The Argosy, Vol. 75, No. 4 — page 182: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

884 Later four or five pieces of gaily tinted pottery were scratched out of the hole, together with some scraps of | bright iron and a little heap of brass tinsel. When they were cast to one side as worthless and the search re- sumed, the Spaniard sprang upon them and piled them in a little heap. The tawdry things gleamed brightly in the dying light, and he stooped over them, chattering and jibbering in his madness. “Where is your wealth?” Jenkins snarled at him when long search had shown that there was absolutely noth- ing in the place but the few gaudy fragments that had already been un- earthed. Pedro paid no attention to him, but sat with his arms about his pile of precious wealth, grimacing into the face of his tormentor, “Tt is mine,” he shrieked shrilly— “mine! Mine, I tell you! I carried it here by myself and alone I[ buried it, and I will not give it to—” Crack! It was the sharp report of a pistol. The Spaniard plunged forward and lay face down upon the sparkling bits of tinsel and the tawdry-colored glass, the red of his heart’s blood dabbling the fallen leaves. His hands and feet beat the earth for a moment and all was still. Jenkins’s hoarse voice broke the si- lence. ‘‘ That’s what he deserves,” he said as he quietly reloaded his long pis- tol and laid it back in his sash. “ That’s what he deserves for bringing us forty miles out of our way on purpose to un- earth an idiot’s treasure. Fall in, men!” Back we started on our homeward trip. CHAPTHR— Xt. CASTLES IN SPAIN. I was ill— mentally and physically ill. The scene in the clearing was enough to upset the nerves of any man not inured to cold, deliberate murder,. THE ARGOSY. and my nerves were already stretched to almost breaking tension. Above all, I could not help enter- taining the feeling that Oakes and I were in some degree responsible for the death of the idiot whose love of wealth had led him to bury in this secluded place the bits of tinsel and pottery that he deemed so priceless. All day long we tramped back through the swamps, following as well as we could the trail that we had made two days before, and all day long the men cursed and raved in their bitter disappointment. But for that last scene of all, the causeless murder of the inoffensive Spaniard over his pile of fool’s gold, I could have sympathized in a way with them, but now I heartily wished the whole lot of them seven fathoms deep in Tophet. Yet—they had saved our lives, and that thought recurred to me a dozen times. Rough and brutal as they were to others, to Oakes and me they had been uniformly kind. It took us three days to do that forty miles. There were times when we sank hip-deep in the stinking black mud that clung to us like glue, from which we were only saved from a hor- rible death by a friendly belt’ flung to us by a comrade, himself to be rescued later when a slip from a mangrove- root meant certain death. The great horny - eyelidded alliga- tors, basking on the mud - banks, yawned cavernously at us, and the jungle-crows and mangrove-hens, the evil genii of the place, croaked and jeered at us as they fluttered out of our path. The whole place seemed to emit a graveyard dampness, and the way was hard and long, so that we were very tired and weary when at last we left the swampland and came out upon the cultivated ground above the city. The men were about to run for- ward, when Jenkins threw up a re- straining hand. “We left four ships at anchor off EORMICLO@ CS (C@)