2

      THE UNSEEN WATCHERS

       Table of Contents

      Starrett had drifted out of the paralysis of the blow into a drunken stupor. Graydon dragged him over to the tent, thrust a knapsack under his head, and threw a blanket over him. Then he went out and built up the fire. There was a trampling through the underbrush. Soames and Dancret came up through the trees.

      “Find any signs?” he asked.

      “Signs? Hell—no!” snarled the New Englander. “Say, Graydon, did you hear somethin’ like a lot of horns? Damned queer horns, too. They seemed to be over here.”

      Graydon nodded, he realized that he must tell these men what had happened so that they could prepare some defense. But how much could he tell?

      Tell them of Suarra’s beauty, of her golden ornaments and her gem-tipped spears of gold? Tell them what she had said of Atahualpa’s treasure?

      If he did, there would be no further reasoning with them. They would go berserk with greed. Yet something of it he must tell them if they were to be ready for the attack which he was certain would come with the dawn.

      And of the girl they would learn soon enough from Starrett.

      He heard an exclamation from Dancret who had passed on into the tent; heard him come out; stood up and faced the wiry little Frenchman.

      “What’s the matter wit’ Starrett, eh?” Dancret snapped. “First I t’ought he’s drunk. Then I see he’s scratched like wild cat and wit’ a lump on his jaw as big as one orange. What you do to Starrett, eh?”

      Graydon had made up his mind, and was ready to answer.

      “Dancret,” he said, “Soames—we’re in a bad box. I came in from hunting less than an hour ago, and found Starrett wrestling with a girl. That’s bad medicine down here—the worst, and you two know it. I had to knock Starrett out before I could get the girl away from him. Her people will probably be after us in the morning. There’s no use trying to get away. We don’t know a thing about this wilderness. Here is as good as any other place to meet them. We’d better spend the night getting it ready so we can put up a good scrap, if we have to.”

      “A girl, eh?” said Dancret. “What she look like? Where she come from? How she get away?”

      Graydon chose the last question to answer.

      “I let her go,” he said.

      “You let her go!” snarled Soames. “What the hell did you do that for? Why didn’t you tie her up? We could have held her as a hostage, Graydon—had somethin’ to do some tradin’ with when her damned bunch of Indians came.”

      “She wasn’t an Indian, Soames,” said Graydon, then hesitated.

      “You mean she was white—Spanish?” broke in Dancret, incredulously.

      “No, not Spanish either. She was white. Yes, white as any of us. I don’t know what she was.”

      The pair stared at him, then at each other.

      “There’s somethin’ damned funny about this,” growled Soames, at last. “But what I want to know is why you let her go—whatever the hell she was?”

      “Because I thought we’d have a better chance if I did than if I didn’t.” Graydon’s own wrath was rising. “I tell you that we’re up against something none of us knows anything about. And we’ve got just one chance of getting out of the mess. If I’d kept her here, we wouldn’t have even that chance.”

      Dancret stooped, and picked up something from the ground, something that gleamed yellow in the firelight.

      “Somet’ing funny is right, Soames,” he said. “Look at this!”

      He handed the gleaming object over. It was a golden bracelet, and as Soames turned it over in his hand there was the green glitter of emeralds. It had been torn from Suarra’s arm, undoubtedly, in her struggle with Starrett.

      “What that girl give you to let her go, Graydon, eh?” Dancret spat. “What she tell you, eh?”

      Soames’s hand dropped to his automatic.

      “She gave me nothing. I took nothing,” answered Graydon.

      “I t’ink you damned liar,” said Dancret, viciously. “We get Starrett awake,” he turned to Soames. “We get him awake quick. I t’ink he tell us more about this, oui. A girl who wears stuff like this—and he lets her go! Lets her go when he knows there must be more where this come from—eh, Soames! Damned funny is right, eh? Come now, we see what Starrett tell us.”

      Graydon watched them go into the tent. Soon Soames came out, went to a spring that bubbled up from among the trees; returned, with water.

      Well, let them waken Starrett; let him tell them whatever he would. They would not kill him that night, of that he was sure. They believed that he knew too much. And in the morning—

      What was hidden in the morning for them all?

      That even now they were prisoners, Graydon was sure. Suarra’s warning not to leave the camp had been explicit. Since that tumult of the elfin horns, her swift vanishing and the silence that had followed, he no longer doubted that they had strayed, as she had said, within the grasp of some power as formidable as it was mysterious.

      The silence? Suddenly it came to him that the night had become strangely still. There was no sound either of insect or bird, nor any stirring of the familiar after-twilight life of the wilderness.

      The camp was besieged by silence!

      He walked away through the algarrobas. There was a scant score of the trees. They stood like a little leafy island peak within the brush-covered savanna. They were great trees, every one of them, and set with a curious regularity; as though they had not sprung up by chance; as though indeed they had been carefully planted.

      Graydon reached the last of them, rested a hand against a bole that was like myriads of tiny grubs turned to soft brown wood. He peered out. The slope that lay before him was flooded with moonlight; the yellow blooms of the chilca shrubs that pressed to the very feet of the trees shone wanly in the silver flood. The faintly aromatic fragrance of the quenuar stole around him. Movement or sign of