'Maybe the old boy was right in sticking back there on the barking sands,' observed Francis.
The ghostly whispering redoubled upon itself and was a long time in dying away.
By this time they were midway between waist and arm-pits and sinking as methodically as ever.
'Well, somebody's got to get out of the scrape alive,' Henry remarked.
And, even without discussing the choice, both men began to hoist Leoncia up, although the effort and her weight thrust them more quickly down. When she stood, free and clear, a foot on the nearest shoulder of each of the two men she loved, Francis said, though the landscape mocked him:
'Now, Leoncia, we're going to toss you out^of this. At the word 'Go! 'let yourself go. And you must strike full length and softly on the crust. You'll slide a little. But don't let yourself stop. Keep on going. Crawl out to the solid land on your hands and knees. And, whatever you do, don't stand up until you reach the solid land. Beady, Henry?'
Between them, though it hastened their sinking, they swung her back and forth, free in the air, and, the third swing, at Francis' 'Go!' heaved her shoreward.
Her obedience to their instructions was implicit, and, on hands and knees, she gained the solid rocks of the shore.
'Now for the rope!' she called to them.
But by this time Francis was too deep to be able to remove the coil from around his neck and under one arm. Henry did it for him, and, though the exertion sank him to an equal deepness, managed to fling one end of the rope to Leoncia.
At first she pulled on it. Next, she fastened a turn around a boulder the size of a motor car, and let Henry pull. But it was in vain. The strain or purchase was so lateral that it seemed only to pull him deeper. The quicksand was sucking and rising over his shoulders when Leoncia cried out, precipitating a very Bedlam of echoes:
'Wait! Stop pulling! I have an idea! Give me all the slack! Just save enough of the end to tie under your shoulders!'
The next moment, dragging the rope after her by the other end, she was scaling the cliff. Forty feet up, where a gnarled and dwarfed tree rooted in the crevices, shs paused. Passing the rope across the tree-trunk, as over a hook, she drew in the slack and made fast to a boulder of several hundred-weight.
'Good for the girl!' Francis applauded to Henry.
Both men had grasped her plan, and success depended merely on her ability to dislodge the boulder and topple it off the ledge. Five precious minutes were lost, until she could find a dead branch of sufficient strength to serve as a crowbar. Attacking the boulder from behind and working with tense coolness while her two lovers continued to sink, she managed at the last to topple it over the brink.
As it fell, the rope tautened with a jerk that fetched an involuntary grunt from Henry's suddenly constricted chest. Slowly, he arose out of the quicksand, his progress being accompanied by loud sucking reports as the sand reluctantly released him. But, when he cleared the surface, the boulder so outweighed him that he shot shoreward across the crust until directly under the purchase above, when the boulder came to rest on the ground beside him.
Only Francis' head, arms, and tops of shoulders were visible above the quicksand when the end of the rope was flung to him. And, when he stood beside them on terra firma, and when he shook his fist at the quicksand he had escaped by so narrow a shave, they joined with him in deriding it. And a myriad ghosts derided them back, and all the air about them was woven by whispering shuttles into an evil texture of mockery.
CHAPTER XIV
'WE can't be a million miles away from it,' Henry said, as the trio came to pause at the foot of a high steep cliff. 'If it's any farther on, then the course lies right straight over the cliff, and, since we can't climb it and from the extent of it it must be miles around, the source of those flashes ought to be right here.'
'Now could it have been a man with looking-glasses?' Leoncia ventured.
'Most likely some natural phenomenon,' Francis answered. 'I'm strong on natural phenomena since those barking sands.'
Leoncia, who chanced to be glancing along the face of the cliff farther on, suddenly stiffened with attention and cried, 'Look!' r
Their eyes followed hers, and rested on the same point. What they saw was no flash, but a steady persistence of white light that blazed and burned like the sun. Following the base of the cliff at a scramble, both men remarked, from the density of vegetation, that there had been no travel of humans that way in many years. Breathless from their exertions, they broke out through the brush upon an open-space where a not-ancient slide of rock from the cliff precluded the growth of vegetable life.
Leoncia clapped her hands. There was no need for her to point. Thirty feet above, on the face of the cliff, were two huge eyes. Fully a fathom across was each of the eyes, their surfaces brazen with some white reflecting substance.
'The eyes of Chia!' she cried.
Henry scratched his head with sudden recollection.
'I've a shrewd suspicion I can tell you what they're composed of,' he said. 'I've never seen it before, but I've heard old-timers mention it. It's an old Maya trick.
My share of the treasure, Francis, against a perforated dime, that I can tell you what the reflecting stuff is.'
'Done!' cried Francis. 'A man's a fool not to take odds like that, even if it's a question of the multiplication table. Possibly millions of dollars against a positive bad dime! I'd bet two times two made five on the chance that a miracle could prove it. Name it? What is it? The bet is on.'
'Oysters,' Henry smiled. 'Oyster shells, or, rather, pearl-oyster shells. It's mother-of-pearl, cunningly mosaicked and cemented in so as to give a continuous reflecting surface. Now you have to prove me wrong, so climb up and see.'
Beneath the eyes, extending a score of feet up and down the cliff, was a curious, triangular out-jut of rock. Almost was it like an excrescence on the face of the cliff. The apex of it reached within a yard of the space that intervened between the eyes. Rough inequalities of surface, and cat-like clinging on Francis' part, enabled him to ascend the ten feet to the base of the excrescence. Thence, up to the ridge of it, the way was easier. But a twenty-fivefoot fall and a broken arm or leg in the midst of such isolation was no pleasant thing to consider, and Leoncia, causing an involuntary jealous gleam to light Henry's eyes, called up:
'Oh, do be careful, Francis!'
Standing on the tip of the triangle he was gazing, now into one, and then into the other, of the eyes. He drew his hunting knife and began to dig and pry at the right-hand eye.
'If the old gentleman were here he'd have a fit at such sacrilege,' Henry commented.
'The perforated dime is yours,' Francis called down, at the same time dropping into Henry's outstretched palm the fragment he had dug loose.
Mother-of-pearl it was, a flat, piece cut with definite purpose to fit in with the many other pieces to form the eye.
'Where there's smoke there's fire,' Henry adjudged. 'Not for nothing did the Mayas select this God-forsaken spot and stick these eyes of Chia on the cliff.'
'Looks as if we'd made a mistake in leaving the old gentleman and his sacred knots behind,' Francis said.
'The knots should tell all about it and what our next move should be.'
'Where there are eyes there should be a nose,' Leoncia contributed.
'And there is!' exclaimed Francis. 'Heavens! That was the nose I just climbed up. We're too close up against it to have perspective. At a hundred yards' distance it would look like a colossal face.'
Leoncia advanced gravely and kicked at a decaying deposit of leaves and twigs evidently blown there by tropic gales.
'Then the mouth ought to be where a mouth belongs, here — under the nose,' she v said.
