Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 12.djvu/12

1090 mystery that colored his thoughts and dreams for the remainder of his life.

The night was clear but moonless. The party climbed uncertainly in darkness up a scarp of boulders and spurs of primitive rock. The landlord picked his way toward a clump of calisaya trees silhouetted against the sky. The chill air was shot with the fragrance of mountain violets. The climbers lent each other hands until the landlord reached a protruding root and then everybody scrambled up. Pethwick dropped down breathless at the foot of the tree, his heart beating heavily. At first he was faintly amused at his host's promise of a portent, but this amusement vanished presently amid the solemnity of night and the mountains.

The very stars above him wore the strange aspect of the Southern constellations. Against their glimmer the Andes heaved mighty shoulders. Peak beyond peak, they stood in cold blackness, made more chill and mysterious by the pallor of snow-fields.

The whole group shivered in silence for several minutes. At last M. Demetriovich asked with a shake in his Spanish:

“Well, amigo, what is there to see?”

“Wait,” began the landlord.

At that moment a star shot far out against the blackness.

“Alla!” gasped the Peruvian.

Pethwick shivered and grinned. He had brought them up to see a shooting star.

“But wait!” begged their host, sensing the engineer's mirth.

Almost at once from where the star seemed to strike arose a faint, glowing haze as indefinite as the Milky Way. It must have been miles distant. In front of it two or three massifs were outlined and others, farther away, were dimly truncated by its radiance.

The huésped drew a long breath. “Now there lies the Rio Infiernillo,” he chattered. “It is a land from which no man returns alive. I have known many men to go, señores, thinking surely there must be great treasure where so much danger lay—and there may be, señores. No man can say. Every man has his opinion about the matter. I will tell frankly what mine is—”

He paused, evidently waiting for some one to urge his opinion.

Instead, Standifer spoke up:

“My opinion is it's a meteor and a phosphorescent display which sometimes follows.”

The landlord laughed through the darkness with immense scorn of such a puerile opinion.

“What is yours?” inquired Pethwick.

“Señores,” defined the tavern-keeper solemnly, “that stream is called the Rio Infiernillo for a very good reason. For there every night comes the devil to dig gold to corrupt the priests, and—and, of course, the Protestants, too,” he added charitably. “But he can never do it, Señores. Let him dig till he scoops down the mountains and reaches his own country, which is the source of the Rio Infiernillo— he will never do it!”

“Has any one ever seen where he has dug?” asked Pethwick, amused again.

“Si, señor.”

“I thought you said no one ever went over there and got back alive,” observed Pethwick carelessly. A slight pause; then the landlord explained:

“This man only lived a few minutes after he fell into my door. I saw him. His hair was white. He was burned. I heard his last words. No one else heard him.”

This was uttered with such solemnity that Pethwick never knew whether it was an account of some weird tragedy of the mountains or whether it was cut out of whole cloth.

That night after Pethwick had gone to bed in the upper story of the hostelry, while the laughing and drinking flowed steadily below, it occurred to him that it was odd, after all, that the landlord should have led them on such a clamber to see a shooting star and a haze—and the two phenomena should have occurred so promptly.

N the following night another landlord led them out on the same mission and showed them the same set of wonders. His explanation was even more fantastic than the first.

Before the party retired that second night, Pethwick asked of M. Demetriovich:

“Professor, what is the probability that two meteors should perform the same evolutions in the same quarter of the sky and apparently strike in about the same place on two nights in succession?”

“I'd thought of that problem,” returned the savant yawning. “In fact, I have set down some tentative figures on the subject.” Here he referred to a little note-book. “It is roughly one chance in two-million.”

“Small,” observed Pethwick.

“That was for the stars alone. For two stars to fall in the same region, each time followed by a phosphorescence, diminishes the probabiltiy to one chance in eight trillion.”

Pethwick whistled softly.

“In fact, it was not a meteorite we saw,” concluded the professor, crawling into bed.

ABLO PASCA shouted something from perhaps a hundred yards up the trail. He was hidden from the string of toiling riders by a fold in the precipice. Pethwick looked ahead and saw two vultures launch themselves out over the abyss. One swung back down the face of the mountain and passed within forty feet of the party, its feathers whistling, its bald, whitish head turning for a look at the intruders and its odor momentarily tainting the cold wind.

A moment later the engineer saw the two guides had dismounted and their mules were snorting and jerking on the very edge of the precipice. The men themselves were staring at something and Pasca seemed almost as panic-stricken as the animals. The unquietness spread rapidly down the string of baggage-carriers.

Pethwick slid off his mount and hurried forward, slipping inside the llamas and dodging past the uncertain heels of the mules. He came out by the side of Pablo to a queer, not to say gruesome sight. In the air circled eight or ten vultures. They had been frightened from a row of skeletons, which