them.”
“I’m — I’m wondering about that,” Todd said. “There have been some very unusual things happening up here. I’ve only got two of the bells out of the cave. There’s another, you know, but the Mexicans won’t go in the cave any more. They say — well, they’re afraid of something. But I’ll get that bell if I have to dig it up myself.”
“Want me to come up there?”
“If you will,” Todd said eagerly. “I’m phoning from a cabin in Coyote Canyon. I left Denton — my assistant — in charge. Suppose I send a boy down to San Xavier to guide you to the cave?”
“All right,” I assented. “Send him to the Xavier Hotel. I’ll be there in a few hours.”
San Xavier is perhaps a hundred miles from Los Angeles. I raced along the coast and within two hours I had reached the little mission town, hemmed in by the Pinos Range, drowsing sleepily on the edge of the Pacific. I found my guide at the hotel, but he was oddly reluctant to return to Todd’s camp.
“I can tell you how to go, Senor. You will not get lost.” The boy’s dark face was unnaturally pale beneath its heavy tan, and there was a lurking disquiet in his brown eyes. “I don’t want to go back — ”
I jingled some coins. “It’s not as bad as all that, is it?” I asked. “Afraid of the dark?”
He flinched. “Si, the — the dark — it’s very dark in that cave, Senor.”
The upshot was that I had to go alone, trusting to his directions and my own ability in the open.
Dawn was breaking as I started up the canyon trail, but it was a strangely dark dawn. The sky was not overcast, but it held a curious gloom. I have seen such oppressively dark days during dust storms, but the air seemed clear enough. And it was very cold, although even from my height I could see no fog on the Pacific.
I kept on climbing. Presently I found myself threading the gloomy, chill recesses of Coyote Canyon. I shievered with cold. The sky was a dull, leaden color, and I found myself breathing heavily. In good physical condition, the climb had tired me unduly.
Yet I was not physically tired — it was rather an aching, oppressive lethargy of mind. My eyes were watering, and I found myself shutting them occasionally to relieve the strain. I wished the sun would come over the top of the mountain.
Then I saw something extraordinary — and horrible. It was a toad — gray, fat, ugly. It was squatting beside the a rock at the side of the trail, rubbing itself against the rough stone. One eye was turned toward me — or, rather, the place where the eye should have been. There was no eye — there was only a slimy little hollow.
The toad moved its ungainly body back and forth, sawing its head against the rock. It kept uttering harsh little croaks of pain — and in a moment it had withdrawn from the stone and was dragging itself across the trail at my feet.
I stood looking at the stone, nauseated. The gray surface of rock was bedaubed with whitish streaks of fetor, and the shredded bits of the toad’s eye. Apparently the toad had deliberately ground out its protruding eyes against the rock.
It crept out of sight beneath a bush, leaving a track of slime in the dust of the trail. I involuntarily shut my eyes and rubbed them — and suddenly jerked down my hands, startled at the roughness with which my fists had been digging into my eye-sockets. Lancing pain shot through my temples. Remembering the itching, burning sensation in my eyes, I shuddered a little. Had the same sort of torture caused the toad deliberately to blind itself? My God!
I ran on up the trail. Presently I passed a cabin — probably the one from which Todd had telephoned, for I saw wires running from the roof to a tall pine. I knocked at the door. No answer, I continued my ascent.
Suddenly there came an agonized scream, knife-edged and shrill, and the rapid thudding of footsteps. I stopped, listening. Someone was running down the trail toward me — and behind him I could hear others racing, shouting as they ran. Around a bend in the trail a man came plunging.
He was a Mexican, and his black-stubbled face was set in lines of terror and agony. His mouth was open in a square of agony, and insane screams burst from his throat. But it wasn’t that that sent me staggering back out of his path, cold sweat bursting out on my body.
His eyes had been gouged out, and twin trickles of blood dripped down his face from black, gaping hollows.
As it happened, there was no need for me to halt the blinded man’s frantic rush. At the curve of the trail he smashed into a tree with frightful force, and momentarily stood upright against the trunk. Then very slowly he sagged down and collapsed in a limp huddle. There was a great splotch of blood on the rough bark. I went over to him quickly.
Four men came running toward me. I recognized Arthur Todd and Denton, his assistant. The other two were obviously laborers. Todd jerked to a halt.
“Ross! Good God — is he dead?”
Swiftly he bent over to examine the unconscious man. Denton and I stared at each other. Denton was a tall, strongly-built man, with a shock of black hair and a broad mouth that was generally expanded in a grin. Now his face bore a look of horrified disbelief.
“God, Ross — he did it right before our eyes,” Denton said through pale lips. “He just let out a scream, threw up his hands and tore his eyes out of their sockets.” He shut his own eyes at the memory.
Todd got up slowly. Unlike Denton, he was small, wiry, nervously energetic, with a lean, brown face and amazingly alert eyes. “Dead,” he said.
“What’s happened?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. “What’s wrong, Todd? Was the man insane?”
And all the while I had a picture of that fat toad tearing out its eyes against a rock.
Todd shook his ehad, his brows drawn together in a frown. “I don’t know. Ross, do your eyes feel — odd?”
A shiver ran through me. “Damned odd. Burning and itching. I’ve been rubbing them continually on the way up.”
“So have the men,” Denton told me. “So have we. See?” He pointed to his eyes, and I saw that they were red-rimmed and inflamed.
The two laborers — Mexicans — came over to us. One of them said something in Spanish. Todd barked a sharp order, and they fell back, hesitating.
Then, without further parley, they took to their heels down the trail. Denton started forward with an angry shout, but Todd caught his arm. “No use,” he said quickly. “We’ll have to get the bells out ourselves.”
“You found the last one?” I asked, as he turned back up the trail.
“We’ve found them — all three,” Todd said somberly. “Denton and I dug up the last one ourselves. And we found this, too.”
He drew a dirt-encrusted, greenish metal tube from his pocket and gave it to me. Within the cylinder was a sheet of parchment in a remarkably good state of preservation. I puzzled over the archaic Spanish script.
“Let me,” Todd said, taking it carefully. He translated expertly.
“ ‘On the twenty-first of June, by the favor of God, the attack by the pagan Mutsunes having been repulsed, the three bells cast a month ago were buried in this secret cave and the entrance sealed — ’ but a landslide obviously opened it up again recently,” Todd broke off to explain.
“Inasmuch as evil witchcraft was practiced by the Indians, when we suspended and rang the bells, the evil demon whom the Mutsunes call Zu-che-quon was called from his dwelling beneath the mountains and brought the black night and the cold death among us. The large cross was overthrown, and many of the people were possessed of the evil demon, so that the few of us who retained our senses were hard put to it to overcome their fiend- inspired attack and remove the bells.
“Afterward we gave thanks to God for our preservation, and gave aid to those who were injured in the fray. The souls of those who perished were commended to God, and we prayed that the San Antonio would soon arrive to relieve us from this cruel solitude. I charge whomever may find these bells, should it not please God to allow me to fulfill this duty, to send them to Rome, in the name of our master the king. May God guard him.’ ”
Todd paused, and carefully returned the parchment to its case. “Junipero Serra signed it,” he said quietly.
