The Human Zero. The Science Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner

Chapter 1 Victim of a Vampire Mind

If you are going to understand this story, you have got to visualize his eyes as I saw them there in that Mexicali dance hall.

I have gazed into the eyes of a swaying rattlesnake. I have seen the eyes of a mountain lion reflect a phosphorescent green from the darkness beyond my camp fire. I have watched the eyes of a killer, crazed with the blood lust, his hand clawing for the holstered weapon at his side.

But I have never seen eyes that affected me as did the eyes of the man who sought me out there in that place which is known as “Cantina Gold Dollar Bar.”

His eyes were gray, but not the gray of the desert. It was as though his eyes had been washed with aluminium paint. They glittered with a metallic luster, and they seemed to be all the same color — if you could call it a color.

When he got closer, I saw that the pupils were little pinpoints. You had to look close to see them. And the whites of the eyes had that same metallic luster, the same appearance of having been coated with aluminium paint.

Those eyes gave me the creeps.

He looked at me for three or four seconds and said nothing. I couldn’t help watching him, couldn’t keep from staring into those funny eyes. It was then I saw the pin-point pupils for the first time.

They looked as though they were turning around and around rapidly, but they always kept the same size. I’ve seen the pupils in a parrot’s eyes do the same thing, only a parrot can change the size of its pupils. This man’s eyes were always the same, always black pin-points against aluminium.

He got on my nerves.

“Well,” I said, “spill it!”

He didn’t speak right away, not even then, but his eyes kept boring into mine. When he finally spoke, his voice was the sort I’d expected, one of those deep, resonant voices.

“I know all about you,” he said.

I thought then he must be doped up. I’d seen those little pin-point pupils before when men were all hopped up. And I’d seen gun-play start awfully fast under those circumstances, so I began to humor him along.

“Sure,” I said, “I could tell that as soon as I saw you. How about a drink?”

He shook his head, not a shake back and forth the way most people would shake their heads, but a swift, single shake of his head.

“No,” he said. “You don’t think I know about you. Let me tell you. Your name is Sidney Rane. You had two years of college in medical school. Then your health broke down and you came to the desert. You got a job as guard for the gold shipments out of Tucson, and you’ve been hanging around the Southwest ever since. You are reported to know more of the desert than any man living.”

He stopped then, letting his words soak in.

I glared at the pin-points.

“Who the heck are you?” I asked, and my tone must have showed irritation.

“Emilio Bender,” he said, and put out his hand.

For a second or two I thought I wouldn’t take that hand, but I couldn’t keep from looking at those strange eyes of his, and finally I put out my hand and shook.

“Now,” he said, “we’ll have a drink,” and led the way to the bar. We drank.

That was a hot afternoon. Flies droned about the place, or circled over the damp spots on the sticky bar. A perspiring bartender dished out the drinks as they were ordered. Half a dozen Mexicans lounged about. There were a couple of drab girls who got checks for promoting drinks. There was little tourist trade. Mostly the tourists went to the fancier places.

Bender waited until I had finished with my glass and had half turned toward him. I knew that his pin-point eyes were staring fixedly at me, trying to catch mine.

It irritated me, and I kept looking away. Finally the silence became awkward. I glanced up and his eyes locked with my gaze and held it.

“Shoot your story,” I said, and knew my irritation was showing in my tone.

He lowered his voice.

“I’m a hypnotist.”

“Don’t try it on me,” I told him. “If you want some one to practice on, go hire a Mex.”

He shook his head, that single swift shake of negation again.

“Listen,” he said, and led me over to a dark corner of the bar. “You’ve had an education. You’re not a fool like some of these people. I’ve got something that bothers me and I want you to look at it.”

He waited for me to say something. I didn’t say a word.

“Hypnotism,” he went on, “is something they don’t know anything about; and medical science is afraid to try to learn anything about it. From the time when poor Mesmer sat his patients around a washtub, their feet in water and an iron ring for their hands, up to the time when science proclaimed that hynotism is nothing but suggestion, science hasn’t learned one thing about it.”

He waited again.

After another interval of silence he said abruptly, “Do you know anything about multiple personalities?”

I’d read a little something, but I shook my head.

“They’re encountered once in a while in dealing with a hypnotic subject. A woman will suddenly become some other personality. There’ll be times when one personality dominates, then times when the other personality is in control.”

I nodded and let it go at that.

As a matter of fact I’d heard of cases like that. Hypnotism would seem to bring out some hidden personality from the dark places of the mind. Science has recorded half a dozen instances.

“I want you to come,” he said.

I kept staring into those pin-point eyes.

“Where?” I asked.

“With me,” he said and started for the door.

I waited a minute, and then curiosity or the effect of suggestion or something got the best of me, and I followed him.

By that time the afternoon crowd of tourists was flowing in a stream across the United States border. The A.B.W. Club was doing a rushing business. You could hear the whir of roulette wheels, the click of chips, the clink of glasses.

I rather expected we’d turn toward the border, but we didn’t. We headed down the side street which runs into the native part of old Mexicali.

It was a ’dobe house he stopped at, and it wasn’t much different from the other ’dobe houses around it.

There were some dirty, half-naked children playing around in the yard. They all had drooling noses and black, questioning eyes. Their mouths were sticky from eating, and more dirt had gathered at the sticky places than on the rest of their faces.

They looked at the man with pin-point eyes, and then turned and ran, just like a bunch of quail scurrying for cover when the shadow of a hawk flits across the ground.

The house was just a square, boxlike affair with small windows and some green stuff growing in the front yard. There was a pool of surface water that smelled sour, some peppers hanging on the wall, and a door that was half open.

Bender and I walked into the house.

There were three people: an old, old woman who had a nose that looked like a withered potato, a fat woman who looked hostile, and a Mexican of the cholo or half-breed class. He had a low forehead, black eyes, thick lips and looked surly.

The man with pin-point eyes walked in just as if he owned the place.

“Sit down,” he said to me in Mexican.

I sat down. It was a funny adventure and I wanted to see how it ended.

The fat woman snapped a shrill comment in the language of her race.

“Again!” she said. “Why don’t you leave us alone?”

“Shut up,” said the man with her, in a surly voice. “He is a friend.”

The old woman chattered a curse.

I caught the eye of the fat woman. “Señora,” I said to her, “if I intrude I will go. I beg of you a thousand pardons.” I spoke to her in Mexican Spanish, letting her know I was a friend.

She smiled at me, after the manner of her race, one of the most friendly races on earth — when you take ’em right.

“You are welcome,” she said. “It is the other. He has come from the Evil One.”

“Shut up,” said the surly man again.

The woman turned to me and shrugged her shoulders.

“You see how it is, señor. He has sold his soul to the devil!”

I said nothing. The man with pin-point eyes said nothing.

It was warm there in the ’dobe house, close with the closeness which comes from many people sharing the same room on a hot day. Yet it was hotter outside, and the sun tortured the eyes. In the ’dobe it was dark and soothing.

Chapter 2 The Past Breathes

I sat and waited. Every one seemed to be waiting for something. One of the children came in the door. I motioned him over and gave him half a dollar. His eyes grew wide, and he thanked me in an undertone, then scampered out.

One by one, the other children came in and got half a dollar each. They muttered thanks. They didn’t ever look toward Emilio Bender, with the aluminium eyes.

The splotch of bright sunlight from the west window moved slowly across the floor. No one said anything. They all sat and waited. I sat and waited. It was a queer sensation, like being plunged into the middle of a dream. It was all unreal.

They seemed to be watching the Mexican.

He sat in a chair, stolid, indifferent, after the manner of his race. He rolled a cigarette and smoked it, flipped the stub to the floor, looked around him with eyes that were black and inscrutable in their stolid, stupidity, then rolled another cigarette.

The splotch of sunlight slid halfway across the floor.

There was a rustle. The old woman was muttering something and making the sign of the Cross. The fat woman rocked back and forth. “He comes,” she said, and crossed herself again.

The man with pin-point eyes was looking at the Mexican.

I watched him, too.

I could see something was happening. The Mexican began to sit a little more erect in his chair. His head came back, and the chest was thrust out. There was something military in his bearing. The surly air of stupidity slipped from him. The dark eyes flashed with spirit. The lines of his entire face became more sensitive, more intelligent. His nostrils dilated and he got to his feet.

When he spoke his words were in a Spanish tongue, but different from the slurring idiom of the Mexican. I had to listen closely to follow what he said.

“I tell you there is a fortune in gold there! Why don’t we start? Are you a coward?” he asked of the man with the aluminium-paint eyes.

Emilio Bender smiled an affable, ingratiating smile.

“We have to get our army together, my friend. It takes time.”

The Mexican laughed, and there was in that laugh a note which no peon ever yet achieved. It was the laugh of a man who laughs at life.

“Dios! Pablo Viscente de Moreno has to wait for an army to reclaim that which is his? Bah, you make me laugh! What are you, a soldier or a coward? Bah!”

He spat out the words with a supreme contempt.

“We need provisions,” said the man with pin-point eyes.

“Provisions!” said the Mexican. “Did we wait for provisions when the brave general Don Diego de Vargas went into the desert to reconquer those who had massacred our countrymen? I can show you the spot, señor, where we camped by the foot of a great rock, and I watched while the brave general wrote upon that rock with the point of his knife.

“I can tell you the words: ‘Aquí estaba el Gen. Do. de Vargas, quién conquistó a nuestra santa fé y a la real corona todo el Nuevo Mexico a su costa, año de 1692’.”

I translated mentally, “Here was General Diego de Vargas, who conquered for our holy faith and the royal crown all of New Mexico at his own cost, in the year 1692.”

The Mexican laughed again, that laugh that was a challenge to the universe:

“It was by camp fire that he wrote that message, and I stood beside him as he wrote. That day we had killed many Indians. We carried all before us. Those were the days! And now you babble about armies and provisions. Lead up my horse! Damn it, I will start alone! Get me my blade and dagger, give me the gray horse. He is better in the desert than the black... Come, let us away! I tell you there is gold to be taken!”

He whirled toward me and transfixed me with an eye that was as coldly proud as the eye of an eagle. His head was back, his shoulders squared.

The man with pin-point eyes got to his feet and made passes with his hands.

“Not now,” he said soothingly. “Not now, Señor Don Pablo Viscente de Moreno; but shortly. We shall go back into the desert. To-night, by the light of the moon I will come again and we shall start. Peace. Sleep until to-night at eight. Then we shall start.”

A cloud came over the proud eyes of the Mexican. The chest drooped backward, the shoulders hunched forward. The head lost its proud bearing.

The old woman swayed backward and forward in her chair, chanting a prayer. The fat woman crossed herself repeatedly.

Then the Mexican was no longer a proud soldier, but a cholo once more. He looked at me with dark eyes that were stolid in their animal stupidity.

“It is hot,” he said, and rolled a cigarette.

Emilio Bender took me by the arm.

“We will go,” he said. “Later, we will return.” And he led me to the door.

There was no word of farewell from the women. The man grunted the formula which the hospitality of his race demanded. The children scuttled from the front yard and hid in the greenery at the side of the house.

I took a deep breath of the afternoon air.

“What,” asked the man with pin-point eyes, “do you think of it?”

I was careful of my words.

“The rock he speaks of is known,” I said. “It is a great sandstone cliff and is known as El Morro, or as ‘Inscription Rock.’ It was by the old trail of the Spaniards who sought the Seven Cities of Cibola. They camped there, and because the sandstone offered a fitting place to inscribe their names and the date of their passage, they carved inscriptions. The first starts with Don Juan de Onate in 1605. After that many expeditions left their marks.

“There is not one person in a thousand who knows of this rock. But it is a great cliff that looks like a white castle. And there is a message from General Don Diego de Vargas upon it.”

The man with the curious eyes took a deep breath.

“Then,” he said, “we will start. I was not sure. They told me you could give me more information of the desert than any other man. I know now we will find gold.”

“Wait a minute,” I protested. “Do you think this man is at all genuine, or is he a slicker trying to promote something? Or is he hypnotized?”

Emilio Bender shrugged his shoulders.

“You have seen,” he replied. “The man who talked to us is Pablo Viscente de Moreno, a soldier who marched with General Diego de Vargas when the country was yet young. I know not the history; but I gather from what the man has said on other occasions that there was a massacre, and General de Vargas was then reconquering the country.”

“But,” I argued, “how could a man who marched in 1692 across the desert with General Diego de Vargas speak to us in a ’dobe house in Mexicali in 1930?”

The man with pin-point eyes shrugged his shoulders.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?”

I made a gesture with my hands and answered him in Mexican: “Quién sabe?”

He nodded. “All right,” he said; “that’s the answer.”

We went back to the Cantina Gold Dollar Bar and had another drink.

“We leave at eight o’clock,” he said, and fastened his metallic eyes upon mine.

“What’s in it for me?” I asked.

“Fifty-fifty,” he said.

“The Mexican?”

“He doesn’t count. We’ll give him what he has to have.”

I laughed at that.

“Be sure you have the half-breed personality on deck when you make the division, and not Pablo Viscente de Moreno, the soldier. You might have difficulties in getting even a cut out of the soldier.”

He nodded, and his pin-point eyes seemed whirling around in spiral circles, emitting little glitters like a whirling wheel reflecting the light.

We had another drink and then I went to roll my blankets. It was adventure, even if it wasn’t anything else. And how could a soldier who marched with General Diego de Vargas in 1692 talk to us in a ’dobe house in Mexicali in 1930?

It just couldn’t be done.

Chapter 3 Warrior Without a Sword

But I rolled my blankets and met the man with pin-point eyes at eight o’clock. We went back to the ’dobe. The women crossed themselves, and the children ran and hid. But the Mexican decided to go with us.

He had another of his surly fits on, and he seemed a little groggy as though he had been asleep and hadn’t fully waked up.

Emilio Bender treated him like a dog. He put him in the back of the touring car with the rolls of blankets and cooking stuff.

“Sit there!” he snapped.

“Si, señor,” said the Mexican.

The car started with a lurch. The old woman crossed herself. The fat woman watched us with apathetic interest. The children were hiding in the shadows cast by the full moon. I couldn’t see one of them.

We crossed the border, headed east toward Yuma. It was a hot night and a still night. The rushing ribbon of road and the drone of the motor made me sleepy. The man with pinpoint eyes did the driving until we got to Yuma. Then I took the car and made Phoenix.

The Mexican slept as well as he could, what with the jouncing around on the washboard road between Yuma and the Gillespie Dam. Then we hit paving again. I gave up the wheel at Phoenix, and Emilio Bender took the car over the black canon grade to Prescott. It was getting warm by that time, but out of Prescott we did some climbing and it was cool and nice by the time we got to Flagstaff.

Back of Winslow the road changed again to sage country, and we stopped the car in the shade of the last of the stunted cedars and had a siesta. We were on our way again by the time the moon got up. We weren’t letting any grass grow under our feet.

The rock known as El Morro in New Mexico is off the beaten trail. Not many tourists get to it. It’s where a mesa juts out into a valley, and a couple of canons run together. The mesa plunges into an abrupt drop to the level of the valley. It’s over two hundred feet straight down from the top to the bottom, and the sandstone sides gleam in the sun.

They’ve protected it from vandals. For a while people wrote their names and addresses on the rock, scratching out the messages of the early Spaniards to leave their own names. Why they did it I don’t know. But they did.

We made a camp. The Mexican looked to me as though he were about half conscious. His head lolled around and his black eyes were utterly expressionless in their stolid stupidity.

“Wait,” said the man with the aluminium-paint eyes.

So we had a siesta, cooked some beans, and warmed up some tortillas and waited for the moon.

It came up over the desert, casting long, black shadows. In the places where there weren’t any shadows the desert gleamed like silver, and the inscription rock was like some huge castle.

We sat and watched the Mexican.

Once or twice Emilio Bender made passes with his hands and crooned low words. The Mex seemed groggy. I figured the whole thing was going to be a flop.

I don’t know just what time it was, but the moon was up a good two hours and the camp fire had died down to a bed of coals before I noticed anything.

The Mex was sitting all humped over, as motionless as the rock that had weathered the countless ages, and which cast a great blob of shadow in the moonlight.

I saw his shoulders twitch and his head come back. The chin stuck out and the eyes glanced around the desert. The flesh lost its heavy look of sordid animalism and took on the fine lines of the thoroughbred. I glanced at Emilio Bender, but the man with the pin-point eyes was staring unwinkingly at the Mex.

It happened all of a sudden.

The Mexican sprang to his feet, and looked all about him. The moonlight caught his eyes, and there seemed to be fire in his glance. He looked at me and jumped back, his hand flying across his body to his left hip, groping for the hilt of his sword.

“Who are you?” he shouted. “Friend or foe? Speak, before Pablo Viscente de Moreno slits your gullet with a blade of Damascus!”

And then he frowned as his groping fingers failed to encounter the hilt of his sword.

“Dios! I am disarmed!” he roared. “And whence came these clothes? What witchery is this? Where are the sentinels? How about the horses? We are in hostile country! The horses are more precious to us than gold. Where are those horses?”

He whirled and fixed the man with pin-point eyes.

“You!” he bellowed. “I’ve seen you before — a sniveling scribe, a hunchbacked, round-shouldered, driveling devil who is learned in something or other. Who the devil are you?”

Emilio Bender said nothing, simply continued to stare with his pin-point eyes, and the moonlight glinted from them and made them seem more than ever as though they had been coated with aluminium paint.

“Speak!” roared the Mex, and made a swift imperious stride toward the hypnotist.

Bender faltered in his glance. I mean it. He shifted his eyes quickly as does one when he is afraid. It was the first time he had ever lost that positive, unwinking stare, that incisive power.

Once more the Mexican’s hand groped about his left hip.

“If I can find the devil who stole my sword I will spit him like a rabbit and leave him to writhe on the sand in the hot sunlight of to-morrow... Where’s the commander? Where is General Don Diego de Vargas?”

He paused, waiting for an answer; and as he stood there, the moonlight clothing him with a silver aura, he seemed like a man of fire. Gone was the stolid Mexican who was a peon, a cholo. In his place was this imperious man of fire and courage, a soldier who had made a profession of soldiering when carrying arms was not merely being a cog in a military machine.

He took a swift step toward Emilio Bender, then halted.

“Carramba! We have few enough men as it is, even if you are a devil of a scribe. The general would like it none too well if I should run you through. But show me where my sword is, or by the Virgin I will spit you to the gills!”

Emilio Bender made a few passes, muttered soothing words, but the passes were without effect. The Mexican turned to me.

“Crazy,” he said. “It is the heat of the desert, and the constant watching for raids from the savages. I have seen men so before. Tell me, comrade, where is my sword, and how come I by these clothes?”

I met his eyes, feeling a strange fascination for this man of fire.

“You left your sword and your armor at a cave where you stored much gold plunder. Have you forgotten?”

He shook his head as a swimmer shakes his head upon emerging from the water.

“Damn it, you tell the truth!” he said. “I had forgotten about that cave. It seems that I have been in a long sleep. Things are not as they should be. There is much that has intervened.

“Bien, we will go to the cave. Let me get my blade in my fingers once more and I will be myself. But how quiet it seems! Where are our comrades? Where is the general? Where are the horses?”

“They, too, are at the cave.”

He glared at me.

“If you are lying you will be spitted like a bird!”

I shrugged my shoulders.

He looked around him at the desert.

“Strange!” he muttered. “The moon was well past the full. Now it is but turned on the wane... This must be the rock. Surely, this is where the general carved his name and the date of his passage. But last night it was. And to-day seems a haze. I must have had the fever. Tell me, you scrivener, have I had the fever?”

The man with pin-point eyes nodded.

“Yes,” he said, “you have been sick.”

The Mexican said no further word but strode across the sand toward the white silence of the glittering rock. The moonlight sent a grotesque shadow, as black as a pool of ink, accompanying him. And I trotted after.

Following me came the man with the aluminium-colored eyes, and he had to trot rapidly to keep up.

The Mexican went directly to the place on the rock where the autograph of General Vargas has been protected from vandalism by the fence. He stared at the fence.

“Done to-day!” he exclaimed.

We said nothing. He raised his eyes to the inscription on the rock and nodded.

“I had thought it was more clear. Perhaps it’s the moonlight. Perhaps it’s my eyes that have become dim with the fever; but it’s the inscription all right.”

His eye caught the yellow pasteboard box in which a roll of films had been brought to the spot by some tourist.

“What the devil?” he exclaimed, and stopped to pick it up.

We waited. He turned it over and over in his fingers.

“Cascaras!” he exclaimed. “There is magic in this thing, or else it is the fever.”

“It is the fever,” said Bender.

The Mexican glared at him. “Speak when you’re spoken to, scribe. Tell me, how do we join our comrades? Which way do we go?”

“Where is the cave?” asked Bender.

He pointed toward ancient Zuni. “It lies in that direction, a march of two days.”

Bender nodded.

“Come,” he said. “We have a new chariot”

And he led the way toward the automobile which had brought us.

The Mexican’s breath hissed in astonishment as he saw it.

“What a chariot! But how are the horses fastened? And why make it so cursed heavy? But it has good lines; only it would do ill in battle. Mark you, my man, there is not proper arm room in which to swing a sword, and that may betray us to these savages.

“A good chariot should have a grip for the left hand so that one may lean out and swing the sword in a complete circle, free of all obstructions. But look at this! There is no grip! There is no place to lean out, and that step which runs along the side will prevent a free swing of the sword.

“But we only talk! Talk is for scriveners and women, not for men of battle. Bring on the horses and we will start.”

Emilio Bender fastened the aluminium eyes upon the man.

“First,” he said, “you must sit in the chariot. We will all get in, and then the horses will come.”

Chapter 4 An Old Battlefield

When the Mexican swung into the car, I noted that the heavy awkwardness was gone from him. He was as graceful as a race horse. I got in the back. Emilio occupied the driver’s seat and stepped on the starter.

The car whirred into life and lurched forward.

The Mexican leaped out into the desert in a long arched vault of such surprising swiftness that it could not have been anticipated.

“Madre de Dios!” he exclaimed, and crossed himself. “It is magic. It shot at us from under that place in the front and it moved. I swear that it moved! Look, you can even see the tracks in the sand where it moved! And there were no horses!”

Emilio Bender got out and fastened the pin-point eyes upon the Mexican, made passes, muttered soothing words.

“It is a magic chariot. We have come from those who are powerful to take you to your comrades. We must make haste. You must enter the chariot and go with us.”

The Mexican shook his head.

“No. I travel either with my horse under me, in a chariot that I can understand, or on my two feet.”

“Surely,” taunted Bender, “Pablo Viscente de Moreno is not afraid of a chariot that can be driven by a poor scrivener!”

That gave the Mexican something to think about. I could see his face writhe and twist in the moonlight.

“He is not!” he said, and climbed back in the car.

Bender stepped on the starter, slammed in the gears. The car lurched into motion, gathered speed, started skimming over the moonlit road.

The Mexican gazed about him at the flying landscape with eyes that seemed to bulge out beyond the line of his bushy eyebrows.

“Car-r-r-ramba!” he muttered. “Wait!” he yelled at Bender. “Such a pace will tire out the chariot within the first two miles. I tell you it is a two-day march!”

For answer Bender slammed it into high and stepped on the throttle. The Mexican tried to say something, but the words would not come. He sat on the edge of the cushioned seat, gripping the windshield support with a grip that showed the white skin over his knuckles drawn taut and pale. The car hurtled through the moonlight.

After half an hour the Mexican recovered his faculties sufficiently to glance about him for landmarks.

“This road,” he said, “has no business being here. But perhaps the magic chariot makes its own road as it goes? That mountain over there is where we camped the first day’s march, and the distance from here to the cave is not great. The first march is short.”

Then he became interested in landmarks and seemed to forget the novelty of his means of transportation.

“There,” he said, “is where we lost two men only last week. There was a scouting party of the savages. But we routed them. I charged three of the Indians over against that rock. Their bodies are there yet, if you care to go and look.”

The car roared onward.

“Wait!” yelled the Mexican. “You are turning away from the direction. Over there against that hill is where we are to go. Just under that mesa that sticks up into the moonlight!”

Bender slowed the car, turned it into the native desert. The wheels bit deep into the sand, and he shifted to second.

The Mexican nodded sagely.

“I knew it could not stand that pace,” he remarked. “Mark you, charioteer, you are not accustomed to these desert places. I can tell that from many things. You have probably come from Spain within a fortnight. You will soon learn that things are different here, and the greatest distance is covered by him who makes the less speed at the start.”

Bender said nothing. He was pushing the car through the sand, dodging clumps of sage and greasewood.

I said nothing. It wasn’t my funeral — not yet.

The car ground its way toward the base of the mesa. As the ground got higher it got harder and the laboring engine gave us a little more speed. I knew the radiator would soon be boiling at that rate. Personally, I’d have given the car a rest.

Not Bender. His greed was getting the better of his self-control, and he was pushing the car to the limit.

We covered about five miles before I could smell the motor overheating. Then it fumed like rancid butter poured on a hot stove.

“Better cool her down,” I suggested to Bender.

He nodded and slowed.

The Mexican pointed to the rugged skyline of the mesa. “There to the left and down at the base. There is the entrance to the cave.”

“There is much gold?” asked Bender.

“As much as two horses could carry,” said the Mexican casually. “We have made these savages pay for their rebellion and the massacre of the priests.”

Bender got ready again and his foot jammed the throttle to the floor boards. The wheels lurched and jumped in the sand, the car gathered momentum.

We were way off the road now, out in the desert, away from the line of sane travel. We might find anything here. I watched the line of the mesa grow larger until it loomed above us.

Then the motor halted for a second. Something clicked and from the mechanism came a clatter — clatter — clatter. The wheels ceased to spin and the car slowed.

“Connecting rod bearing,” I said.

“The gold,” commented the Mexican, “is but a little distance.”

And Emilio Bender slammed his foot back on the throttle. Rod bearing or no rod bearing, he was going to get to that gold.

The motor lost power. The rod clattered and banged. I looked for it to thrust through the bottom of the crank case at any moment. But the wheels bit into the sand and we crawled ahead.

For several minutes the car pushed forward. Then there came a terrific noise, a hissing of hot oil on the sand, and the motor froze tight as a drum.

“Busted out the crank case,” I said, not that there was any need for the comment, but I just wanted to remind him that I’d warned him.

Bender cursed, then jumped from the car. “Come on! We’ll walk.”

The Mexican was out of the car before the words were well clear of Bender’s tongue.

“Carajo! It was great magic while it lasted!” And he was striding toward the wall of the mesa, his feet crunching into the sand, his black shadow marching beside him, a mere black blotch of squat darkness.

We followed as best we could. Greed was giving excessive strength to Bender, the hypnotist, and I noticed he didn’t pant or tire, but jog-trotted through the sand at a steady pace, keeping almost up with the fiercely striding soldier.

We arrived at the base of the mesa. The Mexican found some long forgotten trail, and we started up.

It was a hard climb. Cloudbursts, wind and sun had done things to the trail, and the Mexican cursed from time to time.

“The Indians have been here, I tell you. We shall find where there has been a great battle. Strange I do not smell the blood or that we do not see corpses piled along the way. I tell you they are cunning. They have cut away this trail as though it had been done by a hundred years of time. Only an Indian could do that.

“Forward, my comrades! Who knows what we shall find within the cave? I wish I had my blade. It would be most awkward to be attacked now.” But he kept pushing up the side of the mesa until the sheer wall frowned above us.

He stopped and pointed. “Look you at the cunning of the Indian. He has put these trees and bushes at the mouth of the cave, and he has made them look as though they had been here for years. I am afraid this means that he has conquered our men. But how could a horde of savages conquer trained soldiers?” And he looked from one to the other of us.

I shook my head and said nothing. It was Bender’s party and Bender could handle the explanations.

Bender fastened those pin-point eyes of his on the Mexican and said quietly, “Who are we to fear a few savages?” and pushed aside the brush.

“Charioteer, you are a man of courage!” said the Mexican. He reached out, grasped Bender by the shoulder and jerked him to one side. “But it is the part of a soldier to go first. Only I warn you, these redskins are fiends for torture. They gouge out the eyeballs and grind hot sand into the ears. They cut the skin off the soles of one’s feet and press cactus thorns into the flesh. They heat little splinters of wood and stick them into the body. They are devils when they capture one.”

Bender grunted. “Never mind that stuff. Let’s go ahead and get the gold.”

Chapter 5 Dust

Moreno shrugged and marched forward, going unarmed into a cave that he thought was filled with savages, who had been dead for three hundred years. It was the act of a brave man.

There was a narrow entrance. We had to stoop to get into it, but that entrance widened out within the first twenty feet. The cave went down on a sharp incline, but there were stone steps, worn smooth by many feet, and I groped my way in the darkness.

“There should be flint and steel here, a little tinder and a candle,” said the Mexican, pausing and groping.

Bender took a pocket flashlight from his coat and sent the beam flashing into the darkness.

The Mexican jumped back with an oath.

“Cascaras, charioteer, but you have magic of sorts! What kind of thing is that?”

“A magic light,” said Bender.

The Mexican regarded it for a moment with admiring eyes. Then he reached out and took it.

“It’s like the other magic: fine at first, but it may tire. I prefer the dependable light of my fathers before me. Here’s the flint and the steel, but, there’s no tinder. Surely that dust can’t be... Dios! It is!”

He looked at me, and I could see his eyes gleaming in the reflected light from the flash.

“There is too much magic around here,” he said. “I left that candle and the flint, steel, and tinder here on this rock shelf but last week. Now look at it. A hundred years might have passed, yes, two hundred years!”

And he scowled at me with an expression I didn’t like.

“You,” he said, “are the one who says but little. Yet you are never surprised, and you seem to know more about these magic things than this charioteer with the funny eyes. Speak!”

I smiled at him. “Better wait to argue about the magic until we find what has happened to your brave comrades. We waste time in idle talk. It seems to me you are better at talking than at rescuing comrades.”

The words snapped him out of it. He whirled.

“Right. First we will rescue those who need to be rescued. But you shall pay for those words! Blade to blade and foot to foot you shall make them good or eat them. To call Pablo Viscente de Moreno a coward, one must fight!”

And he was off down the stone stairway.

By the light of the flash I could see that it had been rounded by years and millions of feet. The very stairs had been worn in a deep passageway that bare feet alone had grooved into the rock.

“It was always here, this stairway,” said the soldier, as though he could read my thoughts. “But there is much that is strange. I will be glad to see my comrades, but I fear they are trapped by these savages.

“There must be treachery somewhere, and I will smell out the traitor and have his heart spitted with my blade. I remember something now of this place. It had to do with the feeling of sickness... There was a fight. Hundreds of savages came pouring down into the cave. I remember that which followed— Wait! It was off here to the right. The Indians crowded me into that little chamber. There were hundreds of them. I fought them and hacked them, and they shot their arrows at me, and there were spears. I was wounded. I remember a darkness that came over everything. My torch ceased to give light and I felt a drowsy feeling. At the time I thought it was death.

“But that must have been but a swooning, for I woke up at El Morro, the rock of the inscriptions. Let us see what happened here.”

He darted the beam of the flashlight into the interior of a round chamber which opened off from the main slope of the cave.

I caught the glimpse of the light on something white, and then he jumped back.

“Damn!” he cried. “I remember it now!”

For a moment he stood there, then he crossed himself and strode into the chamber.

There were skeletons there, and the floor of the cave was littered with bone dust. Bits of grinning skulls turned to dust when we touched them. There was a pile of bones in one end of the chamber from which there emerged a strip of glittering steel, reflecting in the beam of the flashlight.

The soldier leaned forward, grasped the blade from the bone heap and drew it toward him.

“Carramba!” I heard him hiss in a whisper. “It is my own. But my blade is rusted with blood. Look you, charioteer, at the incrusted blood upon it!”

He held it out and turned the light on it.

It was a wonderfully well balanced sword of finest steel. The hilt had been ornamented and incrusted with gold. There was a coat of arms upon the upper end of it.

In the shelter of the cave, in the dry climate of the desert country the blade had kept in splendid shape, almost as it had been laid down there some three hundred years ago. And who had laid it down? To whom did those bones belong?

The same question was in the mind of the soldier.

“Look you,” he said. “I was left here to guard this cave and this gold. There were two other men. The general was out making a raid, and meanwhile the savages swarmed down the stairs to attack us three. That is all I remember, that fight here. I went to sleep, or I swooned from loss of blood.

“And then I woke up at the inscription rock. I am still confused on the time. It was more than two weeks ago that I stood by my chief while he wrote his name upon that rock. After that came the fight. That is the last that I remember until I awoke by the rock.

“But now I am unwounded. When I swooned I had a hundred wounds. The blood poured down my arm until the hilt of the sword slipped in my fingers through the slime of my own blood. There were dancing savages grinning at me, shooting arrows at me... Now I wake up two days’ march away and am unwounded. What sort of magic is this?”

And he glared at Bender, with the pin-point eyes.

Emilio Bender did some tall lying, and did it fast.

“I am glad,” he said, simply and in a low tone of voice. “We were in the desert and we heard the cries of savage Indians. We knew that they were torturing white men. We sneaked our way toward the place from which the cries came, and we saw little fires, and there were white men who were lashed to a heavy stake, and the fire was eating its way into their flesh.

“You were lying unconscious on one side. Your turn for the torture was to come, and my friend and I rescued you. There was a great fight with the savages. And we would have been caught had it not been for the magic chariot. But we loaded you into the chariot and took you to a safe place in the mountains. There you recovered your health, but you could not remember how or when you came there or where you had been.

“We took you back to the rock so that the sight of the inscription might bring back your memory. Your wounds have healed, and the savages now have gone.”

With eyes that were clouded with thought the Mexican looked at him.

“Then,” he said, “you are no charioteer at all, but a brave soldier who rescued me from the savages.”

Bender nodded.

“That is right,” he said.

The Mexican clapped him on the shoulder.

“Ha!” he said. “A soldier!” And his eyes glittered. He turned to me. “Then you, too, are a soldier?”

I sensed trouble coming, and I wasn’t going to lie about it.

“No,” I said. “I am what you’d call a charioteer. Civilization has decayed my courage and spoiled my fighting trim. If you want to list Bender as a soldier that’s all right. I’m a charioteer.”

He stepped back, whirled the sword in a glittering arc, made a thrust or two.

I’ve seen fencers in my time, but I have never seen any one who could get the things out of a sword blade that man could. The muscles seemed to have been oiled and greased, made especially for sword handling.

“But the gold,” Bender was prompting him.

“My comrades!” snapped the soldier. “Is it too late to rescue them? How long was it since you found me?”

The man with the metallic eyes glittered his magnetic gaze straight into the pupils of the soldier.

“It has been more than a month,” he said.

“More than a month!” repeated the Mexican in wonder.

What would he have said if he had known it had been more than three hundred years more than a month? Perhaps nothing could have surprised him very deeply after his ride in the magic chariot.

So I was treated to the spectacle of a man picking his three-hundred-year-old sword from the bony hand of his own skeleton and starting out to avenge the fate of two comrades who had been dead for a third of a thousand years.

Chapter 6 A Monster

I got Bender off to one side.

“You’ve found the cave now. But you’d better do some of your hypnotic stuff and bring this fellow back to earth. There are natives all around here, and if I have any accurate knowledge as to where we are I’d say there was an Indian pueblo within a few miles of here. This is quite a cave, and we’re likely to find the Indians are familiar with it.

“If this chap runs onto some Indians down here, you can figure what’s going to happen. Better snap him out of it and we can find the gold somehow or other.”

Bender looked at me, and for the first time I caught a greenish glint of panic in his aluminium-colored eyes.

“I can’t hypnotize him any more,” he told me. “I’ve tried it half a dozen times. He’s dangerous, but there’s nothing we can do about it. The primary personality, Ramon Ayala the Mexican, I can hypnotize any time I want. But this secondary personality has too strong a will. I can’t do a thing with him.”

“Where,” I asked, “did this secondary personality come from?”

“It must be evidence of reincarnation,” he said. “I have always believed in it. This proves it. The individual is made up of hundreds of thousands of personalities. The channel from the conscious to the subconscious is well developed, and the experiences of the conscious mind are transmitted faithfully. But the channel from the subconscious to the conscious is not developed. That is why we don’t see the tangible evidence of reincarnation in—”

He was interrupted at that point by a roar.

“By my sword!” swore the soldier. “The man who has left his bones here is a robber and a thief. He has even stolen the gold chain and cross from around my neck. Look, I tell you! It is mine, and look at the shape it is in. It is blackened, the links of the chain are corroded. He well deserved slaying.

“But, mark you, my comrades, there is some foul miasma here which rots bodies quickly. For these are the bones of Indians whom I slew myself with this very sword, and but a little over a month ago. You are sure of the date?”

Bender nodded easily.

“Certain,” he said. “But let’s go find the gold.”

“Gold!” bellowed the Mexican. “Let us go find my brave comrades, or let us avenge them.”

“You are but one,” tentatively suggested Bender.

“Two!” snapped the Mexican. “You forget that you are also a soldier. Two soldiers and a charioteer. Diablo! What more do you want? We will avenge our brave soldiers who have died the death of the Indians’ torture!”

And he was off down the main slope of the cave, brandishing his sword in a glittering arc.

Bender leaned toward me. “I left my revolver in the car. Have you a weapon?”

I shook my head. I had nothing except two fists and a jackknife.

We followed the soldier, hurrying to keep up with the circle of illumination which was cast by the flashlight. There was no time for conversation, little for thought. Bender was worrying about the gold. I was worrying about what was going to happen. Perhaps it was a presentiment, perhaps it was the uncanny atmosphere of trailing around after a warrior who had been dead for three hundred years, but there were cold chills racing along my spine.

For we couldn’t control this soldier. I knew it. Bender was going to find it out, if he didn’t know it already. With the passing of every single minute the strange secondary personality that was the individuality of Pablo Viscente de Moreno, a soldier who had campaigned the deserts under General Don Diego de Vargas, and who had been dead three hundred years, became more firmly ensconced in the body of a cholo Mexican named Ramon Ayala.

And the personality of that soldier was something to be reckoned with. Civilization has done things to us. We have become weaklings, the whole race, believe it or not. It isn’t so much the physical strength that has ebbed from us, as it is the spiritual courage which we should have. Here was a man who had lived by the sword and had died by the sword. He was one who had lived his life, enjoying its every moment. His vitality showed it, made us seem as sick shadows.

Here was a man who had been raised at a time when one must be able to preserve his life in order to live. He couldn’t call a cop or rely on an injunction if his neighbor got crusty. He had to stand and fight, and that was the life he enjoyed.

We talk proudly of our hardy forbears who went westward across the plains in Eighteen Forty-nine. But how of those soldiers who campaigned the deserts in Sixteen Hundred-odd? Those men were traversing trackless wastes whose very nature and extent they knew nothing of. They didn’t have covered wagons and sturdy oxen. They didn’t have a green and fertile goal at the end of their march.

No, they simply headed their horses into the dry and burning desert, surrounded by hostile tribes, armed only with the weapons of ancient warfare, and knowing not what was before them.

Such was the man who strode in front of me, whirling his sword in a glittering arc for the very joy of life and combat.

And in the chamber behind me were the bones of this very man, dead three hundred years.

Is it any wonder that the cool air of the cave made the perspiration on my forehead seem dank and clammy?

We came to a place where the cave widened out into a great chamber. The flashlight couldn’t penetrate the darkness far enough to disclose all the walls; only a stray outthrust of rock here, or a bit of lowhung ceiling there.

The soldier stopped and sent the beam of the electric flash in a long circle.

“I have got to look for landmarks here,” he said. “I was only here a few times, and it has been over a month ago, and I have been sick in that month... Wait! There should be a branch of the main cave over here to the left.” And he walked confidently forward into the darkness.

“If anything happens we’ll have a hard time getting out of here,” I whispered to Emilio Bender.

“There is gold here,” he said, and his voice quavered with eagerness.

I said nothing further. I could take my chances with the rest. I had been taken along to see the thing through, and that was what I was going to do.

The flashlight hit the walls again, and there was an arched opening.

“This is the place,” said the soldier, and started to run.

We followed.

When he stopped short we almost ran him down. The beam of the flashlight was glittering from something white again, and I knew what it would be.

“Madre de Dios! Another fight. More bones. Carramba, there is another blade, and it is the sword of Juan Bautiste de Alvarado!”

And he stooped and picked up another red-incrusted blade of finest steel.

“Here, soldier,” he said, as he thrust the hilt into the limp hand of Emilio Bender. “Here is the sword of one who was brave of heart and steady of hand. Take it and bear it well and with honor.”

He took another step forward and stooped to the floor of the cave. He presently turned to me with another blade, dulled with three hundred years of disuse.

“Here, señor charioteer, take this. You are unworthy of it. It is the blade of a brave man, but it is the fortunes of war, and you may have to stand shoulder to shoulder with us before you quit the place.

“Remember that a cut is faster and more terrifying, but a thrust is the means of piling a corpse at your feet to make a partial barricade. But, when you thrust, be sure to thrust true and be careful to pull your blade out before the weight of the falling man jerks the hilt from your hand... Come.”

And he started forward again, his feet grinding the bones beneath him to a powder.

“There is some horrid miasma about this place,” he muttered. “Think of bodies that are only a month old turning to dust!”

I said nothing. Bender had started the explanations. He could finish them.

Chapter 7 A Medieval Raid

The room opened out into a wide circle, then narrowed again. There was the sound of running water, and my nostrils fancied they could detect the odor of wood smoke. I spoke of it in a whisper to Bender, but he shook his head.

“Gold,” he said in a hoarse whisper, and hurried on.

We came to a little alcove which had been carved out of the cave by the action of prehistoric waters. The soldier walked into this alcove, then stopped and swore.

“Here it was,” he said. “Now look!”

We crowded at his shoulders to look.

We saw the remains of a stout chest, bound with hasps of iron, bolted with some strangely designed bolts. The chest had been battered and splintered. It was empty, save for several inches of dust.

Bender pushed his eager fingers in the dust, fished around with them for a few moments, then uttered a cry. He withdrew his hand, and there, in his fingers, was a great ornament of gold.

The Mexican nodded casually.

“There were hundreds more,” he said.

The man with pin-point eyes slipped the golden ornament into the pocket of his coat, where it bulged out the pocket and sagged the garment. Then he started groping once more in the dust. When he had finished he knew that there was no hope of additional loot. The chest was empty.

He sat down on a rock. I thought for a moment he was going to swear.

“Where would they have taken it?” he asked.

“Back to their villages. They were, for the most part, ornaments which adorned the temples they erected to their heathen gods... But hold. There was a private store of gold. This was the treasure chest which all were to share in; but there were some ornaments, some melted gold in bars, some of their turquoise jewelry which was mine. I hid it in another part of the cave. Perhaps they were not so fortunate in finding that. Come with me.”

Bender needed no second invitation. He was on his feet and striding forward.

I thought the light from the flash was getting just a trifle more dim.

“Better turn off the flash for a minute or two and save the battery,” I warned.

“Later,” said Bender. “Hurry on.”

And the soldier hurried on.

With us trailing after, our strange guide went back to the main chamber, ran along the dust-covered floor which sent his footfalls thudding back at us in muffled echoes, and shot the beam of the flashlight toward the west end of the chamber.

There was nothing here but wall.

The soldier muttered, sent the beam along the wall, up one side, down the other, stepping back a few paces, muttering to himself.

“It should be here,” he said. “See you, there is the head of a lion in the stone, and that to the left looks like an old man... Ha, now I remember! It is off to the left.”

And he strode confidently to the left. There seemed to be nothing but solid rock, but as we approached nearer a little vault opened out.

“This is the place,” he said. “We must stoop.”

We stooped, and as we got our heads near the floor of the cave there was a gentle draft of air which smote my nostrils with the unmistakable odor of wood smoke.

But the others either did not smell it, or if they did, gave it no heed. Eagerly trailing the three hundred year old secret, they entered the chamber.

It was really an entrance to another cave, or to another branch of caves shooting out from the main chamber. I could see that there was a long passageway, and then an arched roof, and I thought I could detect a glint of light coming from some faintly discerned opening in the distant darkness.

“It was in this little cleft to the right of the opening,” said the Mexican, and turned the beam of the flashlight.

I saw a long cleft some little distance away, and I saw also that the beam of the flashlight was weaker now. The light was no longer a brilliant pencil of white light, but was taking on a reddish hue.

Emilio Bender ran forward, getting his shadow so that it danced along the wall in a grotesque blob of ebony silhouette.

“To one side,” yelled the soldier. “I cannot see.”

And, at that instant, the light went out.

“More of your damned magic that gets tired!” shouted the Mexican, and dashed the flashlight to the floor of the cave. There sounded the tinkle of broken glass and then darkness was about us, a soul-chilling darkness that seemed as tangible as a smothering blanket thrown about our heads.

“Fool!” ranted Emilio Bender.

But his ranting did no good. The flashlight might have recuperated enough strength in the battery to have given us a few flashes that would have enabled us to find the gold and make our escape from the cave.

“I can’t even find the cleft where the gold is,” whined the man of the pin-point eyes.

“Bah!” scoffed the Mexican. “Are we men or are we babies? Why whimper about a little darkness? I have seen darkness before. Doubtless I will see it again!”

“Come back, come back! We must get the gold!” yelled Emilio Bender.

“It is my gold, not yours. This is a private store of my own plunder. I do not share it with soldiers who are cowards. There is much more gold in the Indian temples. Go to them and get your own store of plunder. As for me, I am going to go to the other cave.”

And I could hear the Mexican’s feet ringing on the stone floor as he strode away.

“How many matches have you got?” asked Bender of me, and his voice was wheedling.

“I have a number, but we need them to get out of here,” I said.

“Strike one, just one that I may see where we stand.”

I struck just the one, and as I did so knew that I had made a mistake. For the light of that match showed me the greenish glitter of those aluminium-colored eyes staring into mine from the dark background of the cave.

“Hold that match, steady,” said the man.

I wanted to shake it out. Some inner voice told me to dash it to the floor of the cave and step on it. But I hesitated too long.

The pin-points of the eyes became rapiers, thrusting long tongues of flame into my brain. The whole side of the cave seemed to be a fathomless depth of aluminium-colored darkness from which radiated twin streamers of lambent flame.

“Give me the matches.”

The voice was low and vibrant, and I could feel my hand starting toward his with the matches. But I brought all my will power to my aid, and held them back.

Once more came the command.

“Give — me — the — matches!”

The pin-points of the eyes seared the volition from my brain. I did not know that I was holding out the matches. I knew only that I was no longer master of myself.

The next I knew, the match I was holding had burned my fingers, and a cold hand had closed about the box of matches I was holding out toward Bender.

The darkness was welcome, but I was still haunted by the memory of those pin-points in their aluminium-colored background.

The next I heard was the scrape of a match on the rock wall, the sputter of flame, and the dancing of grotesque shadows as Bender moved the light slowly along, nursing the flame between cupped hands.

In a little while he found the place in the cleft where something had been thrust into a hole in the rocks. He lit another match, put in his hand and pulled out a bit of what had been cloth. Now it was but a few rags of scattered remnants. But from the openings gleamed the unmistakable yellow of gold.

“Gold!” he cried.

Then, as though it had been an echo to his shout, the cave reverberated with a blood-curdling scream which came from the distant darkness.

Emilio Bender jumped back.

“What was that?” he asked of me.

“A woman’s scream and a man’s yell mingled together,” I said.

We waited, tense, listening.

Something was coming toward us. I could see the little flickers of ruddy light which were cast by a moving flame. The woman screamed again. I could hear the pound of shod feet.

Then, from a distance, there was a bedlam of sound.

Around the corner of a passageway came the flicker of a smoking torch, and there was the Mexican, holding to him the screaming form of a young woman.

He was laughing, and there was blood on his face, marks of where her nails had raked down the skin. In his right hand, held with his sword, was a smoking wood torch, a pine knot that was filled with pitch. The girl was Indian, young, attractive, and frightened. She was held in his left arm so that her feet barely touched the floor of the cave, and the soldier was laughing, the happy carefree laugh of an adventurer.

“Forward, amigos!” he cried. “There are other women to be had for the taking, and then there will be a splendid fight. The warriors are coming in force. This is life! And I have been as one dead for over a month!”

And he laughed again.

The woman was kicking, squirming in his embrace like an eel fresh from the water. Her lithe body was a beautiful nut-brown. Her well-turned legs writhed and twisted like twin snakes as she sought to get some purchase from which she could add to the efficacy of her struggles.

“Go,” said the soldier, and threw the torch from him in a long arc of whirling fire. Then the pitch knot hit the floor of the cave and rolled along, bouncing, giving off red embers of fire.

And the soldier was gone in the darkness with a mocking laugh.

Chapter 8 Battle

Ahead of me I saw a barrier of grim shadow outlined against the light of that pine knot, and then heard the sound of naked feet pattering upon the floor. A torch gleamed from around the corner of one of the passageways, and I saw a young buck Indian, almost naked, running swiftly, low to the ground, a spear in his hand.

He saw me as soon as I saw him, and flung up the spear.

I am no swordsman, but desperation stirred dormant cells of dead instinct in my brain. I acted without conscious skill, but I swung that sword at just the right angle to parry the thrust.

Then we were at it, the Indian thrusting with the spear, my sword seeming to bite through the darkness and ward off the thrusts as though it was the sword that guided the arm instead of the arm that must have guided the sword.

There were half a dozen torches, now, and there were others coming on the run. Arrows whizzed about me, and the cave reverberated to the thunder of a rifle. A bullet fanned my cheek and spatted against the wall back of me.

Another Indian was on my left, and I caught the gleam of a dagger as he struck. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bender standing against the wall, his sword glittering in a mad frenzy as he fought off the Indians.

Then came more men and more torches. The red flames gave a weird illumination to the scene of battle. The black smoke went up in streamers until it clung to the distant roof of the chamber. And something thudded against my sword arm with numbing force. I tried to raise the blade and the muscles refused to function.

I sensed a hurtling body coming through the air, and the sword clattered to the rock floor. I swung my left. The fist connected and the man went down. Then the half darkness fairly seemed to rain hurtling brown shapes that ran forward in close formation. Naked arms shot around my knees and I was dragged down. Something hit me on the head, and my brain exploded into a flash of light.

For an instant or two I was unconscious. When I knew anything again I was being bound swiftly and securely. I could hear groans from my left where Bender was lying, two Indians banging his head on the rocks.

There were shouts from one of the side chambers, and my captors, finished with their job of binding me, ran toward those shouts.

I raised my head, and for a few seconds saw such a battle as few living men have seen.

Our soldier had dropped the woman now, and his teeth were gleaming in the light of the torches as he fought and laughed. They did not shoot him because the very press of Indians about him prevented a bullet’s being placed with any accuracy.

But they crowded upon him with grim and relentless fury. There were hunting knives that glittered red in the torchlight, and there were spears that were thrust forward by lean brown arms that rippled with wire-hard muscles.

And moving with effortless ease, his glittering blade flashing in a swift circle of defense, the man held them at bay and laughed at them.

Never had I believed it possible that a slender bit of steel could move with such bewildering speed, or could offer so perfect a defense against pressing numbers.

A swift circling cut, and a man jumped back, his right arm dangling, a knife clattering to the rock. A pointed thrust that made of the sword a mere glittering tongue of naked steel, and a savage cried out in pain and toppled forward to join the piled bodies that were slumped in a half circle around the soldier’s feet, forming a barrier which hampered the movements of those who sought to attack.

The sword glittered with red for a second or two, then as it whirled in its hissing circle, it cleared again and the light reflected from the smooth steel.

It was a rock that got him, a rock expertly thrown. At that there must have been an element of luck in it, for the rock was thrown by the young girl who had crawled to the outer edge of the circle of combatants.

It arched over the heads of the warriors, and dropped from the half darkness, squarely upon the top of the soldier’s head.

He would have shaken off the daze in a few seconds, but he was too hard pressed to stop even for an instant. The sword wavered for a moment in its glittering speed, and then they were on him like a pack of brown wolves dragging down a wounded buck. The whole place became but a swarming mass of seething bodies, and then the motion gradually subsided.

I moved my arms, testing the bonds which held me to see if there was any chance of escape. There was none. My arms might as well have been gripped in a vise.

Then the circle of red figures fell apart and I saw our warrior raised to his feet. His head was bleeding heavily from the cut the rock had inflicted. His arms were circled with cords, and there was still the half-dazed look in his eyes I have seen in the eyes of prize fighters when some unexpected blow has caught them with deadly force in the middle of conflict.

But he was still laughing, and I could see the gleam of his teeth.

About us gathered the enraged Indians. Many had wounds and they were in a deadly humor.

“Explain to them. Otherwise they will put us to death,” chattered Emilio Bender.

Explain! As well have tried to explain cold-blooded murder to twelve men in a jury box. All the smoldering enmity of these Indians against the white man had been fanned to life. They had captured us in the act of raiding them in their sacred cave. All we could hope for was that the end would be merciful. But that was a vain hope. They had been too careful to catch us alive.

If our Mexican could throw himself back three hundred years into some past incarnation under the influence of hypnotism, then these savage Indians could throw themselves back under the influence of rage until the traditions of millions of years of ancestors swayed them in what they were to do.

They jerked us together, tied the three of us with a rope which went around our necks. Many of them had nasty wounds from which blood was flowing in veritable rivulets. But they paid them no heed. Their obsidian-like eyes were glittering with a deadly rage.

The voice of the swordsman rang out. He was fully conscious once more.

“What sort of soldiers are you?” he cried at us. “Why didn’t you hold them here? You two should have had no trouble holding off the tribe. But you didn’t hold one. You let the whole band come down upon me. Soldiers! Bah!

“Where are the circles of dead bodies that should be in front of you? Not a body. You are both tied like a couple of rabbits being taken to the spit! Bah, you have disgraced the swords you carried!

“You, charioteer, did the best that could be expected of you. But how of you, soldier? Soldier indeed! You will answer to me for that falsehood! You are not a soldier. You are not even a charioteer!”

He would have said more, but they jerked on the rope which circled our necks, and we perforce shuffled forward in the half darkness.

Behind us, men looked to their own wounds, or gave treatment to the wounds of others. Ahead of us, some half dozen of the Indians jerked on the rope and took us forward at a half run.

“Don’t stumble,” I warned Emilio Bender, “or they will drag you to death, and the weight of your body will strangle us all.”

I knew something of Indian methods, and knew how hard it was to rush at a half trot through the darkness with hands tied.

Bender yammered some reply, but I could not catch it nor did I care greatly what it was. But he did not stumble.

I did not warn the Mexican. He had heard my warning to Bender, and he was not the sort to stumble, that soldier of a distant past, come to life to plunge us all into a conflict which mocked at history.

We came at length to a lighted chamber. There was a big fire in the center and the walls were black with smoke. This must have been the council chamber of the tribe for countless centuries.

They lined us up against a wall and there were iron loops driven into the solid rock of that wall. They tied us to these loops, and I could hear the laugh of the Mexican as the rope bit into his flesh.

“These are the loops we put into the wall to tie our prisoners to. Now they have turned the tables!”

I found nothing to laugh about, nor did Emilio Bender.

Chapter 9 The Magic of Gold

The Indians squatted in a circle to hold a conclave, and they talked in low tones.

“Will they kill us?” asked Bender.

“Ha!” chuckled the soldier. “Will they kill us! My white-livered scrivener, who talked like a soldier and fought like a coward — they will kill us by inches! Look you to the lofty walls of the cave. From those walls your screams of agony will echo back to you before another twenty-four hours have crossed the pathway of time.”

The remark got on Bender’s nerves.

“Yours, too!” he snapped.

“No,” said the soldier, simply. “I will not scream.”

I spoke to Bender in a low voice. “I have heard of a tribe which dwells in a secret pueblo. They come in to Zuñi to trade; and once or twice when I have been in Zuñi I have seen members of what I considered a new tribe. This is their secret: They make headquarters in this cave. If they are ever surprised on the outside, they pretend to be the ordinary run of Pueblo Indians. How savage they are I don’t know. Perhaps when they have had time to cool off I can barter with them. Remember, we know where there is a store of golden plunder which doubtless they consider sacred ornaments. For the present, our hope is that they will save us and not put us to immediate death.”

Bender grunted at that.

The soldier laughed aloud. “What a fight it would have been had the comrades of my army been with me!”

I turned to him. “Whatever possessed you to grab that girl?”

“Because I wanted to,” he said promptly enough. “I could see that there were not so many men but that three soldiers could hold them at bay. But you are a charioteer and would not know the pleasure of battle.”

That was, to him, sufficient reason. We stood there in a line against the wall, ropes knotted around our necks, ropes binding our arms behind us.

About the fire squatted the Indians in council. From time to time stragglers, more or less seriously wounded, came into the chamber of the cave. The women were treating those who had suffered the most, and in the distance I could hear that wailing cry of savage sorrow with which primitive people mourn for a loved one who is dead.

As the fire died down, fresh wood was piled on it. I noticed the shape of that wood. Plainly it had been cut short in order to be dragged in through an opening; it would not have been cut in such lengths to be hauled in over the long trail we had used. Nor was there any evidence of the entrance we had used being known to the Indians.

I hoped it was a secret entrance about which they did not know. That would give us a break — if we could find our way back to that hole, and if we had the chance to get loose.

The council droned into the small hours of the night. From what I could hear I gathered that the Indians were worried lest others should know that we had come to the cave. Before they decided what to do they wanted to make certain we were alone.

After several hours of powwow, they seemed to reach some decision, and slept. They left a man to watch us and see that we didn’t work loose from the ropes which held us.

But we had been tied by Indians, and there wasn’t much chance of working loose.

The guard regarded us with eyes in which glittered a hatred that made chills ripple the spine. It was clear that his sole desire was to wreak vengeance upon us.

“I’ve got to lie down. I’m weak and the cords are hurting my arms. There’s no feeling in my finger tips,” said Bender.

I laughed at that. They meant to keep us standing, without sleep. If we so much as relaxed our muscles and slumped forward against the bonds, the rope around our necks would strangle us to death unless they decided to loosen the knot after it had bit into our wind, and save us for a more horrible death. I explained as much to Bender.

He seemed to be thinking things over.

“What about the car?” he asked.

“I don’t understand all they said,” I told him. “It’s a mixture of part Spanish, part Indian, and part of a dialect I’ve never heard before. But they’ve set fire to the automobile and covered the wreckage over with sand. They’re worried about how we got into the cave. They think we came in past their guards. But they’ll trail us when it comes daylight and find the entrance we came in by.”

He let his aluminium-colored eyes narrow in thought, and I got an idea.

“Can you hypnotize the guard?” I asked.

He suddenly stiffened to alert attention. “I can try. Talk to him in a low voice. Get his attention on you. Then, when I start to talk, you keep silent.”

I told him I would. The Mexican was listening to us with a frown of perplexity on his features.

Soon the guard came close.

“Would you like gold?” I asked of him.

He scorned to answer me, after the fashion of an Indian.

“Gold, lots of gold, a fortune in sacred gold,” I told him, and let my voice sink to a droning monotone. “You could be wealthy. You could traffic with the white men and buy all that you desired. You would never need to hunt, never need to work. You could have everything that any one in the tribe could have, and a thousand times more. You would be powerful, you would be chief.”

He approached me and spat in my face.

I waited a few moments, then droned again: “Gold, gold, gold, ever the thing of power. There is plenty of gold. You can have sacred gold, precious gold...”

And then, from my right, the voice of the man with pinpoint eyes took up the refrain.

“Gold, gold, gold,” he said, speaking in Spanish. “Gold, gold, gold. Look at me, gaze into my eyes. In them you will see that there is honesty.

“Gold, gold, gold. You are feeling drowsy. Sleep is coming to you. Gold, gold, gold. Always there is the glitter of gold. The firelight on the wall is like gold in the rocks. You see it and the light hurts your eyes. You close them to shut out the sight of the gold, gold, gold.”

And I noticed that the Indian was indeed closing his eyes. He fought against the drooping lids, but the fight was a losing one.

“Gold, gold, gold,” droned the man with pin-point eyes. “And before you go to sleep you must kill the white men. You hate me. You want to kill me. When I am dead you can sleep. But you must kill me first. Take your knife from your belt, hold it in your hand, ready to cut.”

And the brown hand sleepily went to the belt, took out the knife, and looked stupidly at it.

“Gold, gold, gold,” droned the voice in its monotone of sleepy intonations. “Gold, gold, gold. The easiest way for you to kill me is to cut my arteries. See, I am tied up with my arteries, and my arteries stretch to the others. They are not ropes, but arteries in which there courses blood.

“Cut those arteries and watch us slowly die in great agony. Then you can sleep. You cannot call out, you cannot stay awake. You have to sleep, and then you will wake up and find gold. Gold, gold, gold.”

And I saw the hand that held the knife raise it and start sawing at the ropes. As the first of the ropes parted I could see the expression upon the savage features.

Never have I seen such an expression of horrible blood lust before, nor do I care to again. It was as though I could study, through the lens of a slow-motion picture camera, the face of a man who was murdering me in a burst of savage hatred.

The eyes were maniacal. The lips slavered. The facial muscles writhed with the animal pleasure of torture inflicted upon an enemy.

“I groan, I scream, I cry out in my anguish,” purred the man with the aluminium-colored eyes, “and the sound is as music to your ears. Not too fast do you work the knife, but just fast enough to let the blood flow from my arteries and leave me in agony. The warm blood is splashing upon your arms now. You are bathed in it, and you are being revenged. And presently you will sleep, and when you wake up you will find gold, gold, gold.”

The words droned on while the Indian cut through the bonds that held us together and anchored us to the wall.

“Now I am dead and you can sleep,” said the droning voice. “You will lie back upon the floor and your eyes will close. You will relax your hold upon the knife. You have avenged your tribe. And you will sleep a deep and dreamless slumber. When you awaken it will be to find gold. Gold, gold, gold.”

The Indian slumped to the rocky floor, flung one arm under his head and instantly went to sleep.

“What magic is this?” demanded the Mexican.

“Shut up!” I hissed at him in a whisper.

The council fire was some little distance from us, and the men slept about it like logs of wood. I knew the Indian delicacy of sense. They would be almost certain to hear us before we could make good our escape. But every second was precious now.

I sat down on the rock floor and inched my way toward the sleeping Indian, took the knife from his nerveless fingers, and held it rigid in my hand.

By an effort I got to my feet. The aluminium-eyed man leaned against the blade of the knife and sawed the last of his bonds across it. When they had dropped to the floor he took the knife and cut my ropes, then those of the soldier.

Chapter 10 Through the Blackness

Our swords had been taken from us and flung into a corner of the rock chamber. We retrieved them, and I was barely able to restrain the soldier from then and there giving his battle cry by pointing out to him in a whisper that he was accompanied only by a charioteer and a scrivener who were worse than useless in battle. He regretfully agreed, and then we wormed our way silently toward the arched opening through which we had been marched.

In one of the pockets carved in the rock wall by the action of the elements, were stacked some pitch knots to be used as torches, and I gathered up two or three of these.

“You have the matches?” I asked of Bender.

He nodded.

Back of us some one stirred.

“Run!” I whispered.

There was a shout from behind us, but it was the confused shout of one who is not in full possession of his faculties.

Some sleeping Indian, hearing the faint sound of our feet, had doubtless awakened, looked toward the wall and seen that we had gone. But he did not know in which direction.

“Feel your way through the darkness,” I cautioned them. “Do not show a light and do not make noise. They don’t know which way we have gone.”

They followed my instructions, although the Mexican grumbled at being forced to flee from a horde of ignorant heathens.

I had no time to explain to him the development of the modem revolver, or the repeating rifle. I could only urge him to run by warning him that he was with two cowards. It was the only argument which moved him.

I doubt if we could have found our way back to the place where the gold was stored had it not been for the uncanny sense of perception of the Mexican. He seemed able to see in the darkness, and he must have known the inside of that cave as a river pilot knows his stream. For he took us on a swift but silent walk until I could hear the wailing of women, and knew that we were approaching the scene of our conflict.

We had some light here, the light of a distant camp fire in the other chamber of the cave. The women had taken the bodies out into this chamber and built a fire. About this fire they rocked back and forth, wailing their thin chant of mourning.

They were as hypnotized with their grief as the Indian guard had been with the droned words of Emilio Bender.

Getting past them was easy, but we had to use considerable care to keep some of the children from spotting us. It was the older girls who made the trouble. They sat in on the mourning party, but youth is ever unable to concentrate for long upon any emotion other than love; and we could see the slender forms of the girls flitting about the mourning fire, putting on additional wood.

We finally reached the cleft where the gold had been stored. It was still there, intact.

Emilio Bender raked out the gold pieces and struck one of the matches. He devoured them with his eyes. There were golden ornaments, little gold images, even gold arrowheads.

In the greed of that moment, the man with the strange, aluminium-colored eyes forgot himself. He scooped such things as he desired into his pockets.

“This is my third,” he said, heedless of the fact he had taken a good three-quarters. “You two divide the rest and we’ll get going.”

It must have been the silence which warned him. It was the silence which precedes a storm, and Emilio Bender looked up to encounter the flaming gaze of the man who claimed to be Pablo Viscente de Moreno, a soldier who had marched the deserts three hundred-odd years ago.

“So!” yelled the soldier. “You would loot the plunder of a soldier, eh? You who claim to be a soldier, but are not even a charioteer!”

And the right hand of the soldier whipped the naked blade in a hissing arc.

“Arise and account!” shouted the soldier.

There was only the faintest light from the distant camp fires. They glinted in half reflections from the polished blade, and served to show the men as half-formed shadows moving against the chalklike wall of the cave.

“But think,” said Emilio Bender in his droning voice, “of what you can buy with that gold! Think of the sleep you have lost...”

I still believe that if he had surrendered the gold instead of trying to use his hypnotism he could have saved himself. But he was flushed by his success with the Indian and emboldened by greed.

“Sleep, sleep, sleep,” he droned. “You need to rest, to relax, to let your senses become warm and drowsy. You feel a strange quiet...”

It was then that the Mexican said something which has puzzled me, and will always puzzle me. Some of what had happened could be explained through the theory of dual personalities. But this remark tended to show that he knew.

“Quiet!” he shouted. “Sleep, you say! I have slept for three hundred years. Now look out for yourself!”

It happened so quickly that I could not interfere even had I wanted to. These two men had come to the final show-down, and that show-down was inevitable. The hypnotist had virtually created this strange man who was now challenging him. And the greed of the man with eyes like pin-points was bound to bring about such a conflict, sooner or later. As well sooner as later.

I heard the rasp of steel on steel, and an exclamation from the soldier.

“You would try to slip a blade into my stomach from below, would you? Then stand up and fight, man to man.”

“Quick!” yelled Bender to me. “Run him through in the back and we will divide the gold.”

I know of no remark that better illustrated the character of the man. It was his last.

There was the whirl of a blade, a cut, a thrust, a groan and something staggered back and slumped to the rock.

“Fool!” grunted the soldier. “You would pose as a soldier and turn out a thief!”

I groped for the pulse of the man with pin-point eyes. There was no pulse. His wrist was limp and already chilling with death.

The soldier saw my motion and laughed bitterly. “Am I so clumsy then that when I run my blade through their hearts you can feel a beat in the wrist? He is dead, I tell you. Come.”

He stooped and took the gold from the pockets of the dead man, and he made a rough division with me.

“Thus do soldiers share their spoils upon the field of battle,” he said.

I crammed my gold into my pockets.

From the main body of the cave was a terrific clamor of noise. The Indians were loose and on the trail, rushing down the cave toward us.

“Quick, run!” I yelled.

“Run? Why? Are we not two soldiers?”

“They have guns,” I said. “We have no chance against them.”

I doubt if I could have moved him, but, of a sudden, he spoke in a thicker, slower tone.

“Very well, then, let us run. I know this cave. Follow me.”

He ran; and as he ran his steps became more heavy, slower. The body gradually lost the spring and became as the muscle-bound body of a cholo laborer.

We ran through the dark, he leading the way.

“Stoop here,” he called; and I stooped, felt a low archway graze my body.

“There is another entrance, a secret entrance,” he said. “I hope I can find it. I am getting drowsy. Some one is shouting in my ear to go away and leave his body alone. Why should I have some one shout at me to leave my own body?

“Carramba! It’s all because of that man with the funny eyes. I know now that I must die because I killed him. As his corpse gets cold, so does my own soul get cold. I am paying a price, and yet it is not a price. It is something I have already paid... Here, amigo, take all the gold. I would rather you had it than the strange man who is pushing me out of my skin. How he pushes! And he is slow and stolid. He could never oust me but for the death of the man with the strange eyes. I can feel an inner chill.”

He stopped in his tracks, thrust golden ornaments and turquoise necklaces into my hands.

“Fill — your — pockets... Adios, amigo!”

And he was gone. I knew instantly when the other came into possession of his body.

“Que es? What is it?” he demanded, Mexican fashion, and his tone was dull as the tone of a man who is slowly awakening from a long sleep.

“We are in a cave,” I said. “Follow me.”

He accepted the statement with the unreasoning stolidity of his kind. I led the way in the same general direction the soldier had been piloting me. It was dark, and yet it was not entirely dark. There was a half light in the air, and a freshness which reminded me of dawn.

We pushed forward, seeing the vague shape of walls and minarets on our sides. I thought there was an opening overhead and glanced upward. I saw the pale glow of a star, pin-pointing out before the dawn, and I thought of the man with pin-point eyes.

Somewhere, we had left the cave and were in a canon which towered on either side in great cliffs. The cliffs spread apart. The floor of the canon became rough and bowlder-strewn. We fought our way forward. The light grew stronger, and dawn smells were in the air.

We found a deer trail angling from the floor of the canon to the side of the mountain, around it to the desert plain below the mesa. I led the way along this. There were no signs of Indians.

The Mexican looked down at the sword he was using for a walking stick. It was stained with sticky red, and even now the flies were commencing to drone about it.

“What is this?” he asked in his thick, suspicious voice, and raised it to his eyes. Then he flung it far down the canon. It clattered upon the rocks. He crossed himself, looked at me with eyes which were showing a glint of expression, an expression of wonderment.

“It is nothing,” I said. “Come.”

“Where is the other man, the Señor Bender?”

“He has remained behind. Come.”

We struck the shoulder of the mountain, zigzagged to the plain. The sun came up and tinted us with its reddish rays. Far off in the distance I saw a cloud of dust and knew that it was an automobile.

I followed the course of the road, figured where we might intersect it, and ran down the sloping plain, shouting at the Mexican to hurry.

He ran with a heavy-footed pace which covered the ground but slowly. We would have missed it, but the automobile driver saw us and waited while we covered the last half mile. He was a bronzed rancher who was inclined to be suspicious, but he gave us a lift.

I had taken the things from the pockets of my coat, taken off my coat, and rolled the treasure stuff into a ball within the coat. The rancher looked at it suspiciously, but I offered no explanation. He took us to Gallup, and from there we caught a train to Los Angeles.

I had purchased a suitcase for my treasure stuff.

At Los Angeles I secured a car from a friend, and drove the Mexican back to Mexicali.

I deemed it better to transfer a portion of the gold into money and pay him his half in coin. It amounted to more than twelve thousand dollars at the prices I was able to get. Many of the things were museum pieces, even without an authentic history. And I gave no history.

But I did not pay him until I had him back in his ’dobe, and was ready to leave. His women folks commented on the wounds on his face, on the scratch marks which stretched from forehead to chin.

“Where is the evil one?” asked the old woman, when there had been mutually evasive comments on the wounds of the man.

“He remained behind.”

She rocked back and forth on her chair and crooned some charm, or perhaps it was a curse. The words were unintelligible.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“He was evil, very evil,” she said at length.

“He was a devil-man,” said the fat woman.

The Mexican spoke simply.

“He made me very sleepy,” he said.

I made no comments. The children came trooping in and climbed all over me. I gave them a peso apiece. Then, when I was ready to go, I took an envelope from my pocket and handed it to the Mexican.

“Señor,” I said, “I have the honor to wish you good day, and to express regrets at the parting and appreciation for the association.”

He muttered some formal courtesy. It was the fat woman who opened the envelope and saw the crisp five-hundred-dollar bills that were in it. I heard her scream as I left the door.

From the sidewalk I could hear her voice through the open window. She was explaining the amount of the money to the more stolid and ignorant husband. The old woman was keeping up a shrill chattering of words and phrases which had almost no meaning, although once or twice I caught the expression “Devil Man.”

I have no explanation. I have given you the facts as they happened; but to understand them you must be able to visualize the eyes of the man as I saw them there in that Mexicali dance hall, aluminium-colored eyes that had pupils that were mere pin-points.

If you had seen those eyes, the story would have seemed but the natural sequence of events, rather than something bizarre. Strange things happen on the border desert; strange whispers seep through the ear-aching silence of the desert spaces.

But never again have I seen a man with eyes like those — only the once. And that is enough. Emilio Bender lies asleep in a cave of death beneath a mesa in New Mexico. Perhaps, if there is anything in the Buddhist law of reincarnation and repayment, some hypnotist of three hundred years hence will disturb his rest and summon him back to the land of the living.

Personally, I do not know.