Then, as will happen when half thoughts and half dreams come, the reel changed. He was sitting with old Hardgrave, his friend who had seen sixty-eight summers, twenty-five of them in the tropics. In the cool shade of the hotel porch at Belize the old man was showing him a crudely drawn map and was pointing to a spot on that map.
“If you ever get to that spot,” he seemed to hear him say, “you’ll find Indian gods. I have seen them. Three of them, a black one, a blue one, and one of pure gold. I don’t say you’ll come back to tell anyone about it,” the old man smiled a queer smile. “They say it’s dangerous to go up there and I reckon it is. Truth is, no one knows the way there and back. It’s up in the bush somewhere. That’s all anyone knows. It’s all I know, and I’ve been there once.
“You may be sure I didn’t mean to go there,” he reminisced. “They found me sick with a fever, the Indians did, and carried me to their village in the bush and cured me up. Wanted me to stay on with them. Seemed to sort of take a liking to me. I told them I wouldn’t.
“At first they said I didn’t have any choice in the matter. Took me to see some bones, human bones. White man’s bones I’d say from the size of them. Then they took me back to the village.
“Something changed their minds, though. I don’t know what. One day they blindfolded me and took me through the bush and downstream for a whole day. When my eyes were uncovered I found myself in a dugout on a part of the Rio Hondo that I knew.
“So, Johnny,” he added with a rare smile, “if you really want some Maya gods, you just hunt that place up. They’ve got some black ones, and some that are green, and at least one of pure gold.”
Johnny did want one or two of these Maya Indian gods. A very good friend had asked him to bring back one or two for his collection. He had promised to perform this commission.
“I had no notion they were so hard to get,” he told himself now. “It would be strange if I should stumble upon those Mayas up here somewhere,—strange and rather startling.
“Black gods and green ones, and at least one of pure gold,” he repeated, half asleep.
Then of a sudden he started up. His fire was burning low. After throwing on a fresh supply of fuel, he thought more clearly of the consequences if he should fall into the hands of these strange bush people. He was not at all sure that, once they had found him, they would allow him to return.