The Fifth Ace Part 26

His hostess claimed Thode at that juncture and bore him away to fresh introductions, and Willa started across the room to Mrs. Halstead when Starr Wiley intercepted her coolly.

"How do you do?" he asked. Then, without waiting for her reply, he went on: "But that is a superfluous question, isn't it? You are looking as distractingly charming as ever. So our knight errant has put in an appearance once more! He looks a little the worse for wear."

"Mr. Thode has been ill," Willa remarked through stiffened lips.

"There was an accident----"

"A hootch bottle in the hands of a jealous Senorita becomes an effective weapon, but I would call it more like fate than accident."

Wiley laughed unpleasantly. "There were some interesting rumors afloat about our friend's conquests after your departure from Limasito. He'd be an expert porch-climber if his practice in gaining access to certain balconies on certain back streets counted for anything. I could have told you before, but I did not want to shatter your illusions concerning the local Paul Revere."

"You are trying to now, however." Willa looked straight into his eyes and then quickly away in immeasurable disdain. "I have no ears for idle, malicious slander, Mr. Wiley. Please, let me pa.s.s."

"It does rather jar on one, doesn't it? A reminder of the low, primitive life down there is out of place in this highly esthetic atmosphere." He made no move to step aside, and a shade of deeper meaning crept into his tones. "It would be a pity if one were compelled to return to it. The charms of Limasito would pall, I fancy, after all this; yet such things sometimes happen."

"I trust not, for your sake," Willa responded. "You would scarcely find the climate of Limasito a healthy one, if your activities were fully comprehended there."

"I was not thinking of myself----" he smiled once more--"but of an old fairy tale which I mentioned to you in the Park. You look a very confident Cinderella, but midnight is not far off, and only you can stop the hands of the clock, remember."

"I am not fond of riddles." Willa shrugged and turned away to greet her host, who came forward with one of the inevitable callow youths in tow.

Dinner was announced almost immediately and Willa sat through it with the food untouched before her. Wiley's insinuations against Kearn Thode she had dismissed utterly from her thoughts, but his renewed taunt of the morning filled her in spite of herself with dread foreboding. Could fate have indeed been playing with her after all, and was it possible that Wiley held within his hands the strings of her future destiny?

She was Willa Murdaugh, of course. Mason North and the Halsteads had satisfied themselves of that beyond a shadow of a doubt. But what if Wiley had really stumbled upon some facts unknown to them all which might throw a shadow across her t.i.tle? Was it an idle threat to coerce her or a very tangible menace?

She raised troubled eyes to meet Kearn Thode's smiling ones across the table and her native courage came back in a swift rush. Surely she had nothing to fear; she would meet Wiley and beat him at his own game, and then . . . she smiled again into Thode's eyes. What did anything else matter, now that he had returned?

An informal dance was the order of the evening and Willa and the young engineer gravitated to a seat on the stairs after a romping fox-trot.

Both were flushed and sparkling, but when they found themselves alone together a diffident silence fell upon them.

"It must seem good to you to get back," Willa ventured at last when the pause had become oppressive.

"It is." His glance rested upon her with a world of contentment. "I can't begin to tell you how wonderful it seems!"

"And your work down there?" she pursued hurriedly. "You have finished it? You will not have to return again?"

The contentment faded and in its place there came a look of bitterness and dogged determination.

"It has scarcely begun. I wonder if you ever heard an old legend around Limasito concerning the lost location of a marvelous oil well?"

Willa laughed nervously, a little taken aback by the abruptness of the question.

"One hears so many legends in every country of lost or buried or hidden treasure," she parried. "Scarcely anyone pays attention to them except the tenderfoots. You know up in the mining country one is forever hearing such tales of vast deposits of ore, but n.o.body can ever find the lead."

"This particular one concerns a well in a mysterious pool of water where a ma.s.sacre is supposed to have taken place. It dates back to the time of the Spaniards' coming."

He paused, but Willa said nothing. She was striving to mask her thoughts in continued composure lest his quick mind grasp the significance of her interest.

"The place is spoken of as the Pool of the Lost Souls," Thode went on.

"Surely you have heard of it? The people to whom you were so kind, old Tia Juana and her grandson, knew more than anyone else about it. Did they not mention it to you?"

"Tia Juana?" Willa glanced up quickly, but she could not meet his eyes. "She is very secretive, you know, and jealous of the old legends which to her form the sacred history of her beloved country. Suppose you tell me the legend yourself."

Briefly he recounted it to her and, she listened until the end in a dismayed chaos of mind which culminated in a staggering blow.

"I have found it." There was no jubilation in his tone, but paradoxically a note of defeat.

"You!" she stammered breathlessly.

"Yes. You seem surprised?" he added with a quick glance at her. "I know these old legends are mostly regarded as bunk, but now and then one proves to be a straight tip. Generations have searched vainly for the Pool, as I thought you must have heard, but they did not know where to look."

"Then how did you, a newcomer, discover it?" Willa scarcely recognized her own voice.

"By the simple expedient of following someone else who had stolen a march on me in a despicable fas.h.i.+on." His jaw set in the old characteristic way she remembered. "I don't mind admitting that I would have taken almost any means to locate it; that was my main objective in Mexico and I was acting under instructions from my chief.

But I would scarcely have stooped to the method employed by the man of whom I speak."

"Starr Wiley?" The question was wrung from Willa's lips.

He stared at her.

"You know, then?"

"I--I guessed," she countered hurriedly. "I knew that you two were enemies, of course, and it came to me that if anyone had played a false trick upon you it must have been he. You say you found the Pool by following him. How did he know where to search?"

Thode hesitated.

"I found a map of its location, but I had scarcely got my hands upon it when I was struck down from behind and the paper stolen."

Willa uttered a startled exclamation, but he continued, unheeding.

"Someone found me, hours later, lying unconscious and carried me into Limasito, where your good friend, Jim Baggott, took care of me. It was weeks before I was able to be about again, but I had time to think it all out, Of course, I had not seen my a.s.sailant, but I had had an uncanny intuition all day that I was being shadowed--it was the very day of your departure, by the way--and I knew of only one other beside myself who had taken that legend seriously. Wiley was doing his best to locate the Pool; he was aware that I was there for the same purpose and he would have stopped at nothing to win out, for, as you know, there was bad blood between us. If he did not actually strike the blow that felled me I solemnly believe that he was instrumental in it in some way. Please, don't think me ungenerous toward an enemy that I tell you this, or even harbor such a thought, but events really seemed to bear out my suspicions."

"No." Willa was gazing moodily straight before her. "I do not think you are ungenerous, and I am very glad that you are telling me. I believe, too, that you are right; I feel sure that he must have been responsible for your injury. But I am amazed about the map."

"I found it in the ashes of Tia Juana's fire; the little fire in the grove of zapote trees where she cooked her tortillas, and brewed her strange concoctions. You had told me of it, do you remember? But perhaps you have not heard: Tia Juana and the boy, Jose, have disappeared. They must have gone on the very day you started for New York, and no one has been able to discover a trace of them, except one.

That is a very significant trace indeed, though.--Have you no curiosity about the Pool?"

He turned to her suddenly, but Willa could not raise her eyes to meet his now.

"Of course," she stammered.

"It is located on a grapefruit ranch known as the Trevino hacienda, about two hundred miles due north of Limasito. Wiley made the best of his time while I was laid by the heels, but his treachery didn't do him any good, in the end. He found the Pool, but another had been before him; old Tia Juana, herself!"

Willa's lips moved, but no sound came from them. She was praying that he would not look at her again.

"A few days before Tia Juana and the boy disappeared, the Trevino hacienda changed hands. It was sold for twenty-five thousand dollars, to one Juana Reyes.--Reyes, if you recall, was the name of the old Spaniard who owned the Pool originally and whose daughter, Dolores, was killed by the Indians on her wedding night. Reyes is also the almost forgotten surname of Tia Juana, so it looks as if the old lady had come into her own, at last. It is a mystery, of course, where she got the money to purchase the hacienda, but it may have been h.o.a.rded in her family for generations. It is possible, too, that she only then succeeded in deciphering the map, and tracing the location of the Pool from it."

"So you and Starr Wiley both failed." Willa spoke as if to herself.

"Not I!" Thode's eyes flashed with determination. "I told you I had only just begun. I am going to find Tia Juana if she is above ground and buy out her claim. To her it only means the ancestral estate.

That is much, to be sure, if she has gone through her long life in poverty and want in order to h.o.a.rd her riches for its purchase, but it is only a sentimental consideration. When she learns that she has a fortune in petroleum, worthless without the money to develop it, I think she will agree to share her interest. The casa and the land about it can still be hers, we only want to drain and develop the Pool, and my chief will be strictly fair with her. The old lady will be rich beyond her wildest dreams and we will have the greatest producer known since the Dos Bocas gusher went up in flames!"