Part 2

Juan squatted in the darkness. The flickering firelight fitfully glinted red upon his eyes. They moved from time to time, as he gazed alternately from the tossing hammock to the hide wrapped bundle, and from the bundle to the boots. Juan was wholly scornful now, and his three-sixteenths of Spanish blood was wholly in the ascendant. These men were plainly mad. They made much ado over small green pebbles not even bright enough to be used for beads. They made a long recitative over them in a monotonous voice. They rewrapped the green pebbles, and one then kicked the package. Madness. Pure madness!

A burned-through stick collapsed and sent up a slender fountain of sparks. The dark man had been silent, had been as motionless as Juan himself. Yet Juan had seen his eyes darting from one to the other of his companions. He remained motionless now, but his eyes moved from one hammock to the other, and then to the wrapped hide package on the floor.

The stillness was so complete that a sudden snore caused even Juan to start a little. That snore came from the hammock of the gray eyed man. And Juan saw the dark man rise slowly. Juan saw his face clearly, and it was the face of a devil. He saw the long hands work strangely, saw them go to the revolver in his holster, saw them drop away again. And the Indian in Juan felt death in the air.

The jungle may have found the next few moments subtly humorous to watch. As the dark man reached his full height, Juan moved very quietly. As the dark man moved soundlessly toward the hammock in which the wakeful man lay, Juan began to crawl with infinite stealth into his hut. He vanished within its doorway as a startled voice said--

“What’s the matter?”

And Juan was feeling his way very delicately about the abysmal blackness of the hut when the man outside hissed sibilantly for silence. No one knows, of course, just why Juan first looked for and found a second jug of _chicha_ from which he took an encouraging draught. It may have been that Juan was afraid, or it may be that he was covetous, or it is of course possible that he was merely in love with a woman. _Chicha_, however, is helpful in all three of those emotions.

He looked out of the doorway and saw the dark man close by the hammock of the red headed _gringo_. He was talking in an urgent low tone. Tumbled, incomprehensible syllables reached Juan’s ears. And Juan could see the dark man’s face as demoniacal in the fire glow.

“Listen to me,” he was saying softly. “Last night, Walker proposed that we should kill you and divide the emeralds two ways instead of three.”

Juan felt the _chicha_ begin to warm his inwards. He felt for and found another possession of his, in the hut.

“I pretended to fall in with him.”

The sounds meant nothing, but Juan could see the dark man whispering when he looked out of the hut again. His head was close to that of the man in the hammock. Juan could not see the expression of the red headed man. He could not see a look of horror and unbelief changing slowly to one of dawning suspicion.

“We were to play with you until tomorrow,” the whisper went on, while Juan did certain things which were only possible by virtue of a dash of Spanish blood. “That was so you’d help paddle the last stretch. And tomorrow night----”

While the red headed _Yanqui_ listened, staring, the lean fingers of the dark man darted out. There was a little sound--not enough to waken a sleeping man no more than two yards away. And then a horrible, silent, struggle began. The dark man bent over the hammock like some monstrous vulture. His hands were closed about the throat of the man with red hair, who fought frenziedly in the toils of his hampering hammock to tear away the grip that shut off his breath. There was no sound at all except the ghastly rustling of the hammock cloth. Juan deliberately waited as the struggles slackened, as the writhings of the red headed man became less. After all, these men were madmen... And the cause of Juan’s calmness may have been _chicha_ and the motive for his action may have been love of a woman, or covetousness, or it may have been pure fear. But Juan had fitted a long arrow to the string of the tall Araucanian bow in his hands. Standing in the darkness, he drew that arrow to his ear. He released it.

And then everything was very quiet.

Dawn was breaking as the gray eyed Yanqui woke. He tumbled out of his hammock. He stared about him. He stiffened and looked about in what was almost terror. He plunged through the ashes of a dead camp-fire toward his companions.

The red headed man was breathing. A little. A very little. The gray eyed man brought him slowly back to life. For the dark man, of course, nothing could be done. An arrow stuck out a foot beyond his back.

The red headed man could not talk, because of his swollen throat, but by gestures he told what he knew. It was only then that the gray eyed _gringo_ looked for the packet of emeralds. Juan had opened that package, and he had fingered the stones, and he had flung them contemptuously aside. Juan, you see, was not a madman. Juan was gone. And so were the dark man’s boots.

“M-my God!” said the gray eyed Yanqui shakenly. “M-my God! You’d have killed me for a girl, and--he’d have killed both of us for the emeralds--and--and that damned Indian killed him for his boots!”

Which, somehow, seems to point a moral of some sort. But it is elusive.

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the August 15, 1929 issue of “Adventure” magazine.]