She stopped short, seeming to enjoy the surprised look on our faces at finding that she was willing to discuss the matter so intimately.

“After the Indian had shown the Spaniard the treasure in the mound,” she pursued, “the Indian told the Spaniard that he had given him only the little fish, the peje chica, but that some day he would give him the big fish, the peje grande.  I see that you already know at least a part of the story, anyhow.”  “Yes,” admitted Kennedy, “I do know something of it.  But I should rather get it more accurately from your lips than from the hearsay of any one else.”

She smiled quietly to herself.  “I don’t believe,” she added, “that you know that the peje grande was not ordinary treasure.  It was the temple gold.  Why, some of the temples were literally plated over heavily with pure gold.  That gold, as well as what had been buried in the huacas, was sacred.  Mansiche, the supreme ruler, laid a curse on it, on any Indian who would tell of it, on any Spaniard who might learn of it.  A curse lies on the finding—­yes, even on the searching for the sacred Gold of the Gods.  It is one of the most awful curses that have ever been uttered, that curse of Mansiche.”

Even as she spoke of it she lowered her voice.  I felt that no matter how much education she had, there lurked back in her brain some of the primitive impulses, as well as beliefs.  Either the curse of Mansiche on the treasure was as real to her as if its mere touch were poisonous, or else she was going out of her way to create that impression with us.

“Somehow,” she continued, in a low tone, “that Spaniard, the ancestor of Don Luis Mendoza, obtained some idea of the secret.  He died,” she said solemnly, flashing a glance at Craig from her wonderful eyes to stamp the idea indelibly.  “He was stabbed by one of the members of the tribe.  On the dagger, so I have heard, was marked the secret of the treasure.”

I felt that in a bygone age she might have made a great priestess of the heathen gods.  Now, was she more than a clever actress?

She paused, then added, “That is my tribe—­my family.”

Again she paused.  “For centuries the big fish was a secret, is still a secret—­or, at least, was until some one got it from my brother down in Peru.  The tradition and the dagger had been intrusted to him.  I don’t know how it happened.  Somehow he seemed to grow crazy—­until he talked.  The dagger was stolen from him.  How it happened, how it came into Professor Norton’s hands, I do not know.

“But, at any rate,” she continued, in the same solemn tone, “the curse has followed it.  After my brother had told the secret of the dagger and lost it, his mind left him.  He threw himself one day into Lake Titicaca.”

Her voice broke dramatically in her passionate outpouring of the tragedies that had followed the hidden treasure and the Inca dagger.