We waited in silence, the more hopeless as the singing of the night insects italicized our isolation from the organized instruments of man for the righting of wrong.  Here we were, each suspecting the other, in the home of a man whom all mistrusted.

“There’s no use sitting here doing nothing,” exclaimed Lockwood in whose mind was evidently the same thought, “not so long as we have the telephone and the automobiles.”

These, at least, were our last bonds with the great world that had wrapped a dark night about a darker mystery.

“There are many miles of wire—­many miles of road.  Which way shall we turn?”

Senora de Moche seemed to take a fiendish delight in the words as she said them.  It was as though she challenged our helplessness in the face of a power that was greater than us all.

Lockwood flashed a look of suspicion in her direction.  As for myself, I had never been able to make the woman out.  To-night she seemed like a sort of dea ex machina, who sat apart, playing on the passions of a group of puppet men whom she set against each other until all should be involved in a common ruin.

It was impossible, in the silence of this far-off lonely place in the country, not to feel the weirdness of it all.

Once I closed my eyes and was startled by the uncanny vividness of a mind-picture that came unbidden.  It was of a scrap of paper on which, in rough capitals was printed: 

Beware the curse of Mansiche on the gold of the gods.

XXIII

THE ACETYLENE TORCH

Do you suppose he really had the dagger, or was that a lie?” I asked, with an effort shaking off the fateful feeling that had come over me as if some one were casting a spell.

“There is one way to find out,” returned Craig, as though glad of the suggestion.

Though they hated him, they seemed forced to admit, for the time, his leadership.  He rose and the rest followed as he went into Whitney’s library.

He switched on the lights.  There in a corner back of the desk stood a safe.  Somehow or other it seemed to defy us, even though its master was gone.  I looked at it a moment.  It was a most powerful affair, companion to that in the office of which Whitney was so proud, built of layer on layer of chrome steel, with a door that was air tight and soup-proof, bidding defiance to all yeggmen and petermen.

Lockwood fingered the combination hopelessly.  There were some millions of combinations and permutations that only a mathematician could calculate.  Only one was any good.  That one was locked in the mind of the man who now seemed to baffle us as did his strong-box.

I placed my hand on the cold, defiant surface.  It would take hours to drill a safe like that, and even then it might turn the points of the drills.  Explosives might sooner wreck the house and bring it down over the head of the man who attacked this monster.