At that moment the soil broke away under his hands. In a flash, the whole soft slope on which they rested broke away, and all three were sliding and rolling down the steep slope in the midst of a miniature avalanche of soil, gravel, and grass-tufts. The two men picked themselves up first, in the thicket of bushes which had arrested them; but, before they could get to Leoncia, she, too, was up and laughing. “Just as you were saying we didn’t have to go into the valley!” she gurgled at Francis. “Now will you believe?” But Francis was busy. Reaching out his hand, he caught and stopped a familiar object bounding down the steep slope after them. It was Torres’ helmet purloined from the chamber of mummies, and to Torres he tossed it. “Throw it away,” Leoncia said. “It’s the only protection against the sun I possess,” was his reply, as, turning it over in his hands, his eyes lighted upon an inscription on the inside. He showed it to his companions, reading it aloud: “DA VASCO.” “I have heard,” Leoncia breathed. “And you heard right,” Torres nodded. “Da Vasco was my direct ancestor. My mother was a Da Vasco. He came over the Spanish Main with Cortez.” “He mutinied,” Leoncia took up the tale. “I remember it well from my father and from my Uncle Alfaro. With a dozen comrades he sought the Maya treasure. They led a sea-tribe of Caribs, a hundred strong including their women, as auxiliaries. Mendoza, under Cortez’s instructions, pursued; and his report, in the archives, so Uncle Alfaro told me, says that they were driven into the Valley of the Lost Souls where they were left to perish miserably.” “And he evidently tried to get out by the way we’ve just come in,” Torres continued, “and the Mayas caught him and made a mummy of him.” He jammed the ancient helmet down on his head, saying: “Low as the sun is in the afternoon sky, it bites my crown like acid.” “And famine bites at me like acid,” Francis confessed. “Is the valley inhabited?” “I should know, Senor,” Torres replied. “There is the narrative of Mendoza, in which he reported that Da Vasco and his party were left there ‘to perish miserably.’ This I do know: they were never seen again of men.” “Looks as though plenty of food could be grown in a place like this——” Francis began, but broke off at sight of Leoncia picking berries from a bush. “Here! Stop that, Leoncia! We’ve got enough troubles without having a very charming but very much poisoned young woman on our hands.” “They’re all right,” she said, calmly eating. “You can see where the birds have been pecking and eating them.” “In which case I apologize and join you,” Francis cried, filling his mouth with the luscious fruit. “And if I could catch the birds that did the pecking, I’d eat them too.” By the time they had eased the sharpest of their hunger-pangs, the sun was so low that Torres removed the helmet of Da Vasco.