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'The quality of Salada is the only premium offered "S 'Fresh from TEA 761 the gardens' frais ad ii) ; Bi START HERE TODAY Peter DeWolfe has been warned to stay away from Brena Selcoss or he will "vanish like the others." He meets her in London and she tells him her story: When but a very young girl her father died, leaving her an orphan. She. went to St. Louis to marry Dick Hennepin, but he failed to put in an appearance, and has not been heard of since. Then she returned to her former boarding house in Dallas, Texas, and Hennepin's boss, Compton Par malee, marries her. ' Parma- lee is very eccentric and has a fear that he is always being followed. He, too, vanishes. Peter DeWolfe determines to get at the mystery. He sails for America and visita the Parmalee house on the Hudson wheze he finds evidences in an old book of "Aztec lore which leads him 'to make a trip to an ancient Aztec "lost" city. Brena has followed him from Eng- land and insists on accompanying him on the journey. NOW GO ON WITH THE STORY At last they came to the crumbling walls and the gaping mouth of the ancient gateway. The sun was still sending down its heat in throbbing layers over the desert. It slanted down from the West following the angle of declivity of the wall of rock behind the ruin that mounted up in ragged overhanging crags of red and brown. Upon the base of this rock, rudely smoothed and carved, was the symbol of the feathered serpent. Brena clutched Peter's forearm. "It did have a meaning then!" she exclaimed. I do not "It isn't right, Brena! know what we shall find." He looked at the opening in the high wall as if it were the maw of Destiny opened to belch forte upon them a sentence. "Tell me, Peter--are there dangers Do you know?" : "I only guess," he answered. "I think there are nome. I think, Brena, that beyond that wall there is freedom for us--life for us--a message for us." "TI must go with you." He -nodded. At the entrance he stopped, gazing down -at the ground--the film, the blanket of fine dust. He uttered an exclamation. "What do you see, Peter?" "I see a record in the sand." "What record?" "We shall see mor:," he said grim- ly. "Come." In the centre of the enclosure, there was one monument of permanence; it was the great well-curb of mighty slabs hewn from the rock of the cliffs. Towards this memorial of tragedy, of death, of decay, of the insignifi- cance of time, of the inconsequence of an age of man, Brena and Peter, like two creatures of a moment of life, walked with solemn, awed faces. there? ' I) $ WAT 5 "A terrible meaning, Brena, <a. So er Here gaid with awe. Amidst the gigantic proportions of desert, sky and cliff, this figure of the Mayan god--a symbol brought from the lands of the Central Amer- icas by a craven tribe fleeing from its enemies--had looked down with_ its heathen. eyes upon the growth of a city around an oasis, around a 2 flowing giant spring. ¢ - It had seen perhups in the coming and going of generations within that 'fortified pueblo, strange rites, barbaric human sacrifice, the march of a little pomp and power, moving funerals, the dance of naked priests with painted yellow bodies, the eniless stream of laborers bending under their loads of water carried from the well to irri- gation ditches, the harvest, the mir- acles of water. But perhaps it had seen too the day when a subterranean shift had driven the underground water course away, and in a night drained out the life- maintaining supply of five thousand panic-stricken praying men and wo- men and their lamenting priests. Perhaps, if tradition were right, it k ew where the treasures of that city had been hid away. "You are not going into it alone?" said Brena. "I will go with you!" Drowsiness is dangerous, Weary miles seem shorter and the day is brightened when you have Wrigley's with you. Its sugar peps you up. Its delicious flavor adds to any enjoyment, x A five cent package is safety insurance He pointed to a pile of charred bones lying close to the well. Among them was a piece of human skull black- ered as if by fire. "Wait," Peter commanded. He went forward, "bent over the grastly pile, kicked the sand that sur- rounded it, and, stooping down, gath- ered a number of objects into the cup of his hand. "This was no prehistoric man," he said solemnly. "See! The eyelets and the nails of shoes. The owner long ago vanished. Here are two mother of pearl buttons, a pocket knife, coins. This man lost his life, many years ago." Brena tried to spe-k, wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue. "There are things of gold, too," said Peter "Keep your nerve, dear. Look at this!" He Leld out in his trembling fingers a signet ring with n H deeply en- craved upon it. "That!" exclaimed Brena with hor- ror. "It was his!--Jim Hennepin's. This is--he?" Yas." Brena moved toward the pile of bones half consumed by fire; then she stopped and looked away. "He was killed," she said. "He was shot or stabbed." "No," replied Peter grimly. "It was worse than that--more ghastly. He was killed. But it was not by a hu- man hand." * * * * "Brena, I want yo1 to stand here by this old we. l without walking away from it a mome».%," said Peter, taking her by the shoulders and looking squarely into her dark eyes. "I'm go- ing to leave you alone a minute. It's not pleasant. I wan. you to do it just the same." "Where are you going?" "Outside the wall again. I've seen something there that vou did not see." Brena shivered. "Don't be afraid, dear," he said. "We have had--both f us--the lesson of futile fear. Once wé told each other that fear was a crime--a terrible waste. We are on the verge of learn- ing how terrible a waste it can be." She put her hands in his; with a smile she said. "You see, Pater, I am in the dark, dear. But just the same I'll do as you tell me." He disappeared outside the old wall, and as he vanished, so vanished all that attached her to the living world. There was no sound, mo motion within the range of the senses; the ISSUE No. 17--'30 place of death was still. Not even a horned toad, like a piece of dried and shrivelled cactus skin, drew trail upon the dust. Brena felt as if she too had become incapable of movement and of sound; she had a sense of being trans- formed into stone--an adamantine statue of a woman, carved from rock, waiting beside the waterless well under the beating sun, the cloudless infinity of sky, the cliff, until the crack of doom. From the table lands above a lonely buzzard came swooping down on wide, black wings, dipping and turning, with one eye cocked down, as if some- time before he had picked bones in this enclosure and had re turned to the scene of gruesome feasts. Black, ill-omenéd, carrion creature that he was, Brena felt glad that he had come--a thing of life and motion --into this place of vast dimensions '| filled by the silences and rigidity of death. Shg watched the magnificent grace and power of his flight until Peter's voice broke the silence again, and flap- ping toward the west, the bird began to circle up whence he had come. "Brena," said Peter, who came to her with an 'expression drawn as if with some stress within. "Yes? "Sit down with me here where these blocks cast a shadow, dear. I will show you what I have found--a thing like the writing of a giant finger of justice --here in the desert. But first I want to tell you a tale, Brena--revolting Land terrible." "Tell me," she said, sitting with her elbows on her knees. , "It is of surprising brevity, Brena," he asserted. "Its simplicity is the thing that makes ridiculous the many things I expected, all the nightmares of the unknown. I stumbled on to the trail. I used my head. That's all." He stopped to think. a "And yet the simplicity is hideous!" he said. ; Brena glanced toward all that re- mained of Jim Hennepin of Virginia --the blackened, fleshless relics of his existence. "He deserved Peter pointing. his knowledge." "You told me last night of the super- stition of buried treasure here," she said." "You mean that?" "No, not exactly," said Peter. "I picked up the trail in the house where Parmalee took you. Two old books; and maps of this country and of this place were missing from both, One Parmalee took when he went away. The other? Well, I began to wonder about the other." "You thoaght it must have been used--Dbefore?" "Yes, It hadms®en used and prob- ably destroyed. It was used by one man to lure another to his death!" Brena leaned forward. "I began to be sure, Brena, when I found that expert knowledge pro- nounced that the writing on a cheque made out by the one man who led the other to his death here was written by the rame hand thai, with an attempt to disguise, had written the words, 'This Sign,' on the scrap of paper Jim Hennepin left with you and that you gave me. I'd better tell you that when I first took that cheque it was because your indorsement way on it. I wasn't sure, Brena--of anybody." "I understand," she said. "I under- stand. And the scrap of paper was a part of the bait?" Peter raised his hand as if fo say that he wished to go on in his own way. "It was chance, too, that led me to the motive for ridding the world of Hennepin. That miserable man had become a menace. He knew too much! He knew of a long series of embezzle- ments from a certain estate in Texas. A capitalist had bought vast quanti- ties of something--on speculation-- and his agent after his death deceived the executors as to the extent of his holdings. I have had*a clue from an old acecunt book sifted to the bottom." "And Jim Hennepin knew?" "Knew and began a merciless black. mail, threatening ruin. I can see him now, insatiable, hungry, losing in speculations, asking for more, hound- ing a man who was balancing between success and failure and always hint- irg at bankruptcy and the peniten- tiary." Peter went on. He told of the prob- ability that Compton Parmalee, the hounded man, a physical coward, but resourceful and ingenious, had come upon an old volume describing this lost city of the desert. There were tradi- tions of vast wealth hidden there. Par- malee had pretended to the possession of knowledge confirming it. He had shown old letter, the scrap of paper with the Kuk-ul-can symbol. He want- ed to take the Llackmailer to a place from which he would never come back. 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