When they walked across the drawbridge at the nearest of the four great gates of the city, and passed under the portcullis, escorted by a dozen of the guards of the high priest Calaman, the latter came forward with a smile and bade them welcome.
“Isn’t he the limit?” muttered Patsy. “Any one would think we were friends of his.”
Nick Carter gave Patsy a warning look, and addressed Calaman in calm, firm tones:
“Whether we are welcome or not, Calaman, is not of so much importance as to know whether you are prepared to deliver to us the white man you have in Shangore.”
“My son!” broke in Jefferson Arnold. “That’s whom we want.”
Calaman held up his hands with a deprecating gesture, as he smiled.
“My white brothers might know that I would not ask them to come back unless I had something to offer that would please them,” he exclaimed. “We did not understand each other before, and that was why there was fighting and death, when all I desired was peace and good feeling.”
“Old liar!” murmured Chick.
“Your former apartments in the palace are ready for you,” continued the priest. “Will you honor me by taking possession? I will send you food and wine. You need them after your journey. After that, we will go to the public square.”
“Why?” asked the detective.
“This is the day of the Festival of the Golden Scarab,” was the reply. “We ask you to take part in the celebration by showing us again how the death sticks do their work. Will you not do it?”
“Where is the white man we want—he who is the son of my friend, here?”
Nick Carter was resolved not to be turned aside from the main purpose of their coming, persistently as the wily priest endeavored to lead the conversation into other channels.
“He shall be delivered to you in good time,” answered Calaman. “In the meanwhile, you have my assurance that he is well and enjoying treatment such as you would desire.”
They had to be content with this for the time being.
“We shall be ready in half an hour,” Nick Carter announced abruptly, as he walked away to the apartments they had occupied before.
Calaman was as good as his word in reference to the meal he had mentioned, and though they had had a frugal breakfast already up in the rocks, they were quite willing to attack the well-served repast provided for them now.
In exactly half an hour two soldiers came to the door and made deep salaams.
“Very well!” was Nick Carter’s response to this silent notification. “Lead on!”
As they filed out of the room, Chick remarked, in a low tone, as he glanced back at the remains of the meal on the table:
“We’ve got to hand it to the old man for the square meal he puts up. I don’t know what we’ve been eating, but it was as good as anything I ever got in New York.”
Jai Singh snorted rather derisively.
“In my part of the country,” he boomed, “when we feed guests, we provide fat sheep, which are roasted over a very hot fire, and put before those who eat, with rice, raisins, and many fruits that are gathered for the occasion.”
“It looks to me as if these people intend us to be the sheep this time,” smiled Nick Carter. “They intend to roast us over a hot fire—if we let them.”
“That’s right,” chuckled Patsy. “If we let them. Gee! There’s going to be a hot time in their old town to-day, and we’ll be fixing the fire.”
Nothing could repress Patsy Garvan’s bubbling spirits at the prospect of a battle. He liked fighting for its own sake.
The possibility of his being beaten never occurred to Patsy. That was the reason he was nearly always on the winning side.
The two tall guards, carrying their spears in military fashion, and never looking behind, were several yards in front. Nick Carter turned and addressed all the members of his little band:
“Don’t overlook the odds against us. Our four coolies—who could be depended on to keep up their end in a mêlée when told to drive ahead—are prisoners somewhere in this place. Then Calaman has all our cartridges. We can’t do much for ourselves or for Leslie till we get hold of our ammunition.”
“We’ll get it,” declared Patsy, with his usual confidence.
“We’ve got to do it,” added Chick. “We are inside the walls of Shangore, and there is nothing for us but to fight. We got out before, and we can do it again. But, as you say, chief, we must find the cartridges.”
When they reached the courtyard of the palace, they found Calaman waiting for them, surrounded by more than a score of his saturnine guards.
“I am glad to see you have brought your death sticks with you,” was the priest’s greeting. “We will go to the public square, where you may show me again how the sticks kill at a distance.”
They marched through the streets of the city, and the white men were struck by the large numbers of people who were moving about, evidently in holiday dress.
Their garments were all of Eastern style, of course, but there was so many different cloths, cut into such varied designs, that Nick Carter told himself he had never seen a more striking sartorial display even on Fifth Avenue on a bright afternoon.
“You will not kill men for me with your stick, I suppose?” asked the priest, rather wistfully. “I could have three or four of them tied to those stakes over there, and your death sticks could be tried on them.”
This cold-blooded suggestion made Patsy grind his teeth.
Nick Carter shook his head, and answered that he certainly could not consent to do murder in that way.
“Well, I felt sure of that,” returned the priest. “So I have something else for you. Look!”
Nick Carter shuddered as he gazed at the gruesome object at which Calaman pointed.
Between two stakes driven into the ground was strung a long rope. In the middle of the rope was a cord hanging down a little way, and on the end of it was the shriveled head of a human being.
The head had been embalmed, dried, and treated in the secret way known to the people of this strange country, and was not bigger than a good-sized orange.
There it hung, swaying gently to and fro in the slight breeze, occasionally spinning around, as if it were inspecting everything in the square in its own mysterious, grim way.
“Can you hit that with your death stick?” asked the priest.
“Yes,” was Nick’s prompt reply.
“Even while it moves a little?”
“Yes.”
“Gee! I wouldn’t have said that,” grumbled Patsy, in a low tone. “You might as well have had it as easy as you could get it.”
“Then let my white brothers raise their sticks and do it,” directed Calaman, stepping back a little.
“One moment!” called out the detective. “Before we can use our sticks, we must have those little brass cases that you took from us when we were here before.”
Two of the heavy boxes containing cartridges which had come into possession of the priest when Nick and his party had been in the city on the previous day were on the ground, and Nick had seen them.
“Break open that box!” ordered Calaman, pointing to the one he meant.
One of the guards, with his spear, pried off the lid. Nick Carter at once took one of the smaller boxes in the outer case and stuffed it into one of his outside pockets.
The small box contained two hundred and fifty cartridges.
“Get some!” he directed his comrades laconically.
Chick, Patsy, Jefferson Arnold, Adil, and Jai Singh all obeyed. Each was soon well supplied with cartridges, while the big box was practically empty.
Calaman regarded them suspiciously as they grabbed the cartridges. But he did not say anything. Doubtless he felt that he had the whole party in his power, and he could afford to let them have all of these little brass things they wanted.
“First trick to us!” mumbled Jefferson. “And my rifle magazine is plumb full, as well. We’ll make the old scalawag sit up before we’re through with him. Let ’er go, Carter!”
The detective dropped to one knee, and seemingly without taking careful aim, sent three shots at the swinging head.
Crack! crack! crack!
Every bullet had struck the head and was embedded in it. The process of drying and embalming had given it a toughness which permitted the bullets to sink in, without cracking or destroying its shape.
“Holy mackerel!” muttered Patsy Garvan. “That’s a sickening thing. But the chief plugged it, all the same.”
The detective got up and brushed his knee with his hand.
“Go and see for yourself,” he said to the priest. “I have used three of these little cases, and you will find a bit of lead in that skull for each one. Had three of your guards been standing there, I could have killed them as easily as I hit that head.”
Calaman, accompanied by two of his guards, walked across the open space to the swinging head—it was rather more than two hundred yards from where Nick Carter had stood to shoot—and examined it closely.
The three bullets were there. The priest could see them plainly. There had been no deception by the white man with the death stick.
“Stay there, Calaman!” called out Nick. “Stand three paces to the right of the head, and watch. The death sticks will do more than you have already seen.”
The priest did as he was told, with a wondering expression in his deep-set dark eyes. The detective turned to Chick, and spoke in low, earnest tones:
“Blaze away at it, Chick. And be sure to hit it squarely in the middle, if you can.”
“I can do it,” replied Chick. “I’ll drive my first bullet farther in with two others. How will that do?”
“Capital, if you can manage it. I want to teach that old heathen a lesson that will make him wonder where it is going to stop.”
Nick Carter was pumping fresh cartridges into his own magazine as he spoke. There should be no chance of his being caught with an unloaded rifle while he had ammunition within reach, at all events.
“I can manage it,” grunted Chick, as he took careful aim. “I’m glad I’ve always kept up swinging-target practice. At some of those shooting galleries in New York they have me barred out,” he added, with a grin.
“Wait a moment!” roared Calaman. “I’ll come away while you are using your death sticks. They might go the wrong way.”
“There’s no danger if you don’t move,” Nick Carter called back to him. “Tell your guards to keep away.” Then, to Chick: “Now, old man, show them what you have.”
The guards moved away in a hurry, glad of the excuse to get out of what seemed to them a very dangerous situation. But Calaman stuck to his place. There was no cowardice in the old priest.
Chick was as good as his word.
Calaman involuntarily lifted his hands in astonishment as he saw that there was only one fresh hole, but that it went far into the skull—so nearly through, that some of the sand with which it was tightly stuffed filtered out at the back.
The priest turned toward the white men, just as Nick Carter spoke again, in a loud tone, as a new idea came to him.
“Stand where you are,” he requested of Calaman. “I’ll show you that the death stick can be made to strike closely without hurting anybody when we ask it to do so.”
Calaman stood still, as if he did not quite understand what was meant. Then Nick fired three shots so quickly that they sounded like the roll of a drum—one to the right, one to the left, and another a foot above the head of the priest. All three bullets just shaved him.
As the detective held up a hand and smiled, to indicate that it was all over, Calaman stalked toward him. He was outwardly calm, whatever may have been his thoughts. The old fellow was a past master in hiding his emotions.
“You held my life in your hands,” he said. “I saw that each of those little metal cases meant death, and I heard the whir as they passed by my head. Now, show me how to use them, and perhaps I will let the white man you seek go free. Besides, I may give you all many presents.”
“You say ‘perhaps’ you will let our friend, the white man in your city, go free,” rejoined Nick Carter. “Do you forget that you promised he should be delivered to us? Also you said that there was no enmity between us. I am showing you how we use our death sticks. I would not do that for one whom I believed to be an enemy.”
Calaman smiled inscrutably, and his dark eyes were almost hidden in their sockets for an instant. He looked the incarnation of cunning and malevolence.
“Show it all to me, and your friend shall go free to-night, in honor of the feast of the Golden Scarab,” he promised smoothly.
“Very well,” replied Nick Carter. But he was not blinded in the least by the priest’s sudden acquiescence.
“He doesn’t mean to do it,” whispered Patsy. “He isn’t on the level, and I know it.”
“Of course he isn’t,” returned Nick. “But don’t talk. We shall win in the end.”
“You bet!” breathed Patsy Garvan confidently.