"Have you got your pistols with you?" Tom retorted, patting his own jacket to show the bulge of one beneath it.
"Those," said Yasmini, standing between the skeletons and holding up her own light, "are the bones of priests, who died when the secret of the place was taken from them! My father told me they were left to starve to death. This was Jinendra"s temple."
"D"you suppose they pulled that cut stone from the walls, trying to force a way out?" d.i.c.k hazarded. "The lid of the hole we came down through is a foot thick, and was set solid in cement; they couldn"t have lifted that if they tried for a week. Everything"s solid in this place. I sounded every inch of the floor with a cannon ball, but it"s all hard underneath."
"I would have gone straight to the image of Jinendra," said Yasmini.
"Jinendra smiles and keeps his secrets so well that I should have suspected him at once!"
"I went to that last," d.i.c.k answered. "It looks so like a piece of high relief carved out of the rock wall. As a matter of fact, though, it"s about six tons of quartz with a vein of gold in it--see the gold running straight up the line of the nose and over the middle of the head?--I pried it away from the wall at last with steel wedges, and there"s just room to squeeze in behind it. Beyond that is another wall that I had to cut through with a chisel. Who goes in first?"
"Who looks for gold finds gold!" Yasmini quoted. "The vein of gold you have been mining was the clue to the secret all along."
She would have led the way, but Utirupa stopped her.
"If there is danger," he said, "it is my place to lead."
But n.o.body would permit that, Yasmini least of all.
"Shall Samson choose a new maharajah so soon as all that?" she laughed.
"Let the dog go first!" Tom proposed. Trotters was sniffing at the dark gap behind Jinendra"s image, with eyes glaring and a low rumbling growl issuing from between bared teeth. But Trotters would not go.
Finally, in the teeth of remonstrances from Tess, d.i.c.k c.o.c.ked a pistol and, with his lantern in the other hand, strode in boldly. Trotters followed him, and Tom Tripe next. Then Utirupa. Then the women.
Nothing happened. The pa.s.sage was about ten feet long and a yard wide. They squeezed one at a time through the narrow break d.i.c.k had made in the end of it, into a high, pitch-dark cave that smelt unexplainably of wood-smoke, d.i.c.k standing just inside the gap to bold the lantern for them and help them through--continuing to stand there after Tess had entered last.
"Jee-rusalem!" he exclaimed. "This is where I lose out!"
The first glance was enough to show that they stood in the secret treasure-vault of Sialpore. There were ancient gold coins in heaps on the floor where they had burst by their own weight out of long-demolished bags-- countless coins; and drums and bags and boxes more of them behind.
But what made d.i.c.k exclaim were the bars of silver stacked at the rear and along one side in rows as high as a man.
"My contract reads gold!" he said. "A percentage of all gold. There"s not a word in it of silver. Who"d ever have thought of finding silver, anyhow, in this old mountain?"
"Your percentage of the gold will make you rich," said Utirupa. "But you shall take silver too. Without you we might have found nothing for years to come."
"A contract"s a contract," d.i.c.k answered. "I drew it myself, and it stands."
"Look out!" yelled Tom Tripe suddenly. But the warning came too late.
Out of the shadow behind a stack of silver bars rushed a man with a long dagger, stabbing frantically at d.i.c.k. Tom"s great barking army revolver missed, filling the chamber with noise and smoke, for he used black powder.
Down went d.i.c.k under his a.s.sailant, and the dagger rose and fell in spasmodic jerks. d.i.c.k had hold of the man"s wrist, but the dagger-point dripped blood and the fury of the attack increased as d.i.c.k appeared to weaken. Utirupa ran in to drag the a.s.sailant off, but Trotters got there first--chose his neck-hold like a wolf in battle--and in another second d.i.c.k was free with Tess kneeling beside him while a life-and-death fight between animal and man raged between the bars of silver.
"Gungadhura!" Yasmini shouted, waving her lantern for a sight of the struggling man"s face. He was lashing out savagely with the long knife, but the dog had him by the neck from behind, and he only inflicted surface wounds.
"h.e.l.l"s bells! He"ll kill my dog!" roared Tom. "Hi, Trotters. Here, you--Trotters!"
But the dog took that for a call to do his thinking, and let go for a better hold. His long fangs closed again on the victim"s jugular, and tore it out.
The long knife clattered on the stone floor, and then Tom got his dog by the jaws and hauled him off.
"You can"t blame the dog," he grumbled. "He knew the smell of him.
He"d been told to kill him if he got the chance."
"Gungadhura!" said Yasmini again, holding her lantern over the dying man.
"So Gungadhura was Tom Tripe"s ghost! What a pity that the dog should kill him, when all he wanted was a battle to the death with me! I would have given him his fight!"
d.i.c.k was in no bad way. He had three flesh wounds on his right side, and none of them serious. Tess staunched them with torn linen, and she and Tom Tripe propped him against some bags of bullion, while Utirupa threw his cloak over Gungadhura"s dead body.
"How did Gungadhura get in here?" wondered Tess.
"Through the hole at the end of the mine-shaft, I suppose," said d.i.c.k.
"I built up the lower one--he came one day and saw me doing it--but left a s.p.a.ce at the top that looked too small for a man to crawl through.
Then I blocked the mouth of the tunnel afterward, and shut him in, I suppose.
He"s had the men"s rice and water-bottles, and they left a lot of f.a.ggots in the tunnel, too, I remember. That accounts for the smell of smoke."
"But what was the digging I"ve heard o" nights?" demanded Tom. "I"m not the only one. The British garrison was scared out of its wits."
Utirupa was hunting about with a lantern in his hand, watching the dog go sniffing in the shadows.
"Come and see what he has done!" he called suddenly, and Yasmini ran to his side.
In a corner of the vault one of the great facing stones had been removed, disclosing a deep fissure in the rock. One of d.i.c.k Blaine"s crow-bars that he had left in the tunnel lay beside it.
"He must have found that by tapping," said Tom Tripe.
"Yes, but look why he wanted it!" Yasmini answered. "Tom, could you be as malicious as that?"
"As what, Your Ladyship?"
"See, he has poured gold into the fissure, hoping to close it up again so that n.o.body could find it!"
"But why didn"t he work his way out with the crow-bar?" d.i.c.k objected from his perch between the bags of bullion.
"What was his life worth to him outside?" Yasmini asked. "Samson knew who murdered Mukhum Da.s.s. He would have been a prisoner for the rest of his life to all intents and purposes. No! He preferred to hide the treasure again, and then wait here for me, suspecting that I knew where it is and would come for it! Only we came too soon, before he had it hidden!"
But it was Patali afterward, between boasting and confession, who explained that d.i.c.k was Gungadhura"s real objective after all. He preferred vengeance on the American even to a settled account with Yasmini. He must have found the treasure by accident after crawling into the unsealed crack in the wall to wait there against d.i.c.k"s coming.
"The money must stay here, and be removed little by little," said Utirupa.
"First of all Blaine sahib"s share of it!" Yasmini added. "Who shall count it? Who!"
"Never mind the money now," Tess answered. "d.i.c.k"s alive! When did you first know you"d found the treasure, d.i.c.k?"
"Not until the day that Gungadhura found me closing up the fault, and asked me to dig at the other place. The princess told me I was on the trail of it that night that you went with her by camel; but I didn"t know I"d found it till the day that Gungadhura came."
"How did you know where it was?" Tess asked, and Yasmini laughed.
"A hundred guarded it. I looked for a hundred pipal trees, and found them--near the River Palace. But they were not changed once a month.
I looked from there, and saw another hundred pipal trees--here, below this fort--exactly a hundred. But neither were they changed once a month.