins, but no other visitor came near
the cruiser. Comparative quiet settled on the water front at
nightfall, and in the dusk Carroll and Louie departed, heading through
the business district.

Lang kept to his post, however, till nearly ten o’clock. He was very
hungry by this time and nauseated with beer, and he went back to his
hotel, pondering whether he could not lay a charge of assault and
robbery against his pair of enemies and have them extradited back to
Panama. He was afraid of taking any steps less he frighten them off,
for the important matter now was to keep them where he could see them.

He was back at his post of observation at eight the next morning, and
it was not until an hour later that Louie appeared, slouching lazily
down the quay, smoking the invariable cigarette. Carroll arrived a
little later; they took in no more cargo, but were busy about the
craft till noon, when they once more disappeared.

It was late in the afternoon before they returned, and they did not
stay long. They were gone again before six, but Lang perseveringly
remained at his café seat till late in the evening. Morrison had not
appeared. It might be that the boat would not sail for days. Indeed,
it seemed likely that the explorer would take as long a time for rest
and recovery as possible.

But, resolved to take no chances, Lang was at the wharf at eight the
next morning. Even as he approached afar off there seemed something
empty about the wharf. Startled, he quickened his pace, almost
breaking into a run. The slip was empty indeed. The cruiser was gone.

She might have been moved to another berth. He looked wildly up and
down. Desperately he snatched at an Indian dockman, pointing to the
empty place and struggling for Spanish.

“_Donde esta la—la gasolena-bota?_”

The _roto_ stared blankly, then waved an arm wide, and rasped out
something about “_el mar_.”

Providentially just then a young fellow passed whom Lang knew, one of
the clerks from an American agency on the water front, where he had
already inquired concerning Morrison.

“The boat’s sailed,” he interpreted, after a few words with the
stevedore. “Went out just about daylight, the fellow says. Oh, yes, I
know the _Chita_ well. She used to be a yacht, but was sold; she’s
been hired lately, and I heard that some American had her. Were you
trying to catch her?” he asked, looking curiously at Lang’s perturbed
face. “Not likely she’ll be gone far. I don’t know, though,” he added,
after another exchange with the dockman. “He says she took aboard a
hundred tins of petrol. Maybe the port officers will know where she
sailed for.”

“Ask him if he knows who were in her—how many people?” said Lang.

The stevedore did not know. He had not seen her sailing. Lang turned
away blindly, forgetting to tip the man or to thank the interpreter,
his mind a boiling blackness of rage and disappointment.

Carroll had tricked him again. It was his own fault. He should have
enlisted the police, the consul, some authority; or he should have had
a watch kept on the boat day and night. Once more his own insane
carelessness had ruined all.

There was only one chance now, and one fact stood out strongly from
his defeat. He would have to throw his last stakes on the board where
already the dearest lives to him on earth were risked. Far more than
treasure was at stake now, and to win he would have to reach the
glacier gate before the _Chita_.




                             CHAPTER XIII

                           SOUTHWARD BOUND


At half past eleven that morning Lang was aboard a train for
Concepcion.

He had made a hurried study of maps and timetables, visited the
consulate and induced the consular secretary to telephone to the
railway offices for him. His only chance lay in railway speed. The
line followed the coast southward to Puerto Montt, nearly eight
hundred miles, which he hoped to reach in a couple of days, allowing
for South American railway methods. From Puerto Montt he could surely
hire some sort of sailing craft for the indefinite remainder of the
distance.

Vainly he wished now that he had had another day with Morrison at
Panama. The valley of the glacier was between Punta Reale, which he
located on the map, and the tiny settlement of La Carolina, over a
hundred miles farther south. This was all the sailing guide he had;
but from Morrison’s account, and Carroll’s, the valley of the glacier
gate was sufficiently conspicuous so that no one skirting the coast
could pass it by.

Now that he was moving again, depending solely on himself, no longer
groping in the dark, courage and energy came back. He was gambling his
bottom dollar now. This expedition would take all the money he had
left; but he was ready to risk it all, and his life as well, rather
than be beaten. Speed was all he longed for now.

The speed was fairly satisfactory to Concepcion, where he had to
change trains, and wait half the night. Moving out through the gray
dawn, he saw that he was in a new sort of country. Away to the left
rose the mountains, steep, heavily timbered slopes, with now and
again, far away, a glimpse of an ice peak.

There were strips of stumpy clearings along the track, burned slashes,
backwoods farms, log cabins, berry bushes and rail fences, so that he
might have fancied himself in Vermont, but for the squat Chilenos and
brown Indians in ponchos that crowded the car, and the chatter of
Spanish and Araucanian mixing with the rattle of the slow-moving
train.

For there was not much speed now. They stopped interminably at
primitive stations, where there seemed no reason to stop at all. He
snatched a vile snack at a wayside eating house at noon; another at
dark, and night found them still jolting and clattering feebly down
the line to Valdivia.

It was cold in Valdivia, where again he had to wait for hours. He had
time to buy a heavy suit, boots, a woollen poncho, and, by an
afterthought, a small automatic pistol and a box of cartridges. It was
the first time Lang had ever carried weapons, and the hard lump at his
hip gave him an odd feeling of uneasiness and of adventure.

After Valdivia the railway frankly became a one-track frontier line,
the train a mixed one of freight and passenger coaches, slower than
ever. The mountains had come up closer and higher, veiled generally by
drifting mist, and it rained in torrents all one afternoon while they
trailed along the rusty pair of rails at a speed that seemed slow for
an omnibus.

Lang, fuming with impatience, could not talk with his fellow
passengers, who glanced at him with suspicion. He was already far
behind his planned schedule; he was hungry, thirsty, tired, nervous
and irritable. He tried to snatch a doze on the cane seats; he got out
and walked about at the endless stops to load lumber or cattle; and it
was almost with astonishment that he found himself actually and
finally deposited at Puerto Montt, the end of the railway, more than
three days after he had left Valparaiso.

It was evening and raining. He made his way over plank sidewalks into
the grubby little town, where he was surprised and relieved to find
German spoken as currently as Spanish. He could make more headway in
that language, and he established himself at one of the two hotels
which had a German manager, though he had unfortunately lapsed into
Chilean methods of hotel keeping.

It was too late for any researches that night, but his host reassured
him. At Valparaiso no one had ever heard of Punta Reale or La
Carolina, but here they knew all about it. The fishing fleet went to
La Carolina, and the German landlord was sure he would find plenty of
boats, plenty of men to take him.

Lang was haunted that night by visions of the _Chita_ tearing
southward under full power of gasoline; but cold calculation assured
him that he had a good start. It would take the power boat nearly a
week to get as far as this. A fast schooner with favoring winds ought
to land him at the glacier valley within three days, perhaps less.
Barring accidents, he had better than an even chance.

He was early at the straggling water front next morning, where he
found indeed plenty of small craft of various rig tied up at the
wooden wharf, while their owners lounged and smoked with carefree
indifference. Most of them spoke more or less German. In fact, Lang
learned that Puerto Montt was originally a settlement of German
immigrants, but these fishermen of the second generation had grown
South Americanized. A shake of the head, a “_No pues, señor_,” was
what he got in most cases. Some demanded an exorbitant hire for their
boats; others required a week to prepare for the voyage. Lang,
irritable with impatience, was growing discouraged, when he came upon
a young fisherman who, by his round fair face and blond hair, might
have been known to the experienced eye as a north European at a
hundred yards.

Lang came to terms with him almost immediately. Gustav Dorner had been
born at Puerto Montt, but he spoke German well, and owned a schooner
in partnership with his brother Henry. He would go to La Carolina, or
anywhere, for two hundred and fifty dollars in gold, Lang to provide
all supplies for the voyage, and could start the next morning. His
schooner, the _Condor_, might not be a flyer, but she looked seaworthy
and well kept, and, moreover, was not foul with fish like most of the
others, having been lately used for freighting Chiloe Island potatoes
up to Talhuna.

La Carolina was the reputed destination. The real objective Lang kept
to himself. When he sighted the glacier valley he could cut the voyage
short, and he surprised his crew by ordering them to lay in supplies
for three men for three weeks.

He allowed them to do the bargaining at the local stores for dried
meats, meal, flour, potatoes, all the American canned goods to be had.
He picked out himself a couple of spades and picks, an ax and hatchet,
a packet of blasting cartridges and fuse, a crowbar and drill, and
also a .44 caliber Winchester with two hundred cartridges. There was a
flurry of shopping, transporting goods, stowing them away, adjusting
the schooner’s gear, that lasted all that afternoon. Lang had been
mortally afraid that _mañana_ would prevail at the last; but he had
revived the latent Northern energy in his Chilean Germans, and at four
o’clock the next morning Gustav called at the hotel for him, according
to agreement.

The disk of the sun was not yet over the reddened Cordillera when they
were off, slipping down the channel behind Chiloe Island, with a
light, fair breeze—the last lap of the race, which Lang began to feel
confident now of winning.

All went smoothly and that first day was a delight. The sun shone with
springlike warmth; the breeze freshened, fair on the quarter, and the
_Condor_ made great speed, keeping down the inside channel, past one
huge, rocky, wooded island after another.

Lang got out his repeater and practiced with that unfamiliar weapon at
floating sticks and shore targets. Gustav, at the tiller beside him,
entertained him with stories of the Chilean frontier, and of how his
father had come to America to avoid conscription. They ate a cold
lunch on board and kept on till the light failed, and when they landed
for a night camp Gustav estimated that they had covered one hundred
and fifty kilometers.

Lang was jubilant. Another such day might almost end it. But the next
morning came up darkly over tossing, slate-colored water, with a
thrashing rain. It was what Lang came to know later as typical south
Chilean weather.

All that day he sat stiffened and drenched in his heavy poncho,
feeling the water drip down his neck from his hat, and wondering if he
would get pneumonia or rheumatism from this. But, to his surprise, he
felt strong with health and vitality, and even in high spirits, for
they were still making speed. The wind was from the west now, and
stronger. The boat plunged and heeled, flinging spray far over her
streaming decks. Gustav and Henry, at tiller and sheet, handled her
with the skill of jockeys, apparently unconscious of the weather, and
Lang’s heart warmed toward these patient, skillful, simple sailors.
The rain slackened in the afternoon, but it did not clear all day, and
that night they slept all together, huddled under the schooner’s deck,
with a tarpaulin over them.

Lang slept better than on shore, however, and was surprised to find
himself neither ill nor rheumatic the next morning. It was not
raining, but gray clouds drove low and heavy over the sky, gusts of
mist swept the sea, and a smart west wind blew, promising to
strengthen. Coming gustily through the gaps between the tangles of
outer islands, it drove the _Condor_ along at a great rate, an
increasing rate, and toward noon the two Germans took a reef in the
mainsail, with some blind assistance from the passenger.

The mountains rose very high here, white-tipped, most of them, and
that afternoon Lang espied a great white streak, dim through mist,
extending down the slope and splitting the dark cedar forests almost
to the coast line. It was a glacier—not the glacier he was seeking,
but the sight gave him a prospective thrill, and a couple of hours
later they sighted Punta Reale.

At the view of that huge, rocky headland reaching far out like a
barrier Lang felt that he was almost at the goal. It was a hard
obstacle to pass with that wind. The Germans, after some consultation,
wanted to land on one of the islands and wait for a shifting or a
slackening of the breeze. There was not sea room to beat far enough to
windward to clear the promontory.

Lang’s impatience rebelled. It might mean spending twelve hours
immobile. He spoke vehemently; he had his hand on the pistol, prepared
to use force, and the men obeyed the voice of authority. But within
the next hour Lang repented of his insistence.

They hauled as far into the wind as possible, making heavy weather of
it as they beat westward and ever so little ahead. Just off the
headland the breeze seemed to stiffen, coming in violent gusts. The
schooner made a great deal of leeway. She seemed certainly going
ashore. They were so close that Lang heard the crash and suck back of
the seas on that wall of black rock; he could see the crannies
spouting water as the waves retreated, and the frothing uprush again.
They were approaching it; then for minutes they seemed barely to hold
their own; then they were creeping away, thrashing and plunging, a
hundred yards farther, and then with a free sweep they began to run
down the other side of the headland with the wind once more
quartering.

Lang’s breath came freely again. His crew were smiling all over their
streaming faces. There was a long island to seaward now, giving much
shelter, and for a mile or two they ran in smooth water and with a
broken breeze.

A gap in the archipelago brought a gusty sweep, then there was shelter
again, and then another blast from the open sea. A long and lofty
island followed for more than a mile, and then a great opening.

The schooner rushed out of the shelter into the gap, and Lang never
knew how disaster came, so quick it was. Perhaps the steersman had a
moment of carelessness, after the sheltered run, and was not quick
enough to meet the great gust that whooped down from the open Pacific.

The boat heeled, went almost over. Henry sprang forward, and the next
moment the mast snapped close to the deck, and sail and rigging went
forward and overboard in a wild, flapping tangle.

It carried the young German with it. Lang caught a single glimpse of
him as he went under. Like lightning Gustav flung a line that fell
short, and they saw no more of him.

Gustav was thrusting a great knife into his hand, screaming to him to
cut. The schooner was drifting fast toward the shore, a short quarter
of a mile away. Together they slashed at the tackle that was dragging
the _Condor’s_ bows half under water, and the craft righted as the
sail tore loose and surged sinking alongside.

“This is the end!” Lang thought, following Gustav’s gaze toward the
shore. It was a long, sloping, gravelly beach, where the surf rushed
up and ran back, two hundred yards away now, so fast the wind was
driving them in.

But the shore was not the danger. It was a broken line of black
points, spouting white froth, that was hardly a hundred yards ahead—an
almost submerged sprinkle of barrier rocks that they could avoid only
by luck.

Long moments passed as the men clung to the uncontrollable hull,
before it became evident that she was going to strike fairly on the
reef. Lang threw off his heavy poncho, preparing to swim for it.
Gustav crept forward to the prow with a long, stout pole, evidently
with the insane idea of fending off.

The last moments of the approach seemed endlessly slow. Fascinated,
Lang watched that jagged black crag, almost within arm’s length. He
saw the water draw back, showing its wet, weed-grown sides, surge up
foaming to the top and again suck back, and then the _Condor_ smashed
with a terrific surge and shock.

Gustav was dashed helplessly forward, clean over and upon the crag,
and Lang saw a sudden flicker of crimson through the foam. The
schooner half recoiled, sticking on the rock, lifted to another wave
and smashed down again.

Lang hardly knew whether he jumped or was pitched overboard. He went
clear of the rock, battered by the waves, swimming with all his
strength, drawn back, floating, fighting, growing almost automatic,
till at last he felt solidity under his feet and rose gasping and
choking.




                             CHAPTER XIV

                             THE CASTAWAY


Knocked down, recovering himself, scrambling and stumbling, Lang made
footing, got into waist-deep water, and finally struggled out and
beyond reach of the surf that seemed rushing in pursuit. The breath
was battered out of him, he felt limp and weak and as if bruised all
over.

Wiping his eyes, he looked up and down for another survivor. Nothing
but the foamy water moved along that shingly shore. He had scarcely
any hope. Gustav’s brains must have been knocked out instantly on the
reef, and Henry was long since drowned. Out on the rock the _Condor_
still hung spiked. She heaved up and down, and spray flew clean over
her from the striking seas.

At that moment Lang hardly regretted his companions, hardly was
thankful of his escape, hardly thought of anything except to be glad
to be out of that tearing surf. Brain and wits were numbed. He was
cold, wet and intensely uncomfortable. The enormity of the disaster
did not impress him at all, but he realized that he was going to
perish of exposure unless he could be warmed and dried.

He had thrown himself down, and he lay for some time still before he
developed force enough to get on his feet. He had no bones broken, no
severe bruises, even, but the strain and shock had left him in a sort
of numb collapse.

It was with difficulty that he fumbled for his match box. It was by
luck still in his pocket, and was of aluminum, supposed to be water
tight. The dozen or so matches did not appear damp, and he looked
vaguely about for materials for a fire.

There was plenty of driftwood all along the beach, but it was soaked
with rain and sea water. Dense forest covered the slopes rising back
from the shore. There must be firewood there, and he made his way
across sand and shingle, over a belt of straggling grass, sprinkled
with evergreen shrubs, and came to the edge of the woodland.

He expected to find dry branches, twigs, fallen trunks, but everything
was wetness. Rain and mist had made a sponge of the forest. He forced
his way through the tangle of stunted, bushy conifers that dripped
water from their boughs; the ground was spongy underfoot, thick with
moss and overgrown with ferns. The fallen trees seemed all mossy,
rotten, yielding, and what dead twigs he could find were too damp to
be brittle.

As he forced his way farther in, the trees were somewhat larger, but
there was the same thick carpeting of luxuriant moss and ferns, the
same sodden dankness. White and yellow and red fungi grew on the
rotting wood. There were no birds, no sign of animal life, and that
whole abominable swamp seemed like a forest in some sunless cavern.

But it was warm here, for the dense jungle shut out all the wind.
Shouldering his way about, he came at last upon a tree freshly broken
off four feet aboveground, leaving a splintery stump, which oozed with
bluish, gummy drops. It was “fat wood,” in fact, and as he realized
this he tore off splinters with his fingers and the blade of his
pocket knife, heaped them around the fractured end of the trunk, and
struck a match.

The resinous stuff flared up furiously. The flames ran over the gummy
surface of the damp trunk, and within two minutes he had a roaring and
intensely hot fire, such as he would never have thought this saturated
forest could produce. He stripped off his outer garments to dry them,
and stood in his underclothing, revolving slowly before the blaze, and
steaming in its heat.

Vitality flowed back into him with the warmth. His aching limbs were
soothed. He tore off armfuls of evergreen branches, shook the damp
from them, and tossed them on the fire. When his clothes were nearly
dry he put them on again, and sat down, stupid and drowsy. He noticed
that the daylight was waning, the fire redder and brighter. The crash
and wash of the sea mingled with the sound of the wind in the
treetops, and he dozed again and again, finally sinking into a heavy
sleep with his back against a tree.

He started up suddenly in a sort of horror, broad awake, feeling as if
he had not slept at all. Darkness was all around him, except in the
circle of red glow from the low fire, and all the terror of his
predicament came down upon him, as if it had been gathering force
while he slept.

He had come to the end of everything. He was cast away on what he knew
to be a desolate and uninhabited coast, a hundred miles perhaps from
any settlement, without food or any means of obtaining any, except the
little automatic pistol in his pocket, which he hardly knew how to
use. He had lost the great race, lost the emeralds, lost his life, and
lost Morrison’s life, and Eva’s, too, if it happened that she had
really gone on the expedition with her father.

He dragged the fire together and made it burn up. But he was too
anguished now to sit still. There was a soaking fog in the air. The
forest smelled of mold and death. He pushed out, blindly restless,
toward the open shore again.

Out in the open he found the world full of a pale glow. The air was
cloudy with fog, and a strong moon was shining through it. The crash
of the surf was fainter. The wind had fallen.

Going down to the water’s edge, it seemed a long way. Out through the
fog he could see the wreck of the schooner, and he wondered what
optical effect of haze made it seem only a stone’s throw away. It was
still spiked on its rock, but now seemed to stand in an almost
vertical position, with the stern in the water. Then he grasped the
fact that the tide was out.

The receding waters had left her scarcely fifty yards from shore. The
waves ran with less violence now, for the barrier rocks, standing in a
tall file above the surface, broke their force. And immediately Lang
remembered that there was food in that schooner.

He was empty, starving. Instantly he started to wade out, bracing
himself against the rollers. The shore sloped so gradually that he
actually made most of the distance without going much over the waist;
then it shelved suddenly, and he stumbled to his shoulders.

Treading warily for fear of a sudden plunge, he came within a fathom
of the rock where the boat hung, and then the bottom went out of
touch. He dipped under, but with a wallow and a few strokes he
clutched the slippery edge of the crag, and got his hands on the
schooner’s rail.

Easily now he pulled himself up. The schooner’s whole bottom seemed
smashed out back of the bows, and a great spike of rock protruded
through the hole. Everything movable in her must have tumbled down
into the stern, and much of it, he was afraid, must have been washed
out.

He slid down into the stern himself. Three feet of it was under water,
but, as he groped down with his hands, he could feel a miscellaneous
collection of loose objects—the handle of an ax, the head of a spade,
and a rolling collection of tins, all mixed and tangled up with
blankets, tarpaulin, his own poncho, pieces of canvas and bits of
cordage. He felt several loose potatoes which he fished out and put
carefully in his pockets, and then extracted other objects one by one,
dripping in the pallid light

As he retrieved them he laid them in a wet blanket He secured a lump
of corn bread, water soaked and uneatable, a piece of dried beef, and
one by one, most precious of all, tin after tin of American canned
provisions. And among these he struck upon the priceless salvage of
the emergency box of matches, its top still fast waxed.

How to get all these things ashore was a problem. Finally he tied them
up sacklike in the blanket, with six feet of loose cord, and, holding
the end of this, he ventured to jump.

It came near drowning him, but he held fast to the rope and came
through, dragging the freight after him. Well above high-water mark on
the shore he poured out the cargo and immediately went back for more.

This time he secured the rifle, but could find no cartridges. Its
magazine was full, however, and he took it, with a hatchet, a spade,
more loose potatoes, and several more food tins. He could find no
cooking utensils of any sort, except the coffeepot, which seemed
useless, as he had no coffee.

This load was cumbersome and hard to get ashore. He almost had to drop
it, and when he landed he felt that his strength would permit no more
of these excursions. He was wolfishly hungry, and with an armful of
tins, whose labels he could not see, he plunged into the woods again
toward his camp fire, which glowed redly through the misty jungle.

With the hatchet he was able to split fragments from the fallen tree,
and he made a roaring blaze again. By its light he discovered that he
had brought two tins of tomatoes, one of corn and two of vegetable
soup—no very filling articles, any of them. He had no better can
opener than the hatchet, but he hacked open the tomatoes and gulped
down the contents, meanwhile setting the soup tins to heat, and laying
several potatoes to roast at the edge of the fire.

While they cooked, he dried his clothes once more. The potatoes proved
hard, tasteless, saltless, but they filled his inside, and, with the
hot soup, a marvelous change was wrought in him. Courage came back
surprisingly. He had supplies now, enough for days, perhaps for weeks.
Enough to carry him to La Carolina—enough to take him to the emerald
glacier. It was possible that he might be in time, after all.

Hope and impatience came back to him as he huddled in the comforting
warmth. The valley of the glacier might be a day’s tramp away, or it
might be three or four—hardly more than that. He could scarcely miss
it if he followed down the coast. He would have to pack a heavy load
of supplies, but he felt hardened to anything now. Meanwhile, rest was
the first need. He forced himself to lie down, to close his eyes. He
did not think he could sleep, but while plans still revolved through
his mind he fell asleep.

When he awoke he was wet again. It was gray morning, and raining. The
branches dripped dismally. Only a thread of smoke rose from the almost
extinct fire. He split chips with the hatchet, got it blazing again,
and went back to the beach for more food, much less buoyant than a few
hours ago.

His little pile of salvage lay in a driving rain, and now he was able
to see surely what he had. It was certainly more than he could ever
carry on his back, and, worse yet, the tinned stuff seemed mostly
vegetables. He picked out a tin of soup, however, and one of dried
beef, and, returning to his fire, he opened them and ate.

Returning to the beach, he looked carefully over his stores again. It
was useless, he thought, to carry the spade. The rifle and hatchet
would be cumbersome enough. He sorted out such of the tinned goods as
would give most nutriment for least weight, and found a good deal of
soup, sardines, beef and salmon after all. One tin box that he had
supposed to contain meat was full of candles, which he had brought
with some vague idea of underground work. It occurred to him that they
might be invaluable for lighting fires.

There was also a lump of salt beef weighing some four pounds, more
than a dozen potatoes, the tin of matches, and he piled out twenty
cans of food, which should be enough for ten days, or more at short
rations. At any rate it was all he dared try to carry, and he tied all
these articles together in the blanket much as he had dragged them
from the schooner, and made a loop to go over his shoulder.

There was not the slightest use in delaying his start. He packed tins
of corn and beans in all his pockets, put the hatchet in his belt,
took the rifle in his hand, and started to tramp southward along the
beach in the rain.




                              CHAPTER XV

                         AN UNEXPECTED VISION


By degrees the rain slackened down to a fine Scotch mist. Heavy fog
veiled the mountains, and the sea was a vast void at his right hand.
There was hard sand underfoot, making good walking; then it coarsened
to loose gravel, and then alternated from one to the other. He groped
inland through the fog in search of a better roadway, blundered into a
bog of innumerable little rivulets, and got back to the beach again.

Every few minutes, it seemed, he had to wade or jump a creek that
rushed down from the hills. The sky was invisible; he could see
nothing beyond the hazy circle of a few yards. It was a gruesome and
ghostly sort of pilgrimage, over an invisible landscape, which would
have been wildly terrifying if he could have seen it, amid the
shifting mist clouds, where the only life seemed to be the rushing,
crashing surf beside him.

The weight at his back grew painful; the cord was cutting a groove in
his shoulder. He readjusted it repeatedly, sat down to rest, grew
chilled, started again, and plodded on till it seemed to him that it
must surely be midday.

He opened one of the tins of baked beans in his pocket and consumed
them cold, without wasting time on the probably impossible job of fire
making. Again he tramped ahead, wet through, sweating with exertion,
conscious at times of a queer elation and optimism. Considering all
things carefully, it did not seem likely to him that Eva Morrison
would have gone in the _Chita_ with her father—a girl alone with three
men. She must have remained in Valparaiso, and this growing conviction
cheered him wonderfully. However the adventure should turn out, he
felt sure that he would get back to Valparaiso somehow. He still had
over five hundred dollars on him. It seemed a great resource, and he
felt that luck had done its worst possible and that nothing ever could
daunt him again.

All day he kept up that persevering trudge. Now and again the mist
cleared a little, and he caught glimpses of the forested mountain
slopes and the desolate islands out across the channel. He crossed a
great headland like Punta Reale, and rounded what seemed an immense
bay. The going was nearly always hard and sometimes terrible, with mud
or fog or tumbled rocks, and he had no idea of where the sun stood, or
how the day was passing. His watch had been drowned and refused to go.

It was still daylight when he caught sight of the white gleam of a
clump of birch trees on the slope above him, and he snatched at this
piece of luck. He split and peeled off great rolls of bark, cut chips,
and broke open a dead trunk to get at dry wood inside. With these
aids, he was able to get a good fire under way, in spite of a heavy
drizzle that started just then as if it meant to last.

But he was now growing used to being wet, and all he wanted was warmth
and food. He broiled slices of the salt beef along with the roasting
potatoes, and made a tin of vegetable soup hot. It was bad, but it was
delicious. Lang swallowed it all greedily, and, to add to his comfort,
the rain almost stopped when he dropped, hungering for sleep, on the
piled heap of wet spruce branches.

He slept like a log, careless of wet clothing, but was awakened before
daybreak by heavy rain. The fire was drowned out. There was no use
trying to relight it. He huddled wretchedly under his blanket for some
time, while a wet, gray light came slowly up. He finally ate a cold
roasted potato and cold corned beef from a tin, gathered up his
stores, and set out doggedly.

That day was very like the preceding. The ground was bad, the shore
line growing rougher. It rained for three hours, and then settled into
a woolly, clinging fog. About the middle of the day he contrived to
build a fire, made hot soup, and slept an hour, and made the better
speed for it afterward.

His strength was holding out better than he ever would have expected.
He felt capable of going on and on, fallen into a sort of mechanical
movement. His mind grew lethargic; he almost forgot at times where he
was, what he was heading for. The memory of the emeralds, of Morrison,
of Eva was dull in his brain. Hour after hour he plodded on in his
numb stupidity, indifferent as any animal to the wind and wet, when he
suddenly trod upon something that startled him like a blow.

It was the black, scattered cinders of a fire.

In the sudden shock he thought first of Carroll. But the second glance
told him that the fire was old. The ashes were scattered, wet, beaten
into the earth. They did not look quite like wood ashes, either; they
were full of black charred pieces of stone. It looked like coal. It
_was_ coal, and Lang remembered now that Morrison and Floyd had found
an outcrop of coal on the coast and had used it for their camp fires.

He had hit the spot; it could not be otherwise. He stared about
through the blanketing fog. He made a wide circuit, found nothing
more, hurried forward, and came to the edge of a deep and steep
ravine. As he stood there he became aware of a strange, cold smell in
the air, not like the odor of the mountains or the sea.

He could not see what was at the bottom of the ravine, and he walked
up and down the bank a little way, then turned back. Returning to the
fire spot, he looked about for the coal outcrop that had fed it. He
wanted it for his own fire, for he was not going to leave that spot
till he had found out what lay around him.

He looked for a long time before he found it, a hundred yards up the
hillside, amid scattered growths of stunted cedars. There were
shallow, shelving veins of the black, slaty-looking stuff, and clear
marks where fragments had been broken away with a tool.

It would take a hot fire to start that inferior coal, and he had
infinite trouble in finding kindling—birch bark and dry wood. What he
could find he piled right against the coal seam, for he could see no
object in making his fireplace elsewhere.

He sacrificed one of his candles to light the damp wood, spilling the
flaming wax on the kindling, and eventually the coal began to snap and
flare gassily. It was evidently bituminous, and of the lowest possible
quality, but it burned at last with a strong heat that was greatly
superior to that of the wet wood.

Lang prepared his usual supper, longing for the fog to clear. There
was an orange glow through the smother as the sun went down, promising
clearing weather; but as it grew dark and the moon shone the air was
like cotton wool. The fire burned red, eating into the coal seam,
exploding startlingly as lumps of stone burst, and Lang wondered in
vain if this coal meant proximity to the glacier gate. Morrison had,
he thought, made many camps all along the shore, and this might be
miles from the final one.

He lay awake for a long time, but finally slept lightly and uneasily.
He dreamed of the _Chita_, which might be lying offshore within a mile
of him even now.

He awoke suddenly with light shining in his face. It was brilliant
moonlight. He sat up. The sky was all clear, but for a faint film of
fairy haze.

He was on a long rocky hillside, sprinkled with dumps of small
evergreens, sloping to the sea, and rising the other way to the black
density of forests. All that held his eye was a river of white, a
vast, dear sheet of radiance that split the forested mountainside.

He jumped up, dazzled, and ran toward its nearest point. He came to
the edge of the ravine. There was a valley below him, a gravelly
beach, the wash of the sea, a sound of running streams. A few hundred
yards shoreward the valley was cut sharp across by what seemed a snowy
wall. It was a glittering gate, going back and rising—rising
perpetually toward the sky, luminous and white against the low moon,
as if a flood of light itself had been poured out from the heavens and
frozen into solidity.




                             CHAPTER XVI

                          IMPRISONED IN SNOW


It was the place—he could not possibly doubt it. Was he the first to
reach it? Struck with anxiety, he hurried down to the sea, where the
land fell off sharply in a steep bluff. No craft lay in the great bay
that was the extension of the valley. Out in the wide channel he could
see nothing on the water, neither boat nor light, nor camp fire on the
shore.

He had won the race, after all; and now he could hardly be taken
unawares, for he could surely hear the _Chita’s_ engines for a long
way. He returned to his camp, however, and cleaned and dried his
firearms, taking out and wiping the cartridges, trying the action,
finally putting the pistol in his pocket and laying the rifle away
under sheets of dry bark.

To save time he ate his breakfast, knowing that it must be near dawn
by the moon. While he ate he gazed at the magnificent spectacle of the
glacier, which, as he finished began to grow dim at its upper edge,
and presently to redden faintly.

Too impatient to wait for full daylight, he hastened to the edge of
the valley, and scrambled down the twenty-foot precipitous sides. The
ravine was nearly half a mile wide, a dismal gulch of wet gravel, all
of it probably drift from the glacier, and it was several hundred
yards farther up to where the ice wall blocked the valley from side to
side, and even slightly bulged over the edges.

He walked up to the barrier. The ice wall towered above him, perhaps
forty or fifty feet high in some places, indescribably ancient
looking, greenish, full of streaks and beds of frozen gravel. It was
melting fast. Streams of water ran out everywhere, and down the center
splashed a good-sized cascade springing from a sort of cavern that the
stream had hollowed from the ice, and tumbling over rocks that might
be either drift or the underlying earth itself.

Here it must be that Morrison had found the stones, and here he must
have climbed and fallen and broken his ribs. Lang searched through the
wet gravel, poking it with a stick, but found nothing that looked even
remotely like any sort of crystal. The rocks were wet and icy and
slippery, but he was considerably younger and more active than the
explorer, and he scrambled up to the source of the stream without
great difficulty.

According to Morrison’s theory, the rock or gravel containing the
emerald pocket lay somewhere back in the ice, whence a few odd stones
had been washed out, probably by this very streamlet. Lang had
imagined himself chopping away the ice, following the stream back,
till it led him infallibly to the jewels; but he had by no means
realized the immense magnitude of the undertaking. It might not be
this stream at all; it might be any other of the scores of them; he
might have to tunnel back for yards, hundreds of yards. He need hardly
have feared being forestalled by any one; for there might be a whole
summer’s work in the digging out of the treasure.

Considerably dashed, and scarcely knowing how to begin, he climbed out
of the valley, and once more reconnoitered the sea. He returned to
camp and got the hatchet. He wished in vain for the lost ax and pick,
and made his way back to the little ice cave of the cascade, and began
to hew into the glacier.

The ice was rotten and soft. It was not frozen water, of course, but
compressed, frozen snow, fallen on the upper heights, and slowly,
slowly sliding down toward the sea, a mile, perhaps, in a century.
There was plenty of frozen gravel embedded in it, and Lang scrutinized
it all closely, but without discovering any green stones. Spattered
with water, covered with ice chips, he worked a narrow tunnel back a
long way, perhaps for ten feet, breaking through beds of sand and
stones of all sizes, several fairly large rocks, some piece of ancient
wood; and then the stream he was tracking broke into four or five
rivulets, each coming from a different direction.

He had never thought of such a thing. He had no idea from which of
these streamlets Morrison’s emeralds might have come. He hewed a
little farther mechanically, and then gave up, at a loss.

He crept back to the outer air, much discouraged. The enormity of the
task loomed larger than ever. The problem of that half mile of ice
staggered him.

He walked along the valley, scrutinizing the glacier end. Twice he
hewed tentatively into fissures whence strong, muddy streams were
gushing. The sun had clouded over; the clear morning was growing
misty, threatening the inevitable rain. It was getting toward noon, he
thought and he returned to his camp for refreshment and to think the
problem over.

His coal fire was still burning, and after he had eaten he busied
himself at making a shelter, a sort of low shed of poles and bark and
cedar branches, which would shoot off the worst of the rains. Complete
dryness was not to be hoped for, in this climate.

He was suddenly amazed at his own health and hardiness. He had been
shipwrecked, had tramped with a heavy load for Heaven knew how many
miles, had been wet day and night, had lived on the most undesirable
diet, and in spite of it all he felt rough, tough and full of energy,
without so much as a cold. His nervous breakdown had vanished; so had
all his mental torture at what Boston thought of his collapse; and all
his terror of the future. He did not care a continental for Boston,
nor for the whole medical profession. He remembered that the Northern
physicians had prescribed for him sea air and a moist and depressing
climate. They must have been right, and he had assuredly come to the
right place for moisture.

That afternoon he made an exhaustive search of all the expanse of
gravel under the glacier, on the chance that the rest of the emeralds
might have been already washed out. It took him nearly all the
afternoon, and he found a small scrap of rock full of greenish,
glasslike veins, which might have been emerald matrix, or might not.

That was the sole fruit of his prospecting. He ended at the other side
of the valley, and climbed to the top and came back across the surface
of the glacier. It was crumbly and softening. Little streams ran
everywhere, some falling down the glacier’s front, others dribbling
into cracks and fissures. There were a great many of these crevices of
all sizes, some of them a yard wide, and it occurred to Lang that he
might learn something of the interior of the glacier by letting down a
candle at the end of a cord, or he might be even able to scramble down
himself.

Evening came early, foggy and drizzling as usual. He went to look at
the sea from the coast, but could not distinguish anything beyond a
hundred yards. At any rate, there was no _Chita_ in the bay.

A snowslide came down the glacier that night with a tremendous roar
and rumble. Lang started up in a panic, imagining that he had heard
engines. It was heavily foggy, and he was not quite sure what had
really happened until morning, when he found a vast heap of snow at
the foot of the glacier, covering up the tunnel he had hewn out the
day before.

It was still darkly foggy, but not raining, and there was no wind as
he went up the slope to the glacier, carrying a long, thin cord, a
pocketful of candles, and the hatchet. The snowslide had mostly
discharged itself over the glacier’s edge, but a good deal had clung
to the surface of the ice. It was light, fresh snow, and it had been
flung up in great ridges and drifts where the slide had struck any
obstruction. The small ice cracks were covered over, but the larger
crevices had swallowed up the snow and stood open.

Lang looked down into several of them, deep and dark and precipitous,
going farther down than he could see. None of the depths showed any
rock or gravel, however, and he turned down toward the tongue of the
glacier.

He was fifty yards, perhaps, from its edge, plowing through the snow,
when he felt the surface give way under him. He made a wild plunge
aside—too late! A vast mass of snow seemed to dislodge itself, vanish,
and everything dropped from under his feet.

He snatched at something that went past, a projecting crag of ice amid
the whirl of snow, caught it, clung for half a second, and his hand
slipped off. He went down—down—losing breath, and landing in a great
mass of loose snow in which he went clear under.




                             CHAPTER XVII

                         THE GLACIER’S HEART


Probably the loose snow saved him from broken bones, but, in spite of
its softness, the breath was knocked almost out of him. Gasping and
smothering, he clawed his way wildly out of his burial. His eyes
opened on a dim, cold twilight, on whitish-green walls that rose up
and up till they inclosed a foggy-dim gap that was the outer air.

He crawled entirely out of the snow, immensely relieved to find
himself unbroken, and got his breath back. He was at the bottom of a
crevice, or crevasse, fifteen or twenty feet deep, and three or four
feet wide, that extended into darkness both ways. The problem of
getting out was before him. He would have to cut steps in the
perpendicular ice walls. It did not look at all impossible, nor even
very difficult, for he could make his footholds in both walls,
straddling the big fissure as he ascended.

His hatchet had fallen from his belt, but he found it by groping in
the snow. He cut a couple of steps, and raised himself into them. It
was going to be more difficult than he had thought. The crevice was
too wide to keep a foot on each side with any ease. He came down, and
looked toward the dim farther end of the fissure. He had wanted to see
the interior of the glacier, and it would be a pity to climb out
without utilizing this opportunity.

He made his way along the bottom of the crack, which came to a sharp
edge under his feet. It was not quite dark; a queer, pale twilight
seemed to filter in from everywhere. Water was dripping from the top,
trickling down the walls and along the bottom; and all at once his
feet went from under him and he glissaded down a wet, slippery
incline, unable to check himself. He brought up against something
solid at last, on his back in pitch darkness; and somehow, he hardly
knew how, he scrambled back up that slope almost as fast as he had
slid down it. At the top he lay flat, out of breath, horror stricken
at the thought of what he might have escaped.

He made his way back to the heap of snow where he had fallen in. In
the other direction the crevice appeared to slope upward. It promised
an easier way to the top than scaling the sheer wall, and he ventured
along it, feeling very cautiously ahead at every step.

It did rise, wet and slippery and almost as steep as a stair, where
lumps of stone in the ice afforded him all his foothold. He was
hopeful of getting close enough to the top to hack a way through when
the crevice ended against a hard, impenetrable slab of frozen gravel.

Impossible to go any farther this way, but, as he groped about in the
dimness, he saw daylight through a small crack at his right hand. It
was only a few inches wide, but he heard the dripping of water, and
knew that it must be in connection with the upper air.

He widened it a little with the hatchet. There was certainly greater
space beyond. In high hope, he hewed the ice out of an opening wide
enough for his head to pass, and afterward for his body.

He saw a six-foot space, dimly lighted from above, narrowing away in
both directions. The bottom, apparently of fresh snow and ice, was
shortly below him. He crept through his orifice without any doubt,
hung by his hands, and let go.

His feet crashed through the apparent flooring that collapsed all
around him. He slid and slithered helplessly in a slush of wet snow
that slid with him, down, it seemed, out of the light, till he found
himself wedged fast. His legs and half his body were down in or
through a tight opening, from which he could not extricate himself. He
was too scared to think. Madly he hacked at the ice with the hatchet
to which he had still clung. And almost at the first blow a large
flake of the squeezing ice fell off, dropped, and he dropped with it.

He went down so unexpectedly that he did not even clutch at anything,
and landed on his feet with a hard jar, slipped, fell and scrambled to
his knees.

Complete darkness was all around him, except that, a dozen feet above
his head, he saw the faintly dim outline of the opening that had let
him through. He felt around him. His feet were wedged in a sharp
angle. The walls appeared to diverge as they arose. Then for the first
time he remembered the candles and matches he carried.

With trembling fingers he felt for them. Three only of the candles
were left; the others had fallen from his pocket. After losing three
precious matches, he got one of the lights ablaze.

The illumination was wonderfully comforting. The homely light quieted
his terror. Almost calmly he surveyed the place where he had trapped
himself.

At the first glance he saw that it would be impossible to climb
without assistance back to that opening above, which was like a
trapdoor in the ceiling of a room. He was in an enormous V-shaped ice
crack, narrow at the bottom, widening to the top. Behind him the
fissure narrowed abruptly to a mere crevice. In the other direction it
seemed to extend some way into the darkness, growing smaller.

Lang quailed with a horrible sense of helplessness, of impending doom.
He cursed his own panic, that had led him into this trap. With a
little caution he might have got himself free up there, made his way
back to his original entrance, and climbed out. Useless now to think
of it! The only possible escape now seemed to be to cut and heap up
quantities of ice in a pile so high that he could reach the roof of
his cavern, and he began to hew into the wall almost hysterically.

He scraped the flakes and chips of ice back under the hole in the top.
Working violently, he made a huge cavity in the wall, a huge pile on
the triangular bottom. His hatchet went through into another opening.
He was amazed, in a dim way, at the number of fissures that seemed to
honeycomb what he had supposed a solid block of ice. They must be the
result of centuries of warming and cooling, winter and summer, as the
glacier flowed slowly down the mountain.

He did not look through into the new fissure he disclosed. He
continued to cut, piling the ice chips, till he stopped, discouraged
all at once, realizing the futility of this. The loose ice flakes gave
no foothold; they slid and sank under him. Without completely filling
the chamber he could never get himself to the ceiling.

In a nervous panic he seized the candle and made for the other end of
the cavern, where there might be an outlet. It grew lower; he stooped,
crawled on his knees; and then it ended suddenly with a black hole in
the floor that struck him with terror. It seemed to go down to
unutterable abysses.

He scrambled back again, and looked into the crevice he had cut into.
There was a tall, narrow fissure there, just big enough to allow his
body to pass sidewise. He enlarged the opening, squeezed through, and
began to edge along the passage.

It really seemed to lead upward. He had a gleam of hope again. The
walls were full of streaks and beds of frozen gravel, and he had
enough revival of life to glance curiously into them; but they held no
sign of emerald crystals. The passage grew wider, then narrower, and
then began to descend. He was mortally afraid of the slope. The candle
would not show what was at the bottom. He halted for long minutes,
wondering, dreading. But there was no use in going back.

He went down with the utmost slowness and precaution. The slope,
however, was only for a couple of yards, and then the passage rose
horizontal, and then forked into two. One of them closed presently
into a mere rift, too narrow for a cat; and he came back to the other.
Along it he edged his way for some ten feet, and then stumbled and
dropped through another hole in the bottom.

It was only six feet, and he could have pulled himself up again, but
he felt weak and exhausted. He seemed to be in a sort of round cavity,
and he lay huddled where he had fallen. There was no trickle of
moisture there; the air was dry and dead, and heavy and silent like
the grave itself.

He must have dozed involuntarily, for he awoke in a panic. Sleep was
deadly. It would mean the frost-sleep, from which a man does not
awaken. He got up, swung his arms, stamped his feet. His mind felt
dazed. He forgot the opening through which he had dropped, and crept
on hands and knees into a sort of burrow that led out of one end of
his cavern.

How long he thus burrowed through the heart of the glacier he never
could quite guess. Time was blurred to him. He tried to fix his mind
on the next movement, excluding everything else, telling himself
incessantly that he was sure, sooner or later, to find a way out. He
must have gone over the same ground many times; in fact, he fancied
afterward that perhaps he was much of the time merely passing up and
down the same series of ice fissures, circling blindly. The first
candle gave out. Anxious to save them, he crawled in the dark for some
time, till the terror of it was more than he could bear, and he
lighted another. From time to time he stopped, stupid with exhaustion,
and half dozed, and was awakened by the subconscious warning. The icy
chill penetrated his very bones. More and more forcibly it began to
impress his mind that freezing was a painless death.

But the deep roots of self-preservation lived in him and drove him on.
He tried to warm his hands over the candle flame; he tried to speak,
to restore his courage, but the dead sound of his voice was horrible.
He did not know any longer through what labyrinths he had come, and he
took any opening that he could find, splitting space with his hatchet
when there was not room to get through, and more and more often
sinking down in a collapse that was each time more and more
prostrating.

He put the candle out to save it and leaned against the ice, hardly
feeling the chill. It seemed—he _knew_—it was not worth while to go
on. Queer memories and fancies flitted uncontrollably through his
brain like waking dreams. Shipwreck and danger—Boston—Carroll—Eva
Morrison—they were remote like dreams, evoking no reaction.

He became entirely unconscious, and came back to himself with the
usual start and scare. The dead dark frightened him. He fumbled for
his matches; struck one, lighted the candle. As he held up the clear,
bright flame he saw, through a thin veil of ice, a human face looking
into his own!




                            CHAPTER XVIII

                           CAMP OF THE DEAD


The sight was like a part of his own nightmares, and mingled with
them. He stared at the face, dark and distorted behind a pale sheet of
ice, and it dawned upon him that it was real.

In a spasm of unbearable horror and bewilderment he wheeled and
stumbled away down the passage. Within a few feet he halted,
collecting himself. The thing could not possibly be real. He went
back, drawn by a horrible fascination.

He held up the candle and looked again. He could see the head quite
distinctly through the semi-transparent ice, with the dim shadow of a
body under it. It was no vision. It must be, he slowly realized, the
body of some unfortunate Indian, who had perished on the glacier long
ago, and became sealed into the ice.

Delicately with his hatchet he chipped a little at the ice about the
head. A long flake split away. The shoulder came in sight, covered
with a skin garment. The shaggy hairs clung in the frozen material.
And then he thought he saw the dim loom of another form, beyond the
first.

It was some irresistible fascination of horror that led him to
excavate around these grim remains. He chipped away the ice from
around the first body, intensely careful not to wound the flesh, and
saw that there was indeed a second corpse. They were sitting, huddled
close together, and a little more chopping brought to light a foot
wrapped in untanned moccasins that did not belong to either of these
two.

There was a whole party, and it was not hard to reconstruct the story
of the tragedy. The Indians had tried to cross the glacier, probably
in a winter storm. Morrison had said there was a pass at the top of
the glacier. They had been caught in a blizzard, lost, snowed under,
and frozen as they huddled together. The glacier had engulfed their
bodies, and, in its infinitely slow progression, had brought them at
last down to sea level, uncorrupted as when they had perished—how many
centuries ago?

It came upon him that he might well sit down with this prehistoric
company and join its sleep. It would come to that in the end, and he
would be melted out of the glacier along with them. The candle
flickered down. It was burned out, in spite of all his efforts to
economize it. As if it had been an omen, he hurriedly lighted another,
and looked again at the motionless, huddled figures in the cavern he
had hollowed out.

He was not sure how many were in the party; there might be four, or
perhaps more than that. Except the one which lay prostrate, they were
in sitting postures, leaning together. The faces were somewhat
shrunken, the eyes closed, the heads slightly bowed, the coarse black
hair protruded from the fur hoods.

They looked as if they had died yesterday. Lang thought of Morrison’s
archaeological enthusiasm, and imagined his excitement if he could
have witnessed this find. The nearest Indian had a rude copper knife,
green with incrustation, in his belt, with something like a bundle of
arrows, and Lang tried gingerly to pull away the frozen furs to see
these weapons.

The stiff hide would not give. He hacked it a little with the hatchet
edge, cut a long gash, and pulled the frozen edges apart. He must have
cut into some sack. Out of the rent came a stream of pebbles and bits
of rock, that glittered with green and yellow and diamond points in
the candlelight.

He picked one of them out of the litter of ice chips, curiously, not
realizing what it might be. It was a rough bit of greenish crystal,
six-sided, the size of a beechnut, half embedded in a brownish bit of
rock. It was mostly dull surfaced, but as he turned it over a
brilliant green sparkle shot out, and it was only then that he
realized what he had found.

He had forgotten all about the emeralds in these last terrible hours.
The memory came back to him with a shock. He gasped with confusion and
amazement. He had come to the end of his quest. He had broken the
glacier gate. He had found the green stones.

Forgetful of everything else for the moment, he stooped and gathered
them out of the ice. There must have been a quart of the pebbles, of
different sizes, of different colors, too. There were blue and green
ones, crystals white like diamonds, and lumps of stone showing merely
abortive flecks and veins of green—emerald matrix, he thought. It
struck him that the Indians had had little knowledge, and had gathered
indiscriminately everything that was crystalline.

He had indeed cut into a skin sack at the Indian’s belt, and,
investigating it, he found still another handful of stones remaining.
Some of these must be indubitable emeralds—splendid green crystals as
large as the end of his thumb, almost clear of rock. Their possible
flawing, and whether they could be cut to advantage, he was unable to
guess; but they must be immensely valuable. With death all about him,
and his own death impending over him, he sat by the pile of jewels and
gloated, oblivious.

This was certainly the source of the emeralds that Morrison had found.
There was no mine, no pocket in the glacier. These aborigines must
have been messengers, burden carriers. They were taking the stones
from the place where they had been found—perhaps a hundred miles
away—to some other unknown point, perhaps as tribute to their chief,
or destined for the Incas of far-away Peru. But how they had been
washed out of the glacier he could not imagine, for there was no
water, no dribble of moisture in this cavity.

Then the inevitable thought of the futility of it all came down black
and crushing. He had found the treasure, and must stay trapped with
it. The glacier gate would not open to let him out. He had wealth
here; it represented power. It was enough to set all the wheels of
Boston turning, to drive a steamer across the Atlantic. Strange that
it could not lift the thirty feet of ice over his head!

Yet the mysterious suggestion of present wealth and power did provide
strength to his soul. It seemed impossible that he could be going to
perish beside that heap of precious stones. Luck had turned before
when it was at the worst; and he could not refrain from examining the
other bodies to see if they, too, carried emeralds.

The next nearest, when the skin wrappings were cut away, had a
stone-headed club at its belt, and a bag indeed, but containing
nothing but flint arrowheads. The prostrate figure came next, and he
chipped away the ice to get at its waist. It carried no baggage at
all, but a sort of spear shaft showed frozen under its body.

The fourth Indian was still embedded in ice, except for the arm and
shoulder nearest him. Lang began to chip and hew to clear the body,
and was working around to the other side, when the hatchet crashed
through a thin ice wall into an open space beyond. He broke the
aperture wider, and put his head through cautiously, with the arm
holding the candle.

There was another of the usual fissures, a couple of feet wide. In
splitting, the parting edges had torn the Indian’s body partly
asunder; in fact, one leg was sticking in the ice on the other side.
But Lang, hardened to horrors, hardly noticed this gruesome
circumstance. He heard the ripple of water. There was a little stream
flowing down the rounded bottom of the fissure.

More than that, he saw at once that the rending ice had torn the
Indian’s skin swathings; green pebbles glittered in the tattered fur,
and green stones lay scattered at the bottom of the running water.

Here was surely the direct source of Morrison’s find. The water came
in, no doubt, from the melting at the top of the glacier. It must go
out where the emeralds had gone. He had only to follow it to the
outlet.

At this positive direction and hope Lang had a shock and revolution in
his soul that first dizzied him, and then changed to an almost
agonizing ecstasy of joy. He had accepted death more fully than he had
realized. With trembling fingers he fished up the green stones from
the water, chipping them out where they were frozen into the ice
bottom. He picked them out from the torn skin bag, collecting another
half pint, of all sorts. He did not pick them over, but among them
were two huge crystals nearly as large as small eggs, though both were
rocky and flawed at the ends.

He crept back to his first position and hastily gathered up the stones
he had left there. It was a problem how to carry them. He was afraid
to trust his pockets; they might spill out if he tumbled. Finally he
tied his trouser legs tightly around his ankles and poured the stones
inside, half in each leg. They rasped and bulged uncomfortably, but he
had them safe from spilling. By an afterthought he took the
green-rusted copper knife, thinking of Morrison, squeezed back through
the hole he had cut, and began to follow the streamlet down the ice
crevice.

He was able to walk perhaps a dozen feet, and then the fissure grew
too small for passage, though the rivulet slipped through
uninterruptedly. Here he found another small green crystal, and now he
had to hew away the ice to make way for himself.

He attacked it with energetic strength. It could not be many yards,
perhaps not many feet, to the end of the glacier, he thought. At every
stroke he half expected to feel the blade break through. He pushed the
chips back behind him, hewing and hacking, cutting a tunnel just wide
and high enough to creep through, while the little stream ran merrily
between his feet.

He cut for a yard—two yards. He put out the candle lest he might have
greater need later, and worked in darkness, guided by the feel of the
water. The stream dropped through a fissure in the floor. Only a yard,
but it terrified him lest it had gone far beyond following; and he had
to hew a way down after it and pursue it again on its new level.

He sweated and panted in spite of the chill. Then his feverish energy
collapsed suddenly. He got himself back out of the water and lay back,
hard put to it to keep awake. Again he forced himself into the tunnel,
hewed another ten feet, paused to rest, worked again and again
collapsed. He half dozed into a deadly nightmare, awoke shuddering and
plunged frenziedly at the work again. It seemed to him that he had
driven his tunnel far enough to pierce the whole glacier.

Queer terrors beset him. He fancied that the Indians were stirring
back there in the darkness—they were coming down the passageway behind
him. He had to relight the candle to steady his nerves. He began to
fear that he was on the wrong course after all, and the horror of this
possibility almost took the heart out of him.

He stopped to rest again; again attacked the ice, and was encouraged
by finding another small rivulet flowing in to increase the first. A
yard farther, and his hatchet smashed through into space. He split the
screen of ice apart and crawled through.

It was not the open air. It was an ice cavern; the floor was covered
with chips of ice, and the farther end blocked with translucent white.
For a second he thought he had come back into one of his own tunnels,
but there was daylight in the place, and it was snow that blocked the
opening.

He recognized it then. It was the cavern he had dug out the day
before, in his attempt to follow the stream backward. He plunged at
the snow. There must have been a couple of yards of it, but he
wallowed through, and fell outside in a collapse of exhaustion, of
nerve tension, of relief.

He awoke from a minute of dizzy oblivion. The world was veiled in the
thickest fog he had ever seen. Nothing was visible. He could hear the
sea and smell its freshness, but all around him was like a pressure of
cold, wet steam.

By some intuition of direction he knew that his camp was out to the
right of the valley. The thought of the fire, of food, roused a desire
in him that was like a madness. He crawled through the snowslide that
had filled the valley, came to its edge, and out upon the wet, stony
earth.

His knees sank under him. He could not walk, but was reduced to
creeping. He would have been an extraordinary sight for his Boston
patients; wet to the skin, dirty, with a week’s growth of beard, his
clothes torn and mud colored, covered with ice chips, as he crawled on
all fours like a wild beast, still clutching the hatchet
unconsciously, and muttering to himself.

Several times he sank in a heap, unable even to crawl. The earth
seemed to heave and move under him, and strange shapes went past in
the fog. He smelled, he thought, the faint sulphurous smell of his
coal smoke—or was it hallucination? He crawled in that direction. An
illusory voice spoke to him. He came in sight of his camp; dimly he
saw his bark shelter, and beside it he saw a seated figure, a woman’s
figure, wrapped in a dark poncho, with a striped scarf. It was Eva
Morrison’s figure, and he knew that this, too, was an illusion which
would presently dissolve.




                             CHAPTER XIX

                             RESURRECTION


He felt the ground warm under him, the divine warmth of the fire, and
he let himself fall at full length and shut his eyes. A phantom voice
faintly penetrated his ears.

“Are you hurt? Oh, you poor, poor boy! Where have you been?”

To answer was beyond him. It was all a strange dream. He felt himself
gently pulled forward. The warmth grew yet more heavenly. His face was
wiped; it must be a nurse, he thought, with a dim idea of a hospital.
He was covered up with something. It seemed to him that some one had
kissed him. It was a celestial dream.

He must really have lapsed into profound unconsciousness. He seemed to
be dragged out of depths like death by somebody lifting his head, and
repeatedly telling him to take something until the words penetrated to
his mind. He opened his lips without opening his eyes, felt something
warm and wet, swallowed obediently. It was soup, hot and strong. A few
mouthfuls went down, and ran through his whole system like a
stimulant. He looked up.

He saw a face that he knew. It was upside down as he looked at it. His
head was on a woman’s lap, and she was holding the tin of soup to his
lips. It was no hallucination. A sense of warm, full contentment came
over him, and quite automatically he put the soup aside, put up his
arm weakly, and drew that face down to his own.

The contact was warm, electric. His brain cleared suddenly into full
wakefulness.

“Eva—Eva!” he exclaimed. “It’s you? It’s impossible.”

She gently disengaged her head, and he saw that she was flushed and
her eyes were winking with tears, and her face beamed.

“Don’t talk now,” she said. “Drink the rest of this.”

He knew she was right. He swallowed the rest of the contents of the
tin that she held to his lips, looking at her meanwhile, marveling.
These things seemed miraculous to him. His strength came back as he
drank, and he realized the crisis that must be upon him—since Eva was
here.

“What’s the situation?” he asked. “Where’s your father? Is he better?
And Carroll—and the _Chita_? How do you come to be here ashore? There
must be danger. Tell me. I’m all right now.”

“Father’s much better. He’s not strong yet, but he can talk almost as
well as ever. The _Chita_ is out there in the bay. How did you know
her name? Father is aboard her, and Carrero and Diego—two Chileans who
don’t speak anything but Spanish.”

“Carrero—Diego? So they speak nothing but Spanish? Of course! Doesn’t
Morrison suspect who they are?”

“Of course he knows they’re enemies—now. We got them in Valparaiso.
Father was desperately anxious to get here as fast as he could. He
thought—he believed—that you——”

“I know!” Lang exclaimed as she hesitated. “He thought I was trying to
beat him to it. I don’t blame him. It looked awfully fishy. I’ll
explain. Go on.”

“But I didn’t think it,” Eva hastened to say. “I knew there was
something wrong. I was worried—dreadfully afraid. Carrero met my
father soon after we got to Valparaiso, and offered him the boat. It
seemed just the thing. We had it fitted out, and started, and we
joined it at Talhuna. We were three days out before father suspected
anything wrong.

“He didn’t tell me much, but he gave me a little pistol to wear
always. I could feel danger in the air. Father decided to go on to La
Carolina, and take aboard two or three men whom he knew well, but
Carrero refused to go. He seemed to know the way to this place, and he
ran the boat into the bay early this morning, and demanded that father
lead them to the emeralds. He offered to share them equally.

“Of course father refused. They argued and threatened for hours.
Finally they put me ashore, and said that I would stay there till the
emeralds were found.”

“The devils!” Lang exclaimed. “I’ll maroon Carroll for this.”

“Oh, I wasn’t afraid, for myself,” said Eva. “I knew they wouldn’t
dare keep me here long. I climbed up the bank in the fog, and walked
about, and then I smelled smoke, and came upon your fire. Do you know,
I just knew at once that it was your camp. I sat down and waited. I’d
been here hours. Then I saw you coming. I shall never forget how you
looked—as if you’d come from the dead.”

“From the dead? So I had!” cried Lang. He sat up and burst the knotted
strings around his ankles. A stream of wet, rolling, twinkling
crystals rolled out, pebbles and bits of rock and chips of ice along
with them. Eva gave a little, startled cry.

“I’ve been through hell and the glacier. I think I bored the glacier
from end to end. I came from the dead, all right, and I brought back
what I went for. Here they are—the emeralds!”

“The emeralds—those little stones? And so few?”

“So few? They may be worth a million dollars—sure to be, if they’re
all perfect. But they aren’t. And there’s a lot of rubbish mixed with
them. I couldn’t sort them there in the dark.”

A shudder went through him at the memory of that ghastly ice cavern.
It seemed unreal now as a distant nightmare. He began to pick out
pieces of rock and discard them. Eva turned the stones over in her
fingers with more respect.

“Look at this one—and this,” he said, “and think of what the jewelers
charge you for a little emerald the size of a pea. And this! It would
be worth a fortune in itself, but I’m afraid it’s imperfect. The
smaller ones are better.”

By the daylight he could gauge the stones, and he was able to throw
out a great many obviously worthless bits, rough greenish matrix, or
plain fragments of stone. Between them they sorted the heap. Eva laid
her little striped scarf on the ground, and they placed the pick of
the stones upon it in a little, growing pile; and meanwhile Lang gave
her a hurried, abbreviated account of his adventures—his kidnaping,
his voyages, his shipwreck and subsequent struggles.

“Oh, what hardships! How you have suffered!” Eva exclaimed, almost
tearfully. “And all for _this_,” pointing to the jewel heap; “it
wasn’t worth it.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Lang. “But it wasn’t all for that. It was——Well,
if those emeralds should bring a million dollars they’d never be worth
the feeling I had when I opened my eyes just now and saw your face
looking down at me—and it was upside down, too.”

He looked into her eyes, half smiling, half appealingly. He could not
mistake the look of tenderness in the brown eyes that met his
unreluctantly. A surge of pride, of exultation rose through him. He
put out his hand, but before he touched her the girl’s face changed
sharply. She uttered a faint, startled cry; and Lang, jerking about,
caught a glimpse of a huge, blurred figure emerging soundlessly from
the fog, already hardly ten feet away.

He saw the black beard, the fur cap sparkling with drops of moisture;
and without a word he snatched at the automatic pistol in his hip
pocket.

“Drop that! Drop it, Lang, I say!” cried Carroll sharply, already with
his weapon drawn. But Lang desperately pulled the trigger. The wet
mechanism stuck.

“Hands up, Lang—both of you—or I’ll drop you cold!” Carroll ordered,
drawing a bead on the doctor’s chest; and Lang savagely hurled the
useless pistol down and put up his hands. Carroll looked triumphantly
at them both.

“Do you know, I half expected to find you here,” he remarked. “Yes, I
sort of guessed you’d got ahead of us, though I’m damned if I see how
you did it; but you always were quick.”

His eyes fell suddenly on the little heap of stones. He bent forward,
then straightened up with a hissed ejaculation, tense, glaring.

“You did it after all, did you? Get back; keep back!”

He bent again and gathered up the scarf, drew the emeralds together
and knotted up the corners, keeping a keen eye on his prisoners. He
slipped the extemporized sack into his pocket, with a red-and-white
scarf end hanging out.

“You stay where you are for half an hour,” he commanded. “I’ll be
watching you. One move, and it’ll be the last you’ll make.”

He edged away, his face over his shoulder. His figure was growing
faint in the fog, when Lang leaped toward the bark layers that covered
his rifle. He snatched it out, aimed, fired, once—twice at the
vanishing form. It seemed to lurch, stumble; and a pale flash came
back from it, with a bullet that knocked up the fire cinders. Lang
fired again, and then the figure had entirely disappeared.

“He mustn’t get back to the boat!” he exclaimed. “We must head him
off.”

Once aboard, he realized like a flash, Carroll would put on the power
and leave them marooned. He started impulsively away, halted dizzily,
not knowing in which direction lay the sea.

Eva took his hand and guided him. A breeze had risen, and the fog was
sweeping in, huge pillars and billows of it. Through its blinding
density, they ran together down the slope, and must have been near the
water when Lang heard a sound of hurrying footsteps ahead.

He had expected that. He drew Eva aside into the shelter of a dense
cedar shrub. A figure grew in the fog, growing to a slim, boyish form,
running so as to pass directly where Lang stood. He stepped suddenly
out.

“Is that you, Carroll?” exclaimed the runner. “What was that shooting?
Hell!”

Lang’s rifle was already swinging, but the gunman was so swift that he
already had his revolver clear of his pocket when the steel rifle
barrel crashed down on his skull. He dropped limply, flinging his arms
wide. Lang picked up the pistol and stood listening. No sound came
from landward.

“We’ve headed him off,” he said. “Go on board, Eva, and tell your
father what’s happened. Tell him to let no one aboard. I suppose he’s
armed. I’ve got to get our treasure back.”

She hesitated dumbly. He gathered her into his arms with a passionate
impulse, holding her close, kissing her wet face, her lips. She clung
to him, her eyes shut, responding to his kisses, until he let her go,
looking dazed and dreamy.

“Go aboard quickly, dearest,” he said.

“You’re going to risk your life—you mustn’t!” she murmured.

“Trust me. Don’t worry. Just go aboard,” he answered, and wheeled,
casting another look at the senseless, or dead Louie.

He ran back up the slope, his rifle cocked, looking about him keenly.
In his excitement he had no sense of danger. The thought that the
emeralds should be lost at this stage was maddening to him, after all
the horrors he had gone through to get them. But he knew that Carroll
could not have gone far; he could make no final escape on that
desolate coast; he would assuredly be rounded up.

He came to the place where Carroll had disappeared. Searching the
ground closely, he found spots of blood. Carroll had really been hit,
then; but it could not have been severely, for he had gone on, and the
blood-drops ended after the first few yards.

A scout might have trailed him, but it was vain for Lang to try. He
prowled forward in the direction Carroll had been taking, rifle ready
to shoot, realizing now that he was very liable to be shot down
suddenly himself. He thought once that a shadow rose and flitted
before him. He shouted, and then fired after it; but on going forward
he found neither traces nor tracks.

He prowled ahead again, sweeping a wide circle, groping past shrubs
and tree clumps that looked like men in the fog. He had gone a couple
of hundred yards when a flash and report spat from a thicket ten feet
ahead, with a ringing sound in the air by his ears. His nervous start
fired the rifle from the hip. Instantly he dropped flat, and fired
again at the point where he had seen the flash.

Nothing replied. The fog rolled over and over in clearing waves. After
lying strained to high tension for fifteen minutes, Lang crawled
cautiously forward. He found footprints in the soft ground this time,
but Carroll had slipped away.

Again he resumed the slow scouting forward, more keenly strung up than
ever. The air seemed to be growing dim, though the fog was certainly
clearing. It came upon him that it must be evening. He had forgotten
the hours; he had lost all track of time, and did not know whether it
was still the same day that he had fallen into the glacier. It might
have been the next day, or the next. In fact, he felt as if whole ages
had elapsed since that tumble into the crevice.

He stared up the obscure slope, where the fog cleared, and closed, and
cleared vaguely in the dusk. It was useless to pursue Carroll in the
dark, and might be suicidal. The fugitive could not get away,
especially since he was wounded. He was without food. He could be
captured the next morning. Lang stood out in the open and shouted.

“Carroll! Carroll! Come out. Surrender. Give back the stones and we’ll
call it off.”

His voice echoed weirdly up the hillside, but there was no answer. He
shouted again, at the utmost pitch of his voice.

All at once he remembered that the magazine of his rifle could not
contain more than one or two more cartridges, and he had no more in
his pockets. This was the conclusive touch. He turned and walked back
toward the sea, not without a sense of nervous expectancy, and a quick
readiness to look back.

But nothing molested. He passed his old camp, where the fire still
smoldered, went down to the foot of the glacier and climbed over the
piled snow into the valley. From the beach he saw dimly a series of
yellowish lights at no great distance. He hailed, and an answer came
instantly in Morrison’s deep voice.




                              CHAPTER XX

                            IN HIS OWN NET


The _Chita_ was moored a little way down the beach of the bay, with
her dinghy attached to shore and rail so as to make a gangway to the
land. Lang hoisted himself aboard. A big figure loomed up on the deck,
and a big bony hand was thrust out to him.

“Did you get him?” Morrison demanded anxiously.

“No, I didn’t,” Lang responded. “I shot at him twice. Afraid I missed
him. It was getting too dark and——”

“It doesn’t matter. He can’t escape us. We’ll have him to-morrow. Eva
says you’ve found the emeralds. You’ve got a story of adventure to
tell.” He hesitated. “Doctor Lang, the service you’ve done us has been
incredible. You’ll get your reward, I hope.”

“I’m not worrying about my reward,” said Lang. He sank on a deck seat,
feeling utterly played out. He heard Morrison going on, endlessly, it
seemed, expressing his gratitude, his admiration, and he wished
irritably that he would stop. Eva also suddenly appeared out of the
lighted cabin.

“Have you such things as hot water aboard, and soap, and so on?” he
roused himself to interrupt. “Also a razor and any clothes that you
can lend me. I’ve slept and tramped and swum and mined in these
till——”

“Of course. Of course,” Morrison warmly assured him. “I’ll fix you up.
Come with me. When you’ve finished, Eva’ll have something for us to
eat, and you can tell us your adventures. You must be starved, man!”
he ejaculated, staring, as they went down into the cabin light. “You
look as if you’d been through all the mills of the gods.”

Lang felt like it. They left him alone in a little cubby-hole called a
bathroom with his toilet facilities. He managed to wash and to shave
after a fashion, cutting himself several times, and to change to a
suit of Morrison’s, coat and trousers, several sizes too large for
him. His eyes and head ached, his hands trembled, and he thought he
needed food.

He thought he was ravenously hungry, but when he came out to the
spread table in the cabin he could not eat. There was tinned
salmon—the sight of it nauseated him. Never again in his life would he
eat anything out of a can. But he knew that he ought to take food. He
swallowed coffee eagerly, and tried to eat a little corn bread—getting
it down with difficulty. They urged things on him with anxious
solicitude; they were greatly distressed that he could not eat.

It was heavily on his mind that he ought to explain to Morrison his
disappearance from Panama; and he began to tell the story, feeling not
quite certain of his words. It seemed to turn out a very funny story;
Morrison presently roared with laughter at the account of his straits
aboard the _Lake Tahoe_. Lang could not see the humor of it. He almost
lost his temper, and switched to the story of his meeting with Carroll
in Valparaiso. In another minute, he hardly knew by what transition,
he found himself describing his shipwreck.

He was terribly tired. He wished that they would leave him alone. He
leaned his head back against the wall for a moment, was afraid that he
would go to sleep, and tried to collect himself.

“That’s not the most interesting thing,” he recommenced. “It’s what I
found. Went right through it—the glacier, you know. Broke the glacier
gate, as you called it. More than emeralds—far more important, to an
arch-arch’logist. Camp of dead Indians, prehistoric men—copper
knives—stone clubs—frozen solid. A carrier party—no mine
there—historically more precious than rubies—I mean emeralds——”

He leaned his head back involuntarily and the words seemed to melt on
his lips. He wanted extremely to be let alone for a minute, to rest
and collect himself. Some one was pulling at him. He muttered angrily
without opening his eyes; and then they did let him alone at last.

Light was shining on him when he opened his eyes, and not the light of
lamps. Dazed, he found himself lying on the cabin divan, his coat and
boots off, his head on a cushion and blankets wrapped about him. As he
stirred he heard a faint sound, and Eva’s face appeared above him.
And, drunk still with sleep, he put up his arm almost unconsciously,
and drew it down to his own, as he had done once before.

“I’ve been asleep,” he muttered. “It isn’t morning?”

“It’s just after ten o’clock,” she laughed.

She seemed delighted, but Lang was struck with horror. Impossible that
he could have slept so, ever since last sunset. He sat up, caught a
glimpse of the mountainside and the glacier through the window, and
the memory of the past day crashed back into him.

“Carroll—Louie? What’s happened?” he exclaimed.

“Nothing’s happened. We’ve been taking turns on guard all night. All’s
well. I’ve been keeping your breakfast hot for you.”

She gave his head a little squeeze, and darted off to the tiny galley
where a gasoline stove burned. Once the _Chita_ had been equipped with
electric light and heat, but these fittings had long since gone into
disrepair.

Lang hurriedly put on Morrison’s coat again, and his own boots, which
they had cleaned and oiled for him out of their hardened stiffness.
Hearing voices, Morrison came down from the deck.

“You’ve a great capacity for sleep, young man,” he observed. “Thank
Heaven for it. You were on the raw edge last night—pretty close to
collapse. How do you feel?”

Lang felt rested, and said so. He felt marvelously recuperated, in
fact. There was a stiffness in his legs, but his brain was clear, he
was full of energy, and he was ravenously hungry.

“I’ve been up the hill, but no sign of Carrero—or Carroll,” said
Morrison. “He took a shot at us in the night, though—a long-range
shot, fired away up the shore. I couldn’t see the flash. But look what
I’ve got here.”

He opened a door into one of the tiny cabins of the _Chita_, and
revealed Louie the Lope stretched in the berth, covered with a
blanket. The young gangster moved his head slightly and moaned.

“Found him lying in a heap just on the shore this morning,” said
Morrison, regarding Louie with aversion. “He’s pretty sick. He’s had a
bad cold coming on for several days; I thought it might run to
pneumonia. And then your knocking him out, and his lying out in the
damp all night, didn’t do him any good. I had almost to carry him
aboard.”

Lang would not have minded killing Louie, but the idea of disease
aroused all his medical instincts. He put his hand on the gunman’s
forehead, felt his pulse. Louie muttered something, and appeared only
semiconscious.

“Not much fever,” said Lang. “A little concussion, maybe, from the
blow on the head. I think he’ll be all right. I’ll look after him
later. I’ve wasted too much time already, sleeping.”

His stomach almost shrieked for food, in fact, and his breakfast was
waiting for him. There was no trouble now about appetite. He had to
restrain himself lest he eat too much. He devoured Chilean maize mush,
corn bread, potatoes, pork, with ravenous relish, while Eva served
him, and at the end he felt more than ever invigorated. It was the
first really square meal he had eaten since Valparaiso.

“Now, we can’t both leave the ship,” he said to Morrison. “Carroll
might circle back on us, Eva can’t be left here alone. You’ll stay on
guard. I’ll scout up the hill a little. If I need you I’ll fire two
shots rapidly. I suppose you’ve got a rifle to spare?”

He had two, and Lang’s plan was so obviously right that he could not
make any objection. Only he stipulated that if Lang found nothing in
the course of half an hour he should come back and give Morrison his
turn.

It was a fair day for once. There was no fog, no wind, and the sun
almost shone by moments from the gray sky. Lang crossed the boat
bridge to shore, clambered up the side of the ravine, and started up
the long slope.

He felt full of elation; full of confidence. It was not likely that he
would find any trace of the fugitive so near the beach, but he
searched carefully into all the copses and thickets as he worked up
the shore, till he came to his old camp.

He half expected to find that Carroll had spent the night there, but
he found no sign of it. The fire still smoldered, burning far down
into the coal seam now, and all the earth about it was heated. He
turned in the direction he had followed the night before, moving
warily now, expectant every instant of a shot from ambush, but he had
gone several hundred yards before he found any trace of his man.

Then, all at once, he saw him. He saw him from a distance, and with
such a shock that he half raised the rifle. But Carroll’s posture was
reassurance enough.

He hastened up. Carroll was lying face down at the edge of a clump of
cedar, his hat off, his limbs sprawling. He looked dead, but there was
life in his pulse when Lang touched his wrist.

The emeralds! Lang felt his pockets, turned him over. They were empty.
He ran his hands all over the man’s body. There was no bulging package
anywhere, no loose stones about his clothing.

He was dumfounded. He had never dreamed of such a check. There was a
bullet wound in Carroll’s head, no doubt from the last shot that Lang
had fired into the thicket. He must have staggered several yards
afterward. He had thrown the stones away, or dropped them. One
trousers leg was stiff with blood, too. That was from Lang’s first
shot, and probably Carroll had cached the jewels immediately after
finding himself wounded.

Lang looked about on the ground, moved the body to see if anything was
under it. The earth was overgrown with moss and ferns. That little
silk package would be lost like a needle in straw. It might be
anywhere within half a mile. Carroll alone could tell what he had done
with it.

After casting wildly about for several yards, he came back and for the
first time examined Carroll’s wound. The bullet had entered the skull
almost above the ear, rather high. It had not emerged, but Lang could
feel that it was just below the skin near the opposite temple.

It was not necessarily fatal. He had seen such a case before in his
Boston clinic. He had operated then, and with success. He sat down by
the unconscious man and fell into a profound study, and for the time
the emeralds passed out of his mind.

He remembered to fire the double signal shot, and relapsed into
thought again. If he only had a trephine—the little drill that cuts a
round piece out of bone! He heard Morrison halloing from a distance,
responded, and presently the explorer came up, panting, holding a
cocked Winchester at the ready. His eye fell instantly on the
prostrate figure.

“Dead?” he asked quickly. “Have you got the stones?”

“The stones? I don’t know where they are,” responded Lang. “No, he
isn’t dead. He’s lost, or hidden them somewhere—Lord knows where.”

Morrison cursed. His eyes roved wildly.

“My God!” he exclaimed. “We’ve got to get them! Is he going to die?
Can’t you revive him with a strong stimulant or something so that he
can speak before he dies? Surely it’s possible?”

The situation was so exactly the reverse of the former one aboard the
_Cavite_ that Lang, in spite of his abstraction, could not refrain
from a short laugh. Morrison did not see the point.

“Even if it kills him!” he insisted, reinforcing the analogy.

“Very likely he hid the emeralds shortly after I hit him in the leg,”
said Lang. “Look here! I’ll show you what’s happened. My bullet went
through his skull. He must have been knocked senseless by the shock,
but he came to, and staggered some distance. Maybe he got rid of the
stones then, and his gun, too, for I don’t see it. Then he became
unconscious again, but not from the wound directly. A blood clot has
formed on the surface of the brain where the bullet entered, and it’s
that which is paralyzing him. He might survive the bullet wound.”

“What, right through the brain?” ejaculated the explorer.

“Oh, yes. It often happens. I suppose you’ve got some sort of medical
or surgical kit aboard? You wouldn’t have a trephine, of course. Got a
surgical saw? Any anæsthetics and disinfectants?”

“Six ounces of ether and a bottle of iodine,” responded Morrison.
“I’ve got some forceps and scissors and sterilized cotton, and a very
fine, sharp hack saw. What are you thinking of doing?”

“I’m going to operate,” said Lang decisively. “I’m going to remove
that blood clot. It’ll restore consciousness almost surely, when he
comes out of the anæsthetic, and there’s a good chance that he’ll
recover. We can’t take him aboard. It would kill him. I’ll operate at
my old camp. Help me carry him up there, and then go back to the boat
and bring up your surgical kit, and a razor and soap and clean towels
and basins and all the biggest kettles you have for heating water.
Bring Eva—Miss Morrison along, too, if she has the nerve. I’ll need
both of you to help.”




                             CHAPTER XXI

                              THE KNIFE


They bore the patient as gently as possible to the camp, and placed
him in the bark shelter, close by the warmth. Lang built up the fire,
while Morrison hurried away for the needed utensils.

Eva came back with him, looking rather pale and excited. Both of them
were laden with blankets, towels, kettles of water and all the
extemporized instruments that Morrison could lay his hands on. Lang
knew what she was thinking of, but his professional breakdown seemed
to him now a far-away, unimportant thing. He was not concerned with
it. He knew exactly what he had to do; he had no doubt of being able
to do it.

While the kettles of water came to a boil, Lang sat and put a finer
edge on one of the keen pen-knives Morrison had brought. He put the
instruments into the boiling water, timing them for the required
twenty minutes’ sterilization. He scrubbed his hands assiduously,
sponged them with iodine, laid out the apparatus to his hand. He did
not say a word and looked utterly abstracted, but his mind was
thrilling with an elation that he had not known for a long time.

When sterilization was complete, he took out water in a basin to cool;
then folded a towel into cone shape, placed it over Carroll’s face,
and dropped on the ether. He kept one hand on the patient’s pulse;
from time to time he raised an eyelid and warily examined the pupil.
Carroll was weak with loss of blood; he needed careful treatment, but
his unconsciousness made anæthesia come more quickly.

Lang surrendered the ether bottle to Morrison, with instruction to
drop a little more at the word. He then turned Carroll’s head gently
to expose the spot where the bullet lay. With the razor he shaved away
a bare space; he cut a small slit, and, as he expected, the little
blackened lump of lead almost popped out. He cleansed the wound
carefully, applied a wad of absorbent gauze, and fastened it down.

So far all was easy and simple. The critical part was to come. Without
any hesitation, he turned the patient’s head again, and shaved and
cleaned a space of about three inches around the wound, which made a
purplish spot on the white scalp. A little more ether was given.

“Hand me the knife,” he ordered. “Be ready with the saw. Don’t touch
anything. Hand them with the forceps.”

With a quick, deft stroke he made a semicircular incision around the
bullet mark, and turned back the flap of skin. Reaching for the keen
little saw, he attacked the skull in the shortest cut he could
contrive.

At the rasp, and the first reddened particles of bone under the steel
teeth, Eva turned pale, but braced her nerve. Lang did not notice;
from that moment he was aware of nothing but his work. Impassive and
abstracted as he looked, jubilation sang in him. His hands obeyed his
will. He felt as if he had been restored to life; as if a familiar
spirit, long absent, had returned to serve him.

He had to handle the makeshift tools with the utmost delicacy.
Fortunately the wound was on the most convex part of the skull, where
it was possible to cut a hole with a straight saw. The first incision
once through the bone, he began another at right angles to it, and
then a third, completing the square with the fourth. With the forceps
he gently loosened the little block of bone.

It came out. Beneath it was, as he had expected, a large, dark blood
clot. Partly with the forceps, and partly with his fingers, he removed
this, and cleansed the surface with the utmost pains.

He was doubtful whether to reinsert the block of bone. In a hospital
he would probably have resorted to a silver plate. Replacement might
involve infection; it was best to take no chances. He drew the flap of
skin back, and fastened it down with four stitches. He laid down the
needle, washed his hands, and glanced at his audience with a
triumphant and nervous smile.

“Is it successful? Will he live?” asked Morrison, almost in a whisper.

Lang glanced again at the patient’s eyeballs, felt his pulse. It was
weak. The man breathed harshly; his hands were cold.

“Have you any stimulant? Brandy?”

Morrison had had the forethought to bring a bottle. Lang forced a few
spoonfuls between the locked teeth. The pulse fluttered, then
relapsed. Lang shrugged his shoulders.

“Will he live—become conscious?” Morrison asked again.

“No, he won’t,” Lang replied cheerfully. “I don’t think he’ll come out
of the ether. Maybe he had a little too much. He was in no condition
for an operation in this cold, outdoor spot. Shock was too much for
him.”

“But the emeralds?” Morrison cried. “How’ll we find them?”

“We’ll never find them,” said Lang, without concern. Emeralds were
nothing to him just then. He had recovered what was more to him than
any emeralds, and he glanced at Eva and met her fascinated, astonished
gaze with an almost delighted smile. He knew that she knew.

But Morrison, groaning and raging, had fished out the shapeless bullet
from the basin, and was examining it.

“Look here? How’s this?” he exclaimed. “You shot him with your rifle—a
.44 soft bullet, I know. This bullet never came from that gun. This is
a revolver bullet, a small bullet, an automatic.”

Startled out of his dizzy elation, Lang took the bullet and looked at
it. Indeed it was, as he recognized, too small for his rifle.

“Who fired that bullet?” Morrison was demanding hoarsely. “Who killed
him? You didn’t. Suicide? Nonsense!”

Suddenly Lang remembered the shot that Morrison had heard in the
night.

“Louie was ashore all night!” he exclaimed.

“By gad, he was!” cried Morrison. “It was his shot. The young
rattlesnake met Carroll, got his gun, shot him, got the stones. It
can’t be anything else. Louie’s cached them somewhere. Thank Heaven
we’ve got him under our hands.”

He snatched up the rifle and dashed toward the beach, intending to
close the business at last. Lang glanced at his patient; he would be
back in a minute, and, with a hasty word to Eva, he ran after
Morrison, overtaking him on the bluff over the bay.

The _Chita_ was below them, thirty yards away. Her cabin windows were
wide open, and Lang caught a vague stir of movement within.

“It’s Louie,” Morrison whispered. “I thought he was too sick to move.
I’ll bet he was putting it all on. What’s he doing? I could hit him
from here.”

“Don’t shoot,” said Lang. “Keep your eye on him, though, and don’t let
him get near the engines.”

He slipped down the side of the valley and out to the beach. He had a
vague idea that Louie was perhaps delirious with incipient pneumonia.
He silently crossed in the dinghy, swung over the _Chita’s_ rail, and
peeped in the cabin door.

The young gunman had the trap of the fuel hold up, and the cap off one
of the big gasoline tanks. He jerked his head up instantly.

“Stop there, doc!” he yelled shrilly. “Hands up—up high. Come another
step nearer and I’ll shoot into this gas tank and blow us all to
hell.”

Lang now perceived that Louie had a pistol—Carroll’s black automatic,
he was sure—not pointing toward him, but with the muzzle directed into
the tank below. He put his hands up instantly. He did not remember
whether he had a gun in his pocket or not. He realized that Louie had
the undeniable drop this time. That gun flash would explode the
_Chita_ like a load of dynamite.

“Don’t be a fool, Louie!” he tried to expostulate. “I’ve no gun. You
don’t want to blow yourself up, too, do you?”

“Want to make a deal, then?” the boy cried back. “I’ve got the stones.
I’ve put them where you’d never find them, not in a thousand years.
What do you say? A fifty-fifty split. Kick in now, or up we go!”

At that instant Morrison, misunderstanding the situation, fired from
the bluff. Like an echo of the shot, Louie’s pistol exploded into the
fuel tank. For one instant Lang saw death. His heart absolutely stood
still.

But there was no burst of fire. Louie sprang up, his shirt front
suddenly streaming red, wheeled round and fell, and as a dying snake
strikes, his pistol exploded—twice—three times—the bullets crashing
into the floor, and the flashes setting fire to a matting rug.

Morrison’s feet trampled on the deck. He plunged into the cabin, and
bent over the gangster.

“What have you done with the emeralds?” he demanded fiercely.

Louie looked up at him with a twisted smile.

“Hell!” he muttered, and his eyes closed, twitching.

The cabin was filling with smoke from, the burning matting. Lang
sprang to close the gas tank. He glanced down and saw no gleam of
reflecting liquid.

“Why, it’s empty,” he said, in surprise, and probed it with his arm.

“But not altogether,” he added, withdrawing his arm. He brought up a
roughly wrapped little sack of red-striped silk, that burst open as he
threw it down, letting out a stream of twinkling green stones on the
crimson-spotted floor.




                             CHAPTER XXII

                            TRONADOR LIGHT


“Wild life is plainly what I was made for,” said Lang. “See how I’ve
thrived on it. A great adventurer’ll be lost in me when I go back to
surgery in Boston. I’ve had maltreatment enough to kill a mule, as I’d
have thought once, and it’s brought me to life. What a broken-down
wretch I was in Mobile! What a whining, ill-tempered dog you must have
thought me!”

“I never did,” Eva denied quickly. She had just relieved Lang at the
helm of the _Chita_, sitting beside him in the little glassed pilot
house forward. They had hoped to make Puerto Montt that evening and
had kept on, though it was now two hours after sunset. Blackness was
over the mountains to the east and the rough islands on the other side
of the wide channel, and the sea heaved gently, smooth and black,
bubbling up palely away from the bow.

“I thought you were wonderful,” she went on “Everything in the world
had smashed under you—so you thought then. I was so sorry—oh, I can’t
tell you! I wanted to comfort you, even at first when we met on the
boat. And afterward, when it was I who seemed to have lost everything,
you were so good to me, and you never seemed to remember your own
troubles. I couldn’t tell you then how grateful I was. I never can
tell you. But you’ll know some time.”

“You’ve already brought me about a hundred times more than I deserve,”
Lang murmured, abashed, and he was not thinking of the emeralds.

They were in a locked drawer in Morrison’s little stateroom, and even
his share in these was to be no trivial reward. The stones had been
carefully sorted, weighed, cleaned, appraised as far as possible. A
few of them were almost certainly only green sapphires, of slight
value. Many were flawed. The biggest, which Lang had fondly hoped to
be worth a fortune, developed under a magnifier a series of central
cracks, and it would have to be cut into four, or perhaps five parts.
How the stones would cut was still in doubt, but Morrison, who knew
something of rough precious stones, estimated conservatively that the
lot should bring between fifty thousand dollars and seventy thousand
dollars if they were disposed of with due skill and no haste.

It would be no great fortune, but it was all Lang wanted. It was as
good as a million to him. It would give him a fresh start; and he had
his own work back again. He was not afraid of another breakdown.
Action and adventure and rough open-air life had braced and hardened
him and worked out the lack of control in his hands, which had been
probably nervous, after all. The emergency operation at the camp had
restored his confidence. A few weeks’ practice would bring back all
his old technique. As he gazed ahead through the darkness, looking for
the revolving light at the top of Chiloe Island, the future looked a
dazzle of certain success.

Carroll and Louie had died within three hours of each other, and lay
together in one grave in the gravel at the foot of the glacier. Lang
was thankful now that it was not his bullet that had killed either of
them; though their deaths were hardly to be regretted. But he did
still sorely regret the fate of his German Chileans of the schooner,
and he planned to make inquiries at Puerto Montt, and indemnify their
families, if they had any.

Morrison had been greatly fired when he finally heard Lang’s complete
account of his discoveries inside the glacier, and had insisted on
seeing them himself. With reluctance Lang went with him through that
tunnel that he had hewn out in a sort of nightmare.

It seemed a surprisingly short way now to the death camp, where they
chipped all the bodies clear of ice, discovering still another in
doing so. Morrison measured and sketched them, and even managed to
carry in a camera and take flash-light photographs. They gathered up
all the crystals that Lang had discarded, but found no more emeralds;
though Morrison secured material that was almost more precious to
him—copper knives and spears of unusual design, a primeval fire
striker, bone carvings and decorations, and, most important of all,
under the furs of one of the Indians, a number of skeins of peculiarly
colored and knotted cords.

They were like the indecipherable _quipus_ of the Incas, those records
in knotted strings that no one has ever been able to understand. But
these cords were knotted on an evidently different system, and
Morrison had high hopes that they might turn out a sort of Rosetta
stone which would solve the secret of the Peruvian records. At any
rate it confirmed his theory of the extent of Inca influence into the
far south.

Morrison was sitting back in the cabin then, poring over the _quipus_
under the swinging light. They would mean glory for him, should he
succeed in making sense of them. He would write a book, which learned
men would read and quarrel over violently, but it seemed to Lang a
poor sort of ambition.

The adventure was over, but he would never get the thrill and flavor
of it out of his bones. Eva was beside him, her shoulder almost
touching his own, as she steered, looking ahead for the ending mark of
the voyage.

“Eva!” he whispered suddenly.

He did not know what he meant to say. She turned her face, then let go
the wheel impulsively, threw both arms around his neck and drew his
head to her. The boat yawed wildly. They heard Morrison’s startled
shout.

“What’s the matter, there?”

Eva seized the wheel again and steadied her. Looking ahead, Lang saw
something like the faintest, most remote summer lightning touch the
horizon clouds, vanish, reappear, vanish.

“I think we’ve raised Tronador Light,” he called back.

Morrison came forward and stared over their shoulders.

“Yes, that’s old Tronador,” he said with satisfaction. “Many a time
I’ve seen it winking as I came up this channel—never with such a cargo
as we’ve got on board to-night.”

“It’s time—you’ve deserved it long enough, father,” Eva murmured.

“Of course I deserved it, but I’d never have got it but for luck, and
Doctor Lang. Close to a hundred thousand. It was you who turned the
trick for us, Lang, and you’ll get your reward.”

“I’ve got my reward already,” said Lang, with some emphasis.

Morrison glanced at him sharply, and said nothing for a moment.

“Yes, I know. I’ve seen it coming,” he returned somberly. “You get the
reward, but I pay it, Lang. I pay it, and I can’t afford it. I suppose
I can’t help myself.

“Oh, well, it’s the fate of parents,” he went on resignedly. “And I’ve
still got something, after all—some stuff that’ll make the scientific
world take notice. Wait till I write my monograph on the _quipus_!”

It seemed a cold and barren sort of success, Lang thought, sitting in
touch of Eva’s shoulder. His own triumph seemed charged with fire. He
was coming back with treasure and love and future brilliance, and he
felt profoundly sorry for his future father-in-law. And, miles ahead,
Tronador Light swept every minute wider circles of light on the black
horizon.

                               THE END