k awoke, and through the long night
croaked their mournful plaint in a weird minor cadence that seemed to
the awed Americans to voice to the shimmering moon the countless
wrongs of the primitive Indians, who, centuries before, had roamed
this marvelous land in happy freedom, until the Spaniard descended
like a dark cloud and, with rack and stake, fastened his blighting
religion upon them.

A day's rest at La Colorado sufficed to revive the spirits of the
party and prepare them for the additional eight or ten hour journey
over boggy morass and steep hill to La Libertad. For this trip Rosendo
would take only the Americans and Carmen. The _cargadores_ were not to
know the nature of this expedition, which, Rosendo announced, was
undertaken that the Americans might explore for two days the region
around the upper Tigui. The men received this explanation with grunts
of satisfaction.

Trembling with suppressed excitement, oblivious now of fatigue,
hunger, or hardship, Reed and Harris followed the old man that day
over the ancient, obliterated trail to the forgotten mine of Don
Ignacio de Rincon. They experienced all the sensations of those who
find themselves at last on the course that leads to buried treasure.
To Harris, the romance attaching to the expedition obliterated all
other considerations. But Reed was busy with the practical end of it,
with costs, with the problems of supplies, of transportation, and
trail. Carmen saw but one vision, the man in far-off Simiti, whose
ancestor once owned the great mine which lay just ahead of them.

When night fell, the four stood, silent and wondering, at the mouth of
the crumbling tunnel, where lay a rusted shovel bearing the scarce
distinguishable inscription, "I de R."

* * * * *

Two weeks later a group of natives, sitting at a feast of baked
alligator tail, at the mouth of the Amaceri, near the dirty,
straggling riverine town of Llano, rose in astonishment as they saw
issuing from the clayey, wallowing Guamoco trail a staggering band of
travelers, among them two foreigners, whose clothes were in shreds and
whose beards and unkempt hair were caked with yellow mud. With them
came a young girl, lightly clad and wearing torn rope _alpargates_ on
her bare feet. The heat was descending in torrents. From the
neighboring town floated a brawling bedlam of human voices. It was
Sunday, and the villagers were celebrating a religious _fiesta_.