Adventure Magazine Cover — page 178: what you’re looking at

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

742 city and be within ten steps of a thousand houses and yet see none of them. I have passed through such, and when a little boy with my father he showed me one of the greatest of all the temples and said that some day he would run away from the hacienda and we would travel to the heart of the forest where there was a city of our people that still lived.” It was the old familiar evasive legend which one hears throughout the length and breadth of the continent; the circumstan- tial tale that somewhere in the depths of the forest there is a city where some of the ancient race still live cut off from the world by the wilderness. Suddenly the American realized that the cripple was taking the saddle from his pony, and he cried: “Here, mozo, what are we going to do? This is no place to camp—no water.” “The sefior does not know.” said the cripple gently. ‘‘From a hole in the stone seat of E] Tigre Grande runs fine water. Our horses are tired and no one at the hacienda can find the way here but me. Let Don Felipe ride on—let him ride to purgatory—he can not come here!” Out of the door of the old temple ran a little stream and it cascaded in a deeply worn channel down to the level on which they stood. The freed pony was even now wending his way to the little pool formed at the base of the mound. How, without a hidden pump, could that water be made to flow from that high point? Within miles there was no land that was as high. It could not be a spring. ‘All right, my man,” said Haskell, yield- ing. “By the way, what is your name, how did you happen to come to my help and what is the meaning = “The sefior serves himself best by the single question that calls for the single answer,” said the little man with a queer bow. ‘‘Iam Juan and my father was Pedro Juan and my grandfather was Juan Ramon. We have been of the hacienda since the coming of the true religion and the days of the old wars. But my mother was from the hacienda Ortegas and when their lands were taken away by the Governor my mother bade me see to the mother of the Little One.” “The mother of Sefiorita Emalia?” im- quired Haskell. “Si, senor. Now I loseall things for ber.” “Howe” Adventure “Your friend comes here to take away from the Mayas their forest, and Don Felipe and his sons ride out with him as they rode out with you.” “Ts he dead? Do you know anything, Juane”’ “They rode out; they rode back this morning, and he is dead or they would not have come back. Itisasit should be. You should have been killed also.” Haskell looked at him aghast. “T should be killed! Why?” ‘Don Felipe had the papers to say that you would take away our forest.” ‘No, Juan, not your forest; just some of the trees. And Don Felipe has been paid tens of thousands of pesetas to allow me to do it.” “Then he lied to us!” It seemed queer to Haskell that Don Felipe, having the absolute power, even to life and death, over the peons of his remote hacienda should have taken the trouble to explain or lie to them; but he put it among the other mysteries of thisstrange adventure. “Tell me vy ho tried to kill me from the gallery of the house, Juan.” ‘Ernesto. You shot him a while ago.”’ ‘And why, if you think, or did think, I should be killed, did you ride out to-day and help to save my life?” ‘Because the Little One came to me and said the Ortegas needed that I should ride ahead of you, that I should kill Don Felipe if necessary and take you to the runaway Mayas in the forest whence no man ever comes back to the hacienda even though he starves.” ‘The sefiorita told you to kill Don Felipe if you had to do so to save me?” Si, senor.” “Would you have done it?” From where he lay on the grass, Juan turned so that he displayed his withered arm, drawn face, misshapen leg. ‘When I was in the woods with my father, he had run away with me, but when I and my brothers were starving we went back and Don Felipe’s father beat my father to death before all the hacienda. Me they tied up and let little Don Felipe beat me till he was so weary that he wept. Since that day I have been like this.” Haskell could not repress a shudder and he found himself looking forward to the next time Don Felipe Calderon y Ortegas was within whip-range. GCOMmIGDOOKSEEO S|