CHAPTER XII
THE GOLDEN INGOTS
ESTEBAN MIRANDA had played the role of Tarzan of the Apes with the W aziri as his audience fo r less than twenty-four hours when he began to realize that, even with the lee-way that his supposedly injured brain gave him, it was going to be a very difficult thing to carry on the decep tion indefinitely. In the first place Usula did not seem at all pleased at the idea of merely taking the gold away from the intruders and then running from them. N o r did his fellow warriors seem any more enthusiastic over the plan than he. A s a mat ter of fact they could not conceive that any number of bumps upon the head could render their Tarzan of the Apes a coward, and to run away from these west coast blacks and a handful of inexperienced whites seemed nothing less than cowardly.
Following all this, there had occurred in the afternoon that which finally decided the Spaniard that he was building fo r himself anything other than a bed of roses, and that the sooner he found an excuse for quitting the company of the W aziri the greater would be his life expectancy.
They were passing through rather open jungle
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