Lang arrived at Panama, hot and sticky and full of mixed expectations. He had not delayed a day; he had taken the first steamer for Colon, with the remaining two thousand dollars from Yuma Oil belted round his waist. From Colon he had traveled by the Isthmus Railway and his mind was still dazed with heat and hurry, and the unfamiliar Spanish talk, and the wild scenery of the Isthmus and the glimpses of the great engineering work that seemed the sole interest in everybody’s mind. And he scarcely ventured to foresee what he might be going to meet.
He had not the slightest idea how to find Morrison, but he was told that he could find anything at the Hotel Tivoli. Taking a taxi at the landing stage therefore, he was driven to this ornate establishment, where he found that Morrison’s name was indeed known. He was not at the hotel, but at Mrs. Leeman’s boarding house, which seemed to be also a well-known institution. Lang engaged a room, had his baggage sent for, and requisitioned the Ford again.
It was half an hour’s drive, by what seemed devious ways. He felt oddly, nervously in suspense. His lips were dry as the car stopped in front of a huge, rambling bungalow, screened on all sides by a vast veranda, heavy with vines and gay with great red blossoms.
He went up the walk. A barefooted Jamaican negro was pottering about some duties at the steps, and he paused to make inquiries. He hardly understood the queer, clipped half-English accent of the servant, but just then a white-dressed figure came quickly around the corner of the house, on the dim veranda. It was Eva.
She stopped short, in silence. As he saw her Lang felt suddenly full of brimming satisfaction, a pervading, full content, such as he had never known before in his life. They gazed at each other in silence, for a single, magnetic instant that seemed full of mysterious implication. Then Lang, a trifle dazed, saw that Eva was holding out her hand and greeting him with hurried words that he barely took in.
“I never thought I would see you again,” he stammered awkwardly.
“You haven’t much faith in me.”
“I have far more faith in you than I have in anything else in the world,” he returned.
She searched his face for a moment, looking almost startled, hesitated, and then turned quickly, still holding his hand as if to guide him.
“Come this way and see father. He’ll be so glad you’ve come. We didn’t look for you for days—the next steamer.”
She conducted him back round the corner of the veranda, and far toward the rear of the building a big man, dressed in white duck, was sitting in a steamer chair, a litter of newspapers around him. He looked up sharply. An immediate look of recognition came over his face, and he put out a big, bony hand.
It was a very different man from the haggard, unshaven, blind-eyed Rockett whom the physician had studied with such intentness on the Cavite; but he recognized that big, grim, but not wholly unkindly countenance, though the piercing gray eyes were, of course, strange to him.
“Your patient again, doctor!” said the explorer, still with a slight stammer and thickness in his articulation.
“Not my patient any more, I hope. You seem to have made a recovery,” said Lang cordially.
“A little shaky, a little t-tongue-tied yet. I was in the—the w-water half an hour, and it d-didn’t d-do me any good. Better, though, than when I used to s-study you through my eyeglasses and t-try to size you up on that damned steamer.”
“So you weren’t unconscious at all. I half suspected it at times,” Lang exclaimed.
“Oh, partly, partly. I was d-dopy a good d-deal. I must have had”—he stopped and seemed to collect himself—“some sort of fit or stroke ashore, when those pirates were—er—cross-questioning me. I didn’t know about being taken to sea—couldn’t make out where I was. Came to myself slowly—couldn’t move at first—afraid to try to speak—decided it was safest to play dead——”
“I think you shouldn’t talk much now,” Lang interposed. “You can tell me all the story when you’re a bit better.”
“Then when I tried to speak to you at the last, wanting to give a message to Eva, I couldn’t get the words together. The——”
“Hush!” Eva put in. “I’ll tell it. Father had seen Floyd a few days before at Biloxi, and knew that he must be hunting him. So he buried the things hurriedly, for fear of anything happening, and he painted the negro. He knew that I would catch the idea. It used to be a game with us, you know—puzzle pictures. Father has been an artist all his life. Isn’t it strange? He was at the bungalow all the time we were in Mobile, and we didn’t know it. There had been some mistake about the dates. He didn’t expect me South till two weeks later—but we’re mixing the story all up. Of course you know why he sent for you now?”
“Well, I might make a guess,” Lang admitted.
“It’s like this,” Morrison began again, haltingly. “I’m getting better fast, but the doctor here says I can’t travel for a week, and that I must avoid exertion for a month. I can guide, but I won’t be much good else. Eva says you’re temporarily out of medical work. Fate has thrown you in with us, and you might as well go the rest of the way. I pay expenses; you’re chief mate, and you get a one-third share of whatever we find. What do you say?”
“There isn’t any doubt about what I’ll say,” said Lang. “It’s a remarkably generous proposition. Too generous, I’m afraid, for I don’t know anything about mining work. But I’ll do my best, and I’ll climb rocks and chop ice till I drop. I suppose,” he added cautiously, “that there isn’t any doubt about the genuineness of the emeralds? I could hardly believe the story.”
“Absolutely none. I had them ex-examined by the best men in Valparaiso. In fact, the word g-got out that I’d made an emerald strike, and I had all sorts of fellows after me. When we start again we’ll have to be secret or we’ll have a fleet trailing us down the coast.”
“By Jove! we may have some one before us,” Lang exclaimed, suddenly remembering. “Carroll has all your maps and photos, and he’s disappeared—Lord knows where.”
“It doesn’t matter. He’ll never find it,” Morrison declared. “It isn’t where any one would think. It’s a wild, g-glacier——”
He stuttered, and stuck fast.
“It’s a wild, rough coast,” Eva took up his words. “Small mountainous islands, a steep slope, and a rainy climate. They had trouble to find anything dry enough to burn for their fires, until they came on an outcrop of coal right on the coast. There’s a long valley running to the sea, and a wall of ice right across it, like a great gate—the head of the glacier that goes away up the mountain to the top, where there’s a pass. It was the pass that made father stop to examine it. He thought there might be traces of an ancient seaport—his prehistoric Chileans, you know.
“The glacier was melting away at the bottom, of course. The valley was choked with gravel and stones that the glacier had cast out through years and years. Here he found an old copper knife, and then he found the emeralds, right at the foot of the ice. They had come out of the ice.”
“Out of the glacier?” Lang exclaimed.
“It’s my belief,” Morrison broke in again, “that the glacier had gathered them up with all their surrounding rock and gravel, somewhere high up the mountain. The ice had torn up an emerald pocket, carried it down slowly, maybe through centuries, till at last it came near the bottom, and was washed out by the melting. Streams of water were flowing out of the glacier wall everywhere.
“Floyd stole the best of the two stones I found. He lied if he said that he was working on shares with me. I was paying him two hundred pesos a month, and nothing more. Those emeralds—would—would have——”
He stuck again, and glanced hopelessly at Eva.
“Father means,” the girl assisted, “that they could have been cut to I don’t know how many hundred carats if they hadn’t been flawed, and they would have been worth at least twenty thousand dollars apiece. He didn’t have them examined till after he was out of the hospital at Valparaiso. He would have gone back then, but he wasn’t strong enough, and besides he didn’t have the money. He had to go North to get that oil stock and sell it. He had bought it for thirty dollars a share, and was told that it would go to one hundred dollars.”
“That reminds me that I have about two thousand dollars from that stock in my belt now,” said Lang.
“Keep it, for the present,” said Morrison. “Plenty of time. We have a week here to wait for me. I’ll tell you the whole story of the thing to-morrow, perhaps, if my tongue loosens up. You must be completely confused with these snatches and scraps.”
There were many points that Lang wanted badly to have explained, but he postponed them. Evening was falling, suddenly, darkly, like a velvet curtain. Over a decorative row of palms in the distance he caught a glimpse of a fiery red streak of sky above the sea. He had heard several other men coming up the steps to the house—no doubt Mrs. Leeman’s boarders. The sudden heavy roar of a steamer approaching the Canal made the dead, moist air vibrate. It was almost dark on the shaded veranda.
“Is is far south of Valparaiso?” he asked. “How do we go?”
“A long way—over a thousand miles. It’s between Punta Reale and La Carolina, about halfway. We must get a comfortable craft; I’m not in condition for roughing it, this time.”
A gong boomed mellow toned from indoors.
“That’s for dinner,” Eva exclaimed. “We’ll let the rest of the story and all the plans wait till to-morrow. Doctor Lang will stay and dine with us, of course. Mrs. Leeman will give you a better dinner than the Tivoli, and afterward you can telephone for a car to go to the hotel.”
Lang did not hesitate to accept, and Mrs. Leeman, a plump and obviously prospering Los Angeles widow, made him welcome. There were three other boarders besides the Morrisons—two young American engineers from the harbor, and the second officer of an American steamer in port, who always spent his days ashore at this house.
The dinner was good, an attempt at American cooking in the tropics, and every one was jovial. Lang felt in tremendous spirits; the future suddenly had turned rainbow colored again. He astonished himself with his own hilarity, and even Morrison released a somewhat saturnine and stammering vein of chaff. Eva said little, laughed, looked happy, and her beauty had come back as vividly as when he first knew her.
Afterward the men went out to the veranda to smoke, and Lang became involved in argument with Findlay, the American officer, as to the effect, on white constitutions, of prolonged living in the tropics. It was cut short, however, by Findlay’s departure. His ship sailed that night, and his leave was over. Morrison also, by medical orders, had to go to bed at nine o’clock, and Lang assisted him to his bedroom, and, returning, telephoned to the hotel for a taxi to be sent immediately.
Eva presently came out of her father’s room, and walked outdoors with him as he waited. It was hot and cloudy; spicy, musky scents seemed to hover in the air. Away in the city a band was playing faintly.
“Your father has placed a great confidence in me,” he said. “I’m going to try to deserve it.”
“He took my word for you. But he’s a good judge of men besides. I think all’s going to be well now. If he says there are emeralds, there will be emeralds. He’s never wrong.”
“And you’ll be rich and I’ll be rich and we’ll all be rich together. What difference will it make, I wonder?”
“Much, to my father. He’ll have proper funds for his work, for the first time.”
“And much to me. Never did I need it more.”
“And nothing at all to me,” she returned. “There’s your car.”
“Good-by, till to-morrow.”
The car roared up; he took her hand. He might have kissed it; in that Spanish country it would have been courtesy. The car flashed a blinding glare over them as it wheeled.
“Come early and lunch with us,” she cried.
He waved his hand back at her as he got into the car, noticing that the side curtains were closed, and the machine exploded into motion again and panted down the dark street.
It was insufferably hot in that closed interior. Lang spoke to the driver, dimly silhouetted against the windshield, but got only a shake of the head. He resolved to endure it for the short ride to the hotel—too jubilant, besides, to care much about small inconveniences.
The rickety little flivver rattled and pounded, mostly through dark or ill-lighted ways. It seemed to take a long time to reach the hotel. He spoke again to the chauffeur, who seemed to understand no English; and then the taxi slowed down and stopped. The door was opened, and a man pushed darkly inside.
“What the——” ejaculated Lang, amazed at this intrusion.
The driver left his seat and came quickly to the other door. In dismay Lang recollected the two thousand dollars in his belt. He carried no weapon, and as he still hesitated, a strap dropped neatly over his head and shoulders and drew tight, pinioning his arms firmly to his side.
“Got him, Louie? Hold him a minute,” said a voice he recognized.
Too late, Lang kicked out and struggled desperately. There was no room for defense. In the darkness of that hot little compartment, sweat streaming down all three of them, they forced him back, down on the cushions, and Louie sat down firmly on his chest. Half smothered, Lang let out a tremendous yell for help.
“Cheese that!” Carroll commanded. “There ain’t a cop within a mile, anyway. You damn’ fool, we’ve had our eyes on you ever since you struck Panama. I know the old professor’s handed you all the dope. What do you say, now? Come in with us, share alike, or——”
“Or what? Damn you, Carroll! What do you take me for?” Lang spluttered indignantly, too angry to be frightened. “You’re out of it. Why can’t you drop the thing?”
In answer he felt a cloth dropped across his face, then after a gurgling sound he smelled a most familiar odor—the scent of chloroform. He flung his head back, turned it from side to side, threw off the drugged towel. It is not easy to chloroform a man against his will, and he struggled so violently that Carroll let go, cast an impatient word to his assistant, and busied himself with something taken from his pocket.
The cloth had fallen off and Lang breathed deeply, gathering his forces. It was only ten seconds. Carroll turned back, picked up Lang’s defenseless arm, and he felt a penetrating prick.
“A hypodermic!” he thought, with dismay.
He shrieked again at the top of his voice, but he felt the numb influence of the drug passing through his veins, deadening his will to live. In spite of his resolution he grew limp; the sense of struggle blurred, grew dreamy. Consciousness passed out of him.