Part 5 (1/2)
”They match perfectly,” he said quietly, gathering them up and placing them in a wallet which he carried. ”All the indentures of the tearing correspond. Four warnings seem to have been sent to those who are likely to find out something of the secret.”
Norton seemed to have gained somewhat of his composure now that he had been able to talk to some one.
”What are you going to do--give it up?” he asked tensely.
”Nothing could have insured my sticking to it harder,” answered Craig grimly.
”Then we'll all have to stick together,” said Norton slowly. ”We all seem to be in the same boat.”
As he rose to go he extended a hand to each of us.
”I'll stick,” repeated Kennedy, with that peculiar bulldog look of intensity on his face which I had come to know so well.
IV
THE TREASURE HUNTERS
Norton had scarcely gone, and Kennedy was still studying the four pieces of paper on which the warning had been given, when our laboratory door was softly pushed open again.
It was Senorita Mendoza, looking more beautiful than ever in her plain black mourning dress, the unnatural pallor of her face heightening the wonderful l.u.s.trous eyes that looked about as though half frightened at what she was doing.
”I hope nothing has happened,” greeted Kennedy, placing an easy-chair for her. ”But I'm glad to see that you have confidence enough to trust me.”
She looked about doubtfully at the vast amount of paraphernalia which Craig had collected in his scientific warfare on crime. Though she did not understand it, it seemed to impress her.
”No,” she murmured, ”nothing new has happened. You told me to call on you if I should think of anything else.”
She said it with an air as if confessing something. It was apparent that, whatever it was, she had known it all the time and only after a struggle had brought herself to telling it.
”Then you have thought of something?” prompted Craig.
”Yes,” she replied in a low tone. Then with an effort she went on: ”I don't know whether you know it or not, but my family is an old one, one of the oldest in Peru.”
Kennedy nodded encouragingly.
”Back in the old days, after Pizarro,” she hurried on, no longer able to choose her words, but blurting the thing out directly, ”an ancestor of mine was murdered by an Inca dagger.”
She stopped again and looked about, actually frightened at her own temerity, evidently. Kennedy and his twentieth-century surroundings seemed again to rea.s.sure her.
”I can't tell you the story,” she resumed. ”I don't know it. My father knew it. But it was some kind of family secret, for he never told me.
Once when I asked him he put me off; told me to wait until I was a little older.”
”And you think that may have something to do with the case?” asked Kennedy, trying to draw out anything more that she knew.
”I don't know,” she answered frankly. ”But don't you think that it is strange--an ancestor of mine murdered and now, hundreds of years afterward, my father, the last of his line in direct descent, murdered in the same way, by an Inca dagger that has disappeared?”
”Then you were listening while I was talking to Professor Norton?” shot out Kennedy, not unkindly, but rather as a surprise test to see what she would say.
”You cannot blame me for that,” she returned simply.