CHAPTER XVIII.

JIMMIE’S AWFUL HUNGER.

“You say,” Sam asked, as Pedro crouched in the corner of the temple where the old fountain basin had been, “that the Indians will never actually attack the temple?”

“They never have,” replied Pedro, his teeth chattering in terror. “Since I have been stationed here to feed and care for the wild animals in captivity, I have known them to utter threats, but until to-night, so far as I know, none of them ever placed a foot on the temple steps.”

“They did it to-night, all right!” Jimmie declared.

“Felix could tell us about that if they had left enough of his frame to utter a sound!” Carl put in.

The boys were both weak from loss of blood, but their injuries were not of a character to render them incapable of moving about.

“What I’m afraid of,” Pedro went on, “is that they’ll surround the temple and try to starve us into submission.”

“Jerusalem!” cried Jimmie. “That doesn’t sound good to me. I’m so hungry now I could eat one of those jaguars raw!”

“But they are not fit to eat!” exclaimed Pedro.

“They wanted to eat us, didn’t they?” demanded Jimmie. “I guess turn and turn about is fair play!”

“Is there no secret way out of this place?” asked Sam, as the howls of the savages became more imperative.

Pedro shook his head doubtfully. There were rumors, he said, of secret passages, but he had never been able to discover them. For his own part, he did not believe they existed.

“What sort of a hole is that den the jaguars came out of?” asked Jimmie. “It looks like it might extend a long way into the earth.”

“No,” answered Pedro, “it is only a subterranean room, used a thousand years ago by the priests who performed at the broken altar you see beyond the fountain. When the Gringoes came with their proposition to hold wild animals here until they could be taken out to Caxamarca, and thence down the railroad to the coast, they examined the walls of the chamber closely, but found no opening by which the wild beasts might escape. Therefore, I say, there is no passage leading from that chamber.”

“From the looks of things,” Carl said, glancing out at the Indians, now swarming by the score on the level plateau between the front of the ruined temple and the lake, “we’ll have plenty of time to investigate this old temple before we get out of it.”

“How are we going to investigate anything when we’re hungry?” demanded Jimmie. “I can’t even think when I’m hungry.”

“Take away Jimmie’s appetite,” grinned Carl, “and there wouldn’t be enough left of him to fill an ounce bottle!”

Pedro still sat in the basin of the old fountain, rocking his body back and forth and wailing in a mixture of Spanish and English that he was the most unfortunate man who ever drew the breath of life.

“The animal industry,” he wailed, “is ruined. No more will the hunters of wild beasts bring them to this place for safe keeping. No more will the Indians assist in their capture. No more will the gold of the Gringo kiss my palm. The ships came out of the sky and brought ruin. Right the Indians are when they declare that the men who fly bring only disease and disaster!” he continued, with an angry glance directed at the boys.

“Cheer up!” laughed Jimmie. “Cheer up, old top, and remember that the worst is yet to come! Say!” the boy added in a moment. “How would it do to step out to the entrance and shoot a couple of those noisy savages?”

“I never learned how to shoot with an empty gun!” Carl said scornfully.

“How many cartridges have you in your gun?” asked Jimmie of Sam.

“About six,” was the reply. “I used two out of the clip on the jaguars and two were fired on the ride to Quito.”

“And that’s all the ammunition we’ve got, is it?” demanded Carl.

“That’s all we’ve got here!” answered Sam. “There’s plenty more at the machine if the Indians haven’t taken possession of it.”

“Little good that does us!” growled Jimmie.

“You couldn’t eat ’em!” laughed Carl.

“But I’ll tell you what I could do!” insisted Jimmie. “If we had plenty of ammunition, I could make a sneak outside and bring in game enough to keep us eating for a month.”

“You know what always happens to you when you go out after something to eat!” laughed Carl. “You always get into trouble!”

“But I always get back, don’t I?” demanded Jimmie. “I guess the time will come, before long, when you’ll be glad to see me starting out for some kind of game! We’re not going to remain quietly here and starve.”

“That looks like going out hunting,” said Sam, pointing to the savages outside. “Those fellows might have something to say about it.”

It was now broad daylight. The early sunshine lay like a mist of gold over the tops of the distant peaks, and birds were cutting the clear, sweet air with their sharp cries. Many of the Indians outside being sun worshipers, the boys saw them still on their knees with hands and face uplifted to the sunrise.

The air in the valley was growing warmer every minute. By noon, when the sun would look almost vertically down, it promised to be very hot, as the mountains shut out the breeze.

“I don’t think it will be necessary to look for game,” Sam went on in a moment, “for the reason that the _Louise_ and _Bertha_, ought to be here soon after sunset. It may possibly take them a little longer than that to cover the distance, as they do not sail so fast as the _Ann_, but at least they should be here before to-morrow morning. Then you’ll see the savages scatter!” he added with a smile. “And you’ll see Jimmie eat, too!”

“Don’t mention it!” cried the boy.

“Yes,” Carl suggested, “but won’t Mr. Havens and the boys remain in Quito two or three days waiting for us to come back?”

“I think not,” was the reply. “I arranged with Mr. Havens to pick us up somewhere between Quito and Lake Titicaca in case we did not return before morning. I have an idea that they’ll start out sometime during the forenoon—say ten o’clock—and reach this point, at the latest, by midnight.”

“They can’t begin to sail as fast as we did!” suggested Carl.

“If they make forty miles an hour,” Sam explained, “and stop only three or four times to rest, they can get here before midnight, all right!”

“Gee! That’s a long time to go without eating!” cried Jimmie. “And, even at that,” he went on in a moment, “they may shoot over us like a couple of express trains, and go on south without ever knowing we are here.”

Sam turned to Pedro with an inquiring look on his face.

“Where is Miguel?” he asked.

Pedro shook his head mournfully.

“Gone!” he said.

“Well, then,” Sam went on, “what about the red and blue lights? Can you stage that little drama for us to-night?”

“What is stage?” demanded Pedro. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Chestnuts!” exclaimed Jimmie impatiently. “He wants to know if you can work the lights as Miguel did. He wants to know if you can keep the lights burning to-night in order to attract the attention of people who are coming to drive the Indians away. Do you get it?”

Pedro’s face brightened perceptibly.

“Coming to drive the Indians away?” he repeated. “Yes, I can burn the lights. They shall burn from the going down of the sun. Also,” he added with a hopeful expression on his face, “the Indians may see the lights and disappear again in the forest.”

“Yes, they will!” laughed Carl.

“Let him think so if he wants to,” cautioned Jimmie. “He’ll take better care of the lights if he thinks that will in any way add to the possibility of release. But midnight!” the boy went on. “Think of all that time without anything to eat! Say,” he whispered to Carl, in a soft aside, “if you can get Sam asleep sometime during the day and get the gun away from him, I’m going to make a break for the tall timber and bring in a deer, or a brace of rabbits, or something of that kind. There’s plenty of cooking utensils in that other chamber and plenty of dishes, so we can have a mountain stew with very little trouble if we can only get the meat to put into it.”

“And there’s the stew they left,” suggested Carl.

“Not for me!” Jimmie answered. “I’m not going to take any chances on being poisoned. I’d rather build a fire on that dizzy old hearth they used, and broil a steak from one of the jaguars than eat that stew—or anything they left for that matter.”

“I don’t believe you can get out into the hills,” objected Carl.

“I can try,” Jimmie suggested, “if I can only get that gun away from Sam. He wouldn’t let me go. You know that very well! Look here,” he went on, “suppose I fix up in the long, flowing robe, and dig up the wigs and things Miguel must have worn, and walk in a dignified manner between the ranks of the Indians? What do you know about that?”

“That would probably be all right,” Carl answered, “until you began shooting game, and then they’d just naturally put you into a stew. They know very well that gods in white robes don’t have to kill game in order to sustain life.”

“Oh, why didn’t you let me dream?” demanded Jimmie. “I was just figuring how I could get about four gallons of stew.”

Abandoning the cherished hope of getting out into the forest for the time being, Jimmie now approached Pedro and began asking him questions concerning his own stock of provisions.

“According to your own account,” the boy said, “you’ve been living here right along for some weeks, taking care of the wild animals as the collectors brought them in. Now you must have plenty of provisions stored away somewhere. Dig ’em up!”

Pedro declared that there were no provisions at all about the place, adding that everything had been consumed the previous day except the remnants left in the living chamber. He said, however, that he expected provisions to be brought in by his two companions within two days. In the meantime, he had arranged on such wild game as he could bring down.

Abandoning another hope, Jimmie passed through the narrow passage and into the chamber where he had come so near to death. The round eye of his searchlight revealed the jaguars still lying on the marble floor.

The roof above this chamber appeared to be comparatively whole, yet here and there the warm sunlight streamed in through minute crevices between the slabs. The boy crossed the chamber, not without a little shiver of terror at the thought of the dangers he had met there, and peered into the mouth of the den from which the wild beasts had made their appearance.

The odor emanating from the room beyond was not at all pleasant, but, resolving to see for himself what the place contained, he pushed on and soon stood in a subterranean room hardly more than twelve feet square. There were six steps leading down into the chamber, and these seemed to the boy to be worn and polished smooth as if from long use.

“It’s a bet!” the lad chuckled, as he crawled through the opening and slid cautiously down the steps, “that this stairway was used a hundred times a day while the old priests lived here. In that case,” he argued, “there must have been some reason for constant use of the room. And all this,” he went on, “leads me to the conclusion that the old fellows had a secret way out of the temple and that it opens from this very room.”

While the boy stood at the bottom of the steps flashing his light around the confined space, Carl’s figure appeared into the opening above.

“What have you found?” the latter asked.

“Nothing yet but bad air and stone walls!” replied Jimmie.

“What are you looking for?” was the next question.

“A way out!” answered Jimmie.

Carl came down the steps and the two boys examined the chamber carefully for some evidence of a hidden exit. They were about to abandon the quest when Jimmie struck the handle of his pocket knife, which he had been using in the investigation, against a stone which gave back a hollow sound. Carl rushed to his side instantly.

“Here you are!” Jimmie cried. “There’s a hole back of that stone. If we can only get it out, we’ll kiss the savages ‘good-bye’ and get back to the _Ann_ in quick time.”

The boys pried and pounded at the stone until at last it gave way under pressure and fell backward with a crash.

“There!” Jimmie shouted. “I knew it!”