t
myself strong enough to begin the investigations on my own account for
which I had sought by all these years of patient preparation fittingly
to pave the way.

But inasmuch as my life until a short time since has been wholly that of
a scholar, and wholly has been passed in quiet ways, I truly have had no
teeth at all for the proper cracking of the nuts which have come to me
in the course of the surprising adventures that I have now set myself to
narrate. For in the course of these adventures (necessarily, yet sorely
against my will) I have been thrust by force of circumstances into many
imminent and prodigious perils; much time that I gladly would have
devoted to peaceful, fruitful study I have been compelled to employ in
rude and profitless (except that my life was saved by it) battling with
savages; and--what most of all has pained me--many curious and
interesting skulls that I gladly would have added entire to my
collection of crania, I have been driven in self-defence to ruin
irreparably with my own hands.

All of which diversities of my likings and my happenings will appear in
due order, as I tell in the following pages of the strange and wonderful
things which befell me--in company with Rayburn and Young and Fray
Antonio and the boy Pablo--in our search after and finding of the great
treasure that was hidden, in a curiously secret place among the Mexican
mountains more than a thousand years ago, by Chaltzantzin, the third of
the Aztec kings.

I.

FRAY ANTONIO.

My heart was light within me as I stood on the steamer's deck in the
cool gray of an October morning and saw out across the dark green sea
and the dusky, brownish stretch of coast country the snow-crowned peak
of Orizaba glinting in the first rays of the rising sun. And presently,
as the sun rose higher, all the tropic region of the coast and the brown
walls of Vera Cruz and of its outpost fort of San Juan de Ulua were
flooded with brilliant light--which sudden and glorious outburst of
radiant splendor seemed to me to be charged with a bright promise of my
own success.

And still lighter was my heart, a week later, when I found myself
established in the beautiful city of Morelia, and ready to begin
actively the work for which I had been preparing myself--at first
unconsciously, but for ten years past consciously and carefully--almost
all my life long.

Morelia, I had decided, was the best base for the operations that I was
about to unde