“Understand,” Chet said hastily. He was not about to tangle with a man carrying a wrench.
“What are you after?” the pilot demanded.
“Gold,” Chet said.
“It has to do with Palango,” Joe put in.
Rumble Murphy stepped toward them. Glowering, he slapped the wrench menacingly against the palm of his left hand. “You’d better go home right now if you want to stay healthy!”
CHAPTER IX
Chet’s Mistake
RUMBLE Murphy brandished his wrench. Chet stepped back for fear of being hit, but Tony stood still, his hands on his hips. Biff assumed a karate stance.
“That sounds like a threat!” Frank said.
“It is a threat!” Murphy snapped.
“What do you mean?” Joe asked.
“You’ll find out soon enough if you butt in where you’re not wanted.”
Joe stepped forward and looked the pilot straight in the eye. “Come on, Murphy!” he demanded. “Why are you threatening us?”
The man’s answer was a punch that struck Joe on the jaw. Joe staggered backward and toppled over. Biff and Tony caught him as he fell.
Murphy ran to his plane and jumped in. The boys raced after him. Suddenly Frank shouted, “Hit the ground!”
They all plunged face downward on the runway. A landing plane sped toward them. They felt a gust of air as one wing passed over them with inches to spare! Shakily, the boys got to their feet.
“Lucky you shouted, Frank,” Biff said, “or we would have been mowed down.”
They watched helplessly as Rumble Murphy took off. He became airborne and vanished into the clouds scudding across the sky.
“Murphy’s a real pro when it comes to flying,” Frank observed.
Joe rubbed his jaw. “My guess is he’s a boxer,” he said. “That guy hit me really hard with that haymaker.”
The boys walked to the airport terminal.
“We must find out about Palango,” Tony remarked.
“Let’s set up an appointment with Professor Alvarez,” Frank suggested.
Biff clapped Chet on the shoulder. “You’re the expert on archaeology, Chet. We elect you to contact the professor.”
Chet grinned. “I’ll be glad to. Just lead me to the phone.”
He made the call to the university. Alvarez said he would welcome the visitors next morning.
The boys claimed their baggage and took a taxi to the hotel at which they had chosen to stay. After freshening up, they decided to use their free time sightseeing.
In the lobby, Frank inquired at the desk about a guide, and soon a wiry Mexican with wavy black hair appeared.
“You want to see Me-hee-co?” he asked the travelers with a friendly grin. “My name is Juan and my car is outside. It will cost you only a few pesos.”
They made a deal with the guide, who led them to an old auto with crumpled fenders and a crack in the windshield.
“This must be fifty years old,” Joe presumed. His companions were thinking the same thing. Feeling somewhat dubious about its reliability, they climbed in.
Juan started the engine, which wheezed and then made a put-putting sound that seemed about to choke off at any moment. He released the brake and chugged away from the hotel, dispensing tourist information as they rattled along.
First he took them through Mexico City’s main square. “The Zocalo,” he informed his passengers. “Our great plaza.”
The area was dominated by the cathedral. They saw the national palace, the library, the School of Fine Arts, and other public buildings in and around the plaza.
Traffic whizzed every which way. Their guide stepped on the gas and headed into it. His passengers braced themselves as he raced ahead of one car and braked sharply to avoid another.
“Chet, this is worse than your jalopy!” Biff muttered out of the comer of his mouth.
They reached a beautiful broad boulevard. The car bumped along past trees, office buildings, crowds of pedestrians, and benches where tourists and citizens relaxed. Next came the markets of Mexico City, colorful areas with shops and outdoor stalls. Most of the vendors were selling fruits and vegetables.
In the Merced Market, Chet tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him to stop. Juan pulled into a side street.
“What’s up, Chet?” Frank asked.
“Come on. I’ll show you.”
They got out and followed him as he walked to a stall with succulent Mexican dishes. The aroma of tacos, tortillas, enchiladas, and chili filled their nostrils. Chet closed his eyes and inhaled rapturously.
“We might have known,” Joe said with a chuckle. “Chet never passes up any chow.”
“I’m with him this time,” Frank said.
The rest echoed the sentiment. They ordered a tortilla for each, including the driver, then strolled around the market, examining stall after stall. Juan talked to them animatedly, and occasionally conversed with the merchants in Spanish.
Chet, Biff, and Tony paused to look at some prints of Mexico City. Frank and Joe wandered down a side street into a dingy alley.
“Señores, permit me to tell your fortune!” The speaker was an old woman with piercing black eyes and a black lace veil over her hair. Her shop had an astrological chart of the heavens on the open door. “Señores, only a few pesos!” she urged them.
They went in and found her shelves covered with curios—herbs to be distilled for poisons, signs of the zodiac, and dolls with pins stuck in them.
The woman grabbed Joe’s hand and began to read his palm. “You have had a recent misfortune,” she said in a singsong voice.
Joe rubbed his jaw, which was still sore from Rumble Murphy’s punch. “Right,” he replied.
Frank extended his hand. “How about reading my future?” he suggested.
The woman surveyed his palm. Her eyes narrowed. “What do I see here?”
“That’s what I want to know,” Frank said.
“Much gold!”
The Hardys were startled. They tried to query the woman. Finding she would say no more, they paid her and left the shop.
“Could she know about the gold we’re after?” Joe wondered.
“Anything’s possible,” was Frank’s opinion.
The Mexican guide continued the sightseeing tour by driving to Chapultepec Park, a broad green area of woods and a lagoon, where entire families were enjoying the outdoors. Children played amid multicolored shrubs, bushes, and flowers. Fountains spouted water.
“Chapultepec,” the guide said. “That word means ‘grasshopper’ in the Aztec language.”
His battered car huffed and puffed as he pointed it up the hill. At the top he parked in the grounds of Chapultepec Castle, a white stone building with rounded arches and a tall oblong tower. A piece of sculpture on the terrace represented a huge grasshopper.
Inside, the visitors were streaming through the various halls. The boys from Bayport joined them. They saw costumes worn in Mexico City since Aztec times and the apartment once occupied by Emperor Maximilian, who ruled Mexico during the American Civil War.
“What happened to Emperor Max?” Joe asked.
“We shot him,” Juan said laconically.
They climbed up to the roof garden for a view of Chapultepec Park. Frank turned his head. A man with gray hair, wearing a dark suit, was on the other side of the garden. He held a briefcase! Frank tapped Joe on the shoulder and pointed.
“Zemog!” Joe gasped.
The brothers pushed through the crowd, turning and twisting in the press of bodies. At one point they were stopped by a solid wall of visitors and had to detour around them. Struggling and panting, they inched forward. At last they got to the other side.
“I see much gold!” the woman said.
The suspect was gone!
Frank and Joe hurried through the rest of the castle, only to draw a blank in every hall. They ran out to the terrace. Zemog was not there either.
“This is getting ridiculous,” Joe fume
d. “Zemog pops up in the craziest places, and when we follow him, he dissolves into thin air!”
“We let him escape again, as Orlov would put it,” Frank agreed. “Which isn’t saying much for us!”
“I’m beginning to think it’s Zemog’s ghost who’s giving us this problem.” Joe chuckled.
The boys strolled around the terrace until they found Juan and their friends.
“What happened?” Biff asked. “You took off so fast we didn’t even have a chance to offer our help!”
“We think we saw Zemog again,” Frank explained. “And as usual, he escaped.”
“What do we do now?” Chet asked.
“I think we should finish our sightseeing tour at police headquarters,” Joe suggested.
Everyone agreed, and Juan took them to their destination. The boys thanked him for the tour, paid him, and went inside.
The sergeant at the desk spoke English well and listened to their problem with interest. He checked his records for Zemog, but found nothing.
“Zemog is not a Mexican name,” the sergeant said. “Unless he uses an alias, we should be able to track him down without too much difficulty. I will check all the hotels and see what I can learn.”
The boys returned to their hotel for the night. After breakfast the next morning, they taxied to the university to meet Carlos Alvarez. The professor’s office was lined with rows of books on archaeology.
He identified Palango at once. “It is an archaeological site not far from the great ruins of Chichén Itzá on the peninsula of Yucatán. Palango was recently discovered and digging has just begun. It lies in the same area as a lost pyramid of the Mayas. Fifty years ago a hunter reported seeing the pyramid. But since then, every attempt to find it has failed. What is your interest in Palango?”
Frank said that somebody might have flown gold from Mexico City to Palango.
Alvarez was puzzled. “I don’t know why anyone would do that. Usually it is the other way around.”
He gave them a little lecture on gold, noting that the Aztecs molded it into fine art pieces. “Their artifacts are so good many people cannot tell the difference between Aztec and Scythian.”
Chet puffed out his chest. “Oh, I can always tell Aztec stuff!” he boasted.
Alvarez smiled. He took a small piece of gold representing the head of a child from his drawer. “What do you make of that, my friend?”
Chet hefted the gold in his hand. “That’s Aztec, all right.”
“No, it comes from the Inca civilization down in Peru,” Alvarez corrected him.
Chet turned red in the face. His companions snickered, but Alvarez was indulgent. “An easy mistake to make.” He soothed Chet’s feelings.
That ended the session with the professor. The boys, deciding to run down the Palango angle at once, went to the airport and chartered a plane to fly them to Yucatán.
Three hours later they were on their way. The pilot flew across central Mexico, took the long leg of the journey across the Gulf, and zoomed past the shoreline over the jungle, thick with trees and tropical vegetation.
Suddenly the engine began to sputter. The boys looked at one another in alarm.
“What’s happening?” Frank asked tensely.
“I don’t know,” the pilot replied. “I had everything checked out before we left. But this is definitely trouble.”
He worked the controls frantically. But it was of no use. The engine quit and the plane nose-dived toward the jungle!
CHAPTER X
The Boa Constrictor
DowN, down they plunged! The jungle seemed to be rushing up to meet them and presently they could see the upper branches of the trees!
The pilot fought desperately to bring his plane out of its nose-dive. At the last moment, the engine came to life, and he regained control. They swooped down, then climbed just above the trees. Now he was able to zoom back to a safe altitude.
The pilot mopped his brow. “I don’t understand what happened. I double-checked everything before we left Mexico City.”
“Could be somebody doesn’t want us to get to Palango,” Frank observed in a shaky voice.
The plane flew across Yucatán and came down for a landing at Mérida, the main city in the northern Mayan region. The boys climbed out. All were shaken by the near crash.
“T-t-terra firma for me,” Chet stuttered.
“For me, too,” Biff added.
“The Mayas had the right idea,” Tony said. “They never fooled around with planes.”
The Hardys tried to cheer their pals. “We got here, didn’t we?” Joe pointed out.
“Better than hacking our way through the jungle,” Frank declared.
The pilot inspected his plane. “Somebody tampered with the engine,” he said grimly. “I’ll have to repair it.”
His passengers checked with airport officials to see if anybody had seen a private plane marked “Mexico City.” Nobody had, so the boys decided to go right on to Palango. Frank rented a jeep and drove to Chichén Itzá. All of them marveled at the ruins of temples and pyramids that once were the center of the Mayan culture of northern Yucatán. They asked a policeman about Palango.
“Take the dirt road northeast,” the man replied, “and then follow the jungle trail. The Palango dig is at the end of it.”
The boys set out, with Biff at the wheel of the jeep. The dirt road ended and the jungle trail began. It was so rough and bumpy through the dense tropical vegetation that they felt sore and bruised. Even well-padded Chet complained. “I’m not made to be a rubber ball,” he said.
Biff shifted into low gear. “We should have rented a Sherman tank,” he grumbled.
Joe laughed. “How about a swamp buggy?”
The jeep jounced over a large bush. An enormous hole loomed directly ahead! Biff stepped on the brake and the jeep halted at the edge of the hole with a jerk that nearly sent Chet flying over the windshield.
Frank pointed to a pile of fresh earth beside the trail. “Somebody dug that hole recently. I wonder—”
A splintering sound interrupted him. A giant tree beside the trail began to sway. It toppled toward the jeep!
Biff reacted instantly. He stepped on the gas, wrenched the wheel to the left, and scooted into the jungle undergrowth flanking the trail just before the tree fell with a crash. The boys ducked as the branches lashed over the jeep. Then Biff cut back out onto the trail beyond the hole and stopped.
He sighed with relief. “Anyone hurt?” he asked.
The others said no, then Frank proposed that they look around before going on.
The boys walked to the fallen tree. As Chet inspected the tangle of heavy branches, he remarked, “It’s lucky we got out from under.”
“The tree would have smashed us,” Tony agreed.
“Look at the trunk!” Joe declared.
It had been chopped nearly all the way through!
“Someone was setting a trap for us!” Tony exclaimed.
Frank nodded. “He dug the hole to make us stop, cut the tree with an ax till it was barely standing, and then pushed it over to make it topple on us.”
Biff clenched his fists. “That means he must still be around here somewhere. I’ll take him over the hurdles!”
He ran back up the trail. Frank and Joe took the underbrush on one side, Chet and Tony the other. The boys scouted through the area but found nothing except scuffed footprints near the base of the fallen tree.
“He got away!” Biff lamented.
“We may as well call off our search,” Joe said. “It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, only this haystack is the Yucatán jungle.”
An hour later the group bounced into Palango. A Mayan temple had been partially reclaimed, and nearby a deep excavation revealed further work in progress. Several tents had been set up in a cleared area. Four Americans were there along with a dozen Mexicans, descendants of the Mayas, who had been recruited to help with the dig.
The leader of the archaeological exp
edition came forward to meet them. He was tall and handsome with black wavy hair. “I’m Steve Weiss,” he introduced himself. “It’s a surprise to see you. Usually visitors don’t get this far in the jungle.”
Frank explained that he and his companions were trying to find gold.
“We have already found quite a bit!” said a voice behind them.
The boys turned to see a man wearing white shorts and a pith helmet. He had a superior smile on his face, as if to say that he was doing the visitors a favor by speaking to them. He carried a swagger stick, which he slapped against his leather boot.
“I’m Melville Courtney, assistant archaeologist on the dig,” he announced. “I’m also a Hawkins man.”
“He means Hawkins College,” Joe thought.
“We have already found gold, son,” Courtney repeated, “and are scarcely in need of your assistance on that score. The Mayas buried the gold. We retrieved it after much exertion and loss of perspiration.
“I’m sure you realize,” Courtney continued, “that your help would be superfluous.”
“A job is not what we have in mind,” Frank told him.
“Do you have armadillos in mind?” asked a woman who had just walked up. She was short, had golden hair, and a heart-shaped face. She wore a denim shirt and slacks.
“Rose Renda, our biologist,” Steve Weiss introduced her. “She just joined us a few days ago.”
“I’m an armadillo freak,” Rose declared.
Chet scratched his head and gave her a blank look. “Armadillo freak?”
“As you no doubt know,” Rose explained, “an armadillo is an armored animal native to these parts. It’s about five feet long from snout to tail in the biggest species. The armor on its back is approximately three feet long. The problem I’m researching is this: how is the armadillo related to the glyptodon?”
Now Tony looked blank. “What’s a glyptodon?”
Rose smiled. “You mean, what was a glyptodon? It lived millions of years before the armadillo, was about nine feet long, and had five feet of armor. The armor was completely smooth, and had a number of hinges that permitted it to turn more easily.”
The Jungle Pyramid Page 6
