and the flock rose again with loud squawks of
alarm, leaving a round dozen of their number, either dead or badly
wounded, behind them. Ten minutes later, as the brief twilight was
rapidly deepening into night, the nude figures of the two Englishmen
scrambled out of the water, each bearing his quota of dead wild duck,
and, laying their spoils upon the ground, nonchalantly proceeded to
resume the quaint garments of skins that now constituted their only
clothing.

Long into the night sat the pair, crouching over their camp fire, for
though the days were hot the nights were bitterly cold, even in that
valley between the two ranges of mountains; and while Dick gazed
abstractedly aloft into the velvet blackness at the innumerable stars
that glittered above him through the frosty atmosphere, Phil spoke of
the strange dreams--which he persisted, half-jestingly and half in
earnest, in regarding as memories--that visited him so frequently, of
curious scenes that he had witnessed and remarkable deeds that he had
done in the far past, either in imagination or reality, he could not
possibly say which. And while he talked and Dick listened, vacillating
between amusement and conviction, some twenty stalwart figures, thin and
aquiline of feature, copper-hued of skin, and strangely clothed, came
creeping up out of the darkness until they reached a clump of bush
within earshot of the pair, where they lurked, waiting patiently until
the audacious intruders upon their most sacred territory should resign
themselves to sleep--and to a captivity which, as planned by the chief
figure of the group, was to be of but brief duration, ending in a death
of unspeakable horror.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

HOW THEY FOUND AN ENORMOUS TREASURE, AND TOOK IT HOME.

It was past midnight, and the camp fire, which Dick had bountifully
replenished with stout branches from the neighbouring clump of bush, the
last thing before stretching himself out to sleep, had dwindled to a
mass of dull red smouldering embers, when the white-clad figure of an
elderly man, copper-hued, bald-headed, and clean shaven, approached with
stealthy footsteps the recumbent bodies of the two slumbering
Englishmen. Bending over first one and then the other, he held a
saturated cloth toward their nostrils in such a manner that the sleepers
were permitted to inhale, for about a minute each, the faint, fragrant
fumes that emanated from it; then, abandoning all further caution, he
withd