,
and when we spoke to him he neither spoke nor moved. But, happily, our
dread that he had died in that gloomy solitude was not realized; for as
I laid my hand upon his bare breast I felt his heart feebly beating, and
at the touch of my hand he sighed a little, and then slowly opened his
eyes.

"He's only swounded," Young cried, joyfully. "It's th' smotherin'
shut-upness o' this forlorn hole he's lyin' in. There's a little more
air out in th' big room. Just grab t'other end o' th' stretcher,
Professor, an' we'll yank him out there--nobody's likely t' come in t'
stop us while this storm lasts. An'--an' we must be careful how we talk,
Professor, y' know," he added, in a lower tone, as we raised the
stretcher. "It won't do for him t' know about--about _it_ now." There
was a break in Young's voice as he spoke, and I could feel by the
momentary quiver of the stretcher that a shiver went through him as he
thought of that "it," about which we must for a time hold our peace.

Young bore the forward end of the stretcher, and as we came into the
oratory I felt him start as he exclaimed, "What th' devil's broke loose
here?"

The darkness of the storm outside shrouded the oratory in a dusky
twilight; but even through the shadows which lay thick about us we could
see that there had been within this chamber some outbreak of
extraordinary and tremendous violence; for the image of the god
Huitzilopochtli had been cast down and broken into fragments, and just
behind where it had stood there was a dark rift in the gold-plating of
the walls, where several plates had been wrenched bodily away.

A strong odor of sulphur hung heavily in the air, and, as I perceived
it, the whole matter was plain to me. But Young sniffed at this odor
suspiciously when we had brought the stretcher gently to rest upon the
floor, and in a startled voice exclaimed, "Th' devil has been bustin'
around in here for sure, an' he's left his regular home-made stink for a
give-away!" and as he spoke there was manifest a decided bristling of
his fringe of hair.

I could not help smiling at this quaint proof of the shattered condition
of Young's nerves--for, under ordinary circumstances, he was the very
last man in the world to place faith in things supernatural--but I
answered him promptly: "Then the devil did a stroke of honest business
at the same time, for all this is the work of the same thunder-bolt, or
of a part of it, that killed that Indian. Didn't you hear