CHAPTER III.
THE WITCH DOCTOR.
It was a grisly object to be encountered so unexpectedly, and, as the light of the lanterns flickered upon it, Patsy’s overwrought imagination made him think it was preparing to get up.
“Gee! I wish I was out of this!” ejaculated Patsy involuntarily.
“Why?” whispered Chick. “That can’t hurt you.”
“How do I know that? Look on his chest. There’s some kind of tattooing. Looks like a lobster.”
“It’s a beetle,” corrected Jefferson Arnold.
“The Golden Scarab!” explained Jai Singh, in his deep, resonant voice. “You see that they are on the walls, too.”
“You’re right,” agreed Nick Carter. “There are etchings of beetles all over the walls and ceilings. But they are mixed up with men and trees and rocks. I did not detect the beetles at once.”
Indeed, the drawings had been so skillfully made that it was only after looking at them a second time that one saw how many representations of the strange god of these people there were.
Nick Carter stepped in front of the others, to inspect closely the still form on the stone table.
He noted that the table—a mere slab—was long and narrow. There was room on it for the body of a tall man, and not much more.
The dead man had nothing on but a loin cloth, and the skin was much lighter than that of the ordinary East Indian. Indeed, it was more like that of a Chinese, although taller than most Chinamen. Even without the head, it could be determined that the man in life had been of considerable height.
“Dead a long time, from its general appearance,” muttered Nick Carter. “But the embalming has been done with Oriental skillfulness.”
Indeed, the preserving was so wonderful that the figure looked more like an image in some kind of polished dark marble than something of human clay.
Some glistening, lacquerlike substance had been employed, which, although colorless and transparent, kept out all the air. It had hardened after being applied as a liquid, and was now like glass to the touch.
No living person was in sight, and the invaders determined to go on farther.
They had come upon a mystery, and not one of them was willing to go back until they should discover the solution.
Patsy had recovered from his first shock of horror, and now was bending over the table, studying intently the sketch of the Golden Scarab on the breast of the corpse.
“Rather a nasty thing!” he remarked. “I don’t mind seeing a man who has been knocked out in a fair scrap, even if it has killed him. But this business of a fellow losing his head and being iced over—— Well, he isn’t any wedding cake, I’ll tell you those.”
“That will do, Patsy,” interposed Nick Carter. “You need not lose your own head over it. The cave extends a long way yet, from the look of it. We are going. Do you want to come along?”
“Ugh!”
Patsy grunted at the very thought of being left alone with this gruesome thing, and was close by the side of his chief on the instant.
Farther and farther into the strange tunnel they pushed their way, and at every step were confirmed in their first conviction that it was a place used for unholy rites by a strange people.
There were other stone slabs like the one on which lay the headless body, but all of them were empty. They counted nine in all.
The cave ended abruptly a few paces beyond the last of the nine slabs. At least, that was Nick Carter’s first impression. Then he saw that there was a narrow passage which went on into the darkness, but how far he could not conjecture.
“Are we going to squeeze in there?” whispered Patsy.
“Yes.”
Nick Carter had already entered when he answered, and was working his way through, his elbows at his sides, so as to take up as little room as possible.
“Don’t make any noise,” he whispered to his followers. “We don’t know what we are going to run into. We may find a hundred men back in this place for anything we can tell.”
“I only hope that blackguard, Pike, will be among them,” growled Jefferson Arnold. “I wouldn’t care how many others there might be if I could get my fingers on him.”
“We must wait and see,” replied Nick.
He had gone about a hundred feet, the others close behind, when the floor sloped down steeply, and they had to walk on their heels to keep upright.
“I see a light a little distance ahead,” he whispered. “It is red, as if it came from a fire. Put out the lanterns, and don’t talk until we know what this is all about.”
Nick had stopped abruptly, and he was listening, in the hope that something might come to his ears which would explain the mystery.
When the lanterns were darkened, all they could make out was the red glare some way in front, while a faint aromatic odor, as if spices were burning, drifted to them in fitful gusts.
All at once the tunnel widened, and they were able to stand side by side and move about more freely.
They found themselves at the top of a flight of shallow steps—not more than three or four—looking down into an almost circular cavern, in the middle of which was a large brazier, full of live coals.
That accounted at once for the red glare, and soon they saw how the fragrance of burning spices had come to them.
Seated in front of the brazier was a man, clad in a loose white robe which he had permitted to slip down to his waist. His back was toward the intruders, and he seemed quite unconscious of their presence.
So intent was he on his work, whatever it might be, that when Patsy made quite a noisy shuffle in his effort to get a better view, the strange being did not turn around.
They could see his elbows moving, as if he were kneading something in the big caldron that rested on the brazier, and from time to time he took something from a cloth by his side and threw a handful of powdery stuff into the brazier.
When he did this, a great splash of flame and smoke shot upward, and the whole place was filled with a pungent odor that threatened to make Patsy break into a terrific sneeze.
“If you do, I’ll stuff a handkerchief in your mouth,” whispered Nick Carter, as he saw the danger. “Pinch your nose if you can’t keep it back in any other way.”
“Look at the roof, chief!” murmured Chick, in Nick’s ear. “What are those things hanging to that crossbar?”
“Merciful heavens!” was the detective’s gasping exclamation. “This is awful!”
The whole roof of the cavern was blackened by smoke, and festoons of soot hung down several feet in length, like black cobwebs. In the middle of the smoke, hanging from an iron bar, were several shriveled round things, varying in size from an orange to a large grapefruit.
Nick Carter saw what the things were, but he did not say anything.
“What’s this stuff on the floor?” whispered Patsy, the irrepressible. “Feels like sand.”
“I guess it is sand,” returned Jefferson Arnold, as he leaned forward to look. “It shines like sea sand. But what I’d like to know is what that gentleman is doing.”
Nick Carter did not reply, but a look of understanding had come into his eyes. He shuddered as he glanced up again to the round things hanging to the crossbar in the smoke and soot.
“It is a witch doctor,” said Jai Singh. “He makes medicine. With my own people we cure men like these with the spear before they go too far and try to make trouble. A medicine man should not be allowed to know too much, or he will do harm.”
“So you just kill them and get them out of the way, eh?” observed Jefferson Arnold. “Not a bad idea! It might help the United States if they would do the same thing with some of our politicians at home.”
They watched the man bending over his caldron and brazier for at least ten minutes before he leaned back and held at arm’s length the thing he had been kneading over the fire.
He scrutinized it with the air of an artist looking over a sketch he had just made. Then he made some slight alterations and held it out again.
Nick observed that there was a low couch, with a roll of skins, at one side of the cavern, and that a pitcher and some coarse cakes lay beside it on the floor.
“He must live alone,” remarked Chick. “A cheerful existence, I don’t think.”
Patsy Garvan could not hold back his curiosity any longer. He pushed his way past the others, stole down the shallow steps, and tiptoed across the white sand until he was close behind the man.
He clapped his hand to his mouth to stifle a cry.
What Patsy had seen in the strange creature’s skinny fingers was the head of a man—a man with a light-colored beard, hair, and eyebrows. The head had been reduced to the size of an orange.
The head was not artificial. A single glance was enough to assure him of that. No, it was a real head, but in miniature.
The things Nick Carter had noted hanging to the crossbar were human heads drying in the smoke!
In spite of Patsy’s endeavor to keep back his ejaculation of horror, he had made sound enough to break the spell which had overhung the place.
The man at the brazier leaped to his feet in a flash, at the same time whipping out an immense two-edged knife of portentous length and sharpened to a needle point.
The fellow was big and powerful, although he had not seemed so when crouched over the fire. His hair was tinged with gray and his black eyes were sunk in their sockets. But he was full of furious energy.
With a roar of savage anger, he charged at Patsy Garvan.
But Patsy was too much on the alert to be there when his foe got to where he had been. The medicine man missed Patsy altogether. Then he found himself in the sinewy hands of Nick Carter.
The detective had seized him just below the elbows and was holding his hands to his sides. Chick raised his revolver, to knock him senseless if he should break loose from his captor.
“I have him safe,” cried Nick Carter. “Don’t hurt him. We want him alive.”
“You do, eh?” mumbled Patsy Garvan. “Well, I wouldn’t want him, alive or dead, either.”