ed. "It sounds like the name of some new floor
varnish."

"Well, it isn't, though it might be," laughed Tom. "Copan is a city,
in the Department of Copan, near the boundary between Honduras and
Guatemala. A fact I learned from the article and not because I
remembered my geography."

"I was going to say," remarked Ned with a smile, "that you were coming
it rather strong on the school-book stuff."

"Oh, it's all plainly written down there," and Tom waved toward the
magazine at which Ned was looking. "As you'll see, if you take the
trouble to go through it, as I did, Copan is, or maybe was, for all I
know, one of the most important centers of the Mayan civilization."

"What's Mayan?" asked Ned. "You see I'm going to imbibe my information
by the deductive rather than the excavative process," he added with a
laugh.

"I see," laughed Tom. "Well, Mayan refers to the Mayas, an aboriginal
people of Yucatan. The Mayas had a peculiar civilization of their own,
thousands of years ago, and their calendar system was so involved----"

"Never mind about dates," again interrupted Ned. "Get down to brass
tacks. I'm willing to take your word for it that there's a Copan
valley in Honduras. But what has your friend Professor Bumper to do
with it?"

"This. He has come across some old manuscripts, or ancient document
records, referring to this valley, and they state, according to this
article he has written for the magazine, that somewhere in the valley
is a wonderful city, traces of which have been found twenty to forty
feet below the surface, on which great trees are growing, showing that
the city was covered hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago."

"But where does the idol of gold come in?"

"I'm coming to that," said Tom. "Though, if Professor Bumper has his
way, the idol will be coming out instead of coming in."

"You mean he wants to get it and take it away from the Copan valley,
Tom?"

"That's it, Ned. It has great value not only from the amount of pure
gold that is in it, but as an antique. I fancy the professor is more
interested in that aspect of it. But he's written a wonderful story,
telling how he happened to come across the ancient manuscripts in the
tomb of some old Indian whose mummy he unearthed on a trip to Central
America.

"Then he tells of the trouble he had in discovering how to solve the
key to the translation code; but when he did, he found a great story
unfolded to him.

"This story