"What are you doing here?" demanded Craig, astonished.

"I couldn't wait for you to get back. I thought I'd do a little detective work on my own account. I kept getting further and further away, knew you'd find me, anyhow. But I didn't think you'd have a brute like that," he added, binding up his hand ruefully. "Is there any trace of Inez?"

"Not yet. Why did you pick out this house?" asked Kennedy, still suspicious.

"I saw a light here, I thought," answered Lockwood frankly. "But as I approached, it went out. Maybe I imagined it."

"Let us see."

Kennedy spoke a few words to the man with the dog. He slipped the leash, with a word that we did not catch, and the dog bounded off, around the house, as she was accustomed to do when out on duty with an officer in the city suburbs, circling about the backs of houses as the man on the beat walked the street. She made noise enough about it, too, tumbling over a tin pail that had been standing on the back porch steps.

"Bang!"

Some one was in the house and was armed. In the darkness he had not been able to tell whether an attack was being made or not, but had taken no chances. At any rate, now we knew that he was desperate.

I thought of all the methods Kennedy had adopted to get into houses in which the inmates were desperate. But always they had been about the city where he could call upon the seemingly exhaustless store of apparatus in his laboratory. Here we were faced by the proposition with nothing to rely on but our native wit and a couple of guns.

Besides, I did not know whether to count on Lockwood as an ally or not. My estimation of him had been rising and falling like the barometer in a summer shower. I had been convinced that he was against us. But his manner and plausibility now equally convinced me that I had been mistaken. I felt that it would take some supreme action on his part to settle the question. That crisis was coming now.

I think all of us would willingly have pushed Alfonso forward. But the relations of the de Moches with Whitney had been so close that I no more trusted him than I did Lockwood. And if I could not make out Lockwood, a man at least of our own race and education, how could I expect to fathom Alfonso?

It seemed, then, to rest with Kennedy and myself. At least so Craig appraised the situation.

"You have a gun, Walter," he directed, "Lockwood, give yours to
Jameson."

Lockwood hesitated. Could he trust being unarmed, while Kennedy and I had all the weapons?

Craig had not stopped to ask Alfonso. As he laid out the attack he merely tapped the young man's pockets to see whether he was armed or not, and finding nothing faced us again, Lockwood still hesitating.

"I want Walter," explained Craig, "to go around back of the house. It is there they must be expecting an attack. He can take up his position behind that oak. It will be safe enough. By firing one gun on each side of the tree he can make enough noise for half a dozen. Then you and I can rush the front of the house."

Lockwood had nothing better to suggest. Reluctantly he handed over his revolver.

I dropped back from them and skirted the house at a safe distance so as not to be seen, then came up back of the tree.

Carefully I aimed at the glass of a window on the first floor, as offering the greatest opportunity for making a racket, which was the object I had in mind.

I fired from the right and the glass was shattered in a thousand bits. Another shot from the left broke the light out of another window on the opposite side.

The house was a sort of bungalow, with most of the rooms on the first floor, and a small second story or attic window. That went next. Altogether I felt that I was giving a splendid account of myself.

From the house came a rapid volley in reply. Whoever was in there was not going to surrender without a fight. One after another I plugged away with my shots, now bent on making the most of them. With the answering shots it made quite a merry little fusillade, and I was glad enough to have the shelter of the staunch oak which two or three times was hit squarely at about the level of my shoulders. I had never before heard the whirr of so many bullets about me, and I cannot say that I enjoyed it.

But my attack was what Craig wanted. I heard a noise in the front of the house, as of feet running, and then I knew that in spite of all he had given me the least dangerous part of the attack.

I plugged away valiantly with what shots I had left, then leaving just one more in the chamber of each gun, I hurried around in the shadow, my blood up, to help them.

With the aid of the officer, they had just forced the light door and
Searchlight had been allowed to leap in ahead of them, as I came up.

"Here," I said to Lockwood, handing him back his gun, "take it, there is just one shot left."

I, at least, had expected to find one, perhaps two desperate men waiting for us. Evidently our ruse had worked. The room was dark, but there seemed to be no one in it, though we could hear sounds as though some one were hastily barricading the door that led from the front to the room at which I had been firing.

Lockwood struck a match.

"Confound it, don't!" muttered Craig, knocking it from his hand. "They can see us well enough without helping them."

"Chester!"

We stood transfixed. It was a woman's voice. Where did it come from?
Could she be in the room?

"Chester—is that you?"

"Yes, Inez. Where are you?"

"I ran up here—in this attic—when I heard the shots."

"Come down, then. All is right, now."

She came down a half ladder, half flight of steps. At the foot she paused just a moment and hesitated. Then, like a frightened bird, she flew to the safety of Lockwood's arms.

"Mr. Whitney," she sobbed, "called me up and told me that he had something very important to say, a message from you. He said that he had the dagger, in his safe, up in the country. He told me you'd be there and that you expected me to come up with him in his car. I went. We had some trouble with the engine. And then that other car—the one that followed us, came up behind and forced us off the bank. Mr. Whitney and I were both stunned. I don't remember a thing after that, until I woke up here. Where is it?"

I listened, with one eye on that door that had been barricaded. Was
Lockwood really innocent, after all? I could not think that Inez
Mendoza could make such a mistake, if he were not.

Lockwood clenched his fists. "Some one shall pay for this," he exclaimed.

There was the problem—the inner room. Who would go in? We looked at each other a moment.

The room in which we were was a living room, and perhaps, when there were visitors in the little house, was a guest-room. At any rate, on one side was a huge davenport by day which could be transformed into a folding bed at night.

Lockwood looked about hastily and his eye fell on the door, then on this folding bed.

With a wrench, he opened it and seized the cotton mattress from the inside. With his gun ready he advanced toward the barricaded door, holding the mattress as a shield, for his experience in wild countries had taught him that a cotton mattress is about as good a thing to stop bullets as one could find on the spur of the moment.

Kennedy and the officer followed just behind, and the three threw their weights on the door almost before we knew what they were about.

"Chester—don't!" cried Inez in alarm, too late. "He'll—kill you!"

The excitement had been too much for her. She reeled, fainting, and I caught her.

Before I could restore the davenport to something like its original condition so that we could take care of her, the first onslaught was over.

Three guns were sticking their blue noses into the darkness of the next room.

"Hands up!" shouted Craig, "Drop your gun! Let me hear it fall!"

There followed a thud and Kennedy, followed by Lockwood and the officer entered.

As they fumbled to strike a light, I managed to open a window and let in some fresh air, while the Senora, for once human, loosened the throat of Inez' dress and fanned her.

Through the open door, now, I could hear what was going on in the next room, but could not see.

"It was you, Lockwood," I heard a familiar voice accusing, "who was in the Museum the night the dagger disappeared."

"Yes," replied Lockwood, a bit disdainfully. "I suspected something crooked about that dagger. I thought that if I made a copy of the inscription on the blade, I might decipher it myself, or get some one to do it for me. I went in and, when a chance came, I hid in the sarcophagus. There I waited until the Museum was closed. Then, when finally I got to the place where I thought the dagger was—it was gone!"

"The point is," cut in Craig, interrupting, "who was the mysterious visitor to Mendoza the night of his murder?"

He paused. No one seemed to be disposed to answer and he went on, "Who else than the man who sought to sell the secret on its blade, in return for Inez for whom he had a secret passion? I have reasoned it all out—the offer, the quarrel, the stabbing with the dagger itself, and the escape down the stairs, instead of by the elevator."

"And I," put in Lockwood, "coming to report to Mendoza my failure to find the dagger, found him dead—and at once was suspected of being the murderer!"

Inez had revived and her quick ears had caught her lover's voice and the last words.

Weak as she was, she sprang up and fairly ran into the next room. "No—Chester—No!" she cried. "I never suspected—not even when I saw the shoe-prints. No—that is the man,—there—I know it—I know it!"

I hurried after her, as she flung herself again between Lockwood and the rest of us, as if to shield him, while Lockwood proudly caressed the stray locks of dark hair that fluttered on his shoulder.

I looked in the direction all were looking.

Before us stood, unmasked at last, the scientific villain who had been plotting and scheming to capture both the secret and Inez—well knowing that suspicion would rest either on Lockwood, the soldier of fortune, or on the jealous Indian woman whose son had been rejected and whose brother he had himself already, secretly, driven to an insane suicide in his unscrupulous search for the treasure of Truxillo.

It was Professor Norton, himself—first thief of the dagger which later he had hidden but which Whitney's detectives had stolen in turn from him; writer of anonymous letters, even to himself to throw others off the trail; maker of stramonium cigarettes with which to confuse the minds of his opponents, Whitney, Mendoza, and the rest; secret lover of Inez whom he demanded as the price of the dagger; and murderer of Don Luis.

Senora de Moche and Alfonso, behind me, could only gasp their astonishment. Much as she would have liked to have the affair end in a general vindication of the curse she could not control a single, triumphant thrust.

"His blood," she cried, transfixing Norton with her stern eyes, "has cried out of Titicaca for vengeance from that day to this!"

"Want any help?"

We all turned toward the door as Burke, dust-covered and tired, stamped in, followed by a man whose face was bandaged and bloody.

"I heard shots. Is it all over?"

But we paid no attention to Burke.

There was Whitney, considerably banged up by the fall, but lucky to be alive.

"I tried to shake him," he explained, catching sight of Norton. "But he stuck to us, even on our detours. Finally he grew desperate—forced my car off the road. What happened after that, I don't know. He must have carried me some miles, insensible, and dumped me in the bushes again. I was several miles up the hill, tramping along, looking for a road-house, when this gentleman found me and said I had gone too far."

Senora de Moche turned from Lockwood and Inez who were standing, oblivious to the rest of us, and stared at Whitney's bruised and battered face.

"It is the curse," she muttered. "It will never—"

"Just a moment," interrupted Craig, drawing the dagger from his pocket, and turning toward Inez. "It was to your ancestor that the original possessor of the secret promised to give the 'big fish,' when he was killed."

He paused and handed the dagger to her. She touched it shuddering, but as though it were a duty.

"Take it," he said simply. "The secret is yours. Only love can destroy the curse on the Gold of the Gods."

THE END

*****

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