"I know!"
There was a lengthy silence. People looked at one another, and
their eyes said, _This has been too much for her_!
"I _know_," I impatiently repeated. "I can take you straight
there. I found the tombstone before Mr. Tubbs did, and the cave
too. Come, let's not waste time. We must hurry--they'll be
getting back!"
Amazement, still more than half incredulous, surged round me. Then
Mr. Shaw said rapidly:
"You're right. Of course, if you have found the cave, the best
thing we can do is to keep them shut up in it. But we must move
fast--perhaps we're too late already. If they have found the chest
they may by now be starting for camp with the first load of
doubloons."
Again I shook my head.
"They haven't found the gold," I assured him.
The astonished faces grew more anxious. "It sho' have told on
li'le Miss Jinny's brain," muttered Cookie to himself.
"They haven't found the gold," I reiterated with emphasis, "because
the gold is not in the cave. Don't ask me how I know, because
there isn't time to tell you. There was no gold there but the two
bags that the pirates brought back last night. The--the skeleton
moved it all out."
"My Lawd!" groaned Cookie, staggering backward.
"Virginia! I had no idea you were superstitious!" quavered Aunt
Jane.
"I say, do take some sleeping tablets or something and quiet your
nerves!" implored Cuthbert with the tenderest solicitude.
In my exasperation I stamped my foot.
"And while we are arguing here the pirates may be starting back to
camp! And then we'll have to kill them and go home and give
ourselves up to be hanged! Please, please, come with me and let me
show you that I know!" I lifted my eyes to the intent face of
Dugald Shaw.
"All right," he said tersely. "I think you do know. How and what,
we'll find out later." Rapidly he made his plan, got together the
things needful for its execution, looked to the bonds of the still
dazed and drowsy prisoners, posted Cookie in their neighborhood
with a pair of pistols, and commanded Aunt Jane to dry her tears
and look after Miss Higglesby-Browne, who had dismayed every one by
most inopportunely toppling over in a perfectly genuine swoon.
Then the Scotchman, Cuthbert Vane and I set off through the woods.
The men were heavily armed, and I had recovered my own little
revolver and restored it to my belt. Mr. Shaw had seen to this,
and had said to me, very quietly:
"You know, Virginia, if things don't go our way, it may be
necessary for you to use it--on yourself."
And I nodded assentingly.
We went in silence through the green hush of the woods, moving in
single file. My place as guide was in the van, but Mr. Shaw
deposed me from it and went ahead himself, while Cuthbert Vane
brought up the rear. No one spoke, even to whisper. I guided
Dugald Shaw, when needful, by a light touch upon the arm. Our
enterprise was one of utmost danger. At any moment we might hear
the steps and voices of the returning pirates. Thus fore-warned,
we might of course retreat into the woods and let them pass,
ourselves unseen. But then, what of those whom we had left in
camp? Could we leave them undefended to the vengeance of Captain
Magnus? No, if we met the pirates it was their lives or ours--and
I recall with incredulity my resolution to imbed five of my six
bullets in a pirate before I turned the sixth upon myself. I
reflected with satisfaction that five bullets should be a fatal
dose to any pirate unless an exceptionally tough one. And I hoped
he would not be tough--
But I tell myself with shudders that it was not I, but some
extraordinary recrudescence of a primitive self, that indulged
these lethal gloatings.
No steps but our own, no voices but of birds, broke the stillness
of the woods. We moved onward swiftly, and presently the noise of
the sea came to us with the sudden loudness that I remembered. I
paused, signaled caution to my companions, and crept on.
We passed the grave, and I saw that the vines had been torn aside
again, and that the tombstone was gone. We came to the brink of
the cliff, and I pointed silently downward along the ledge to the
angle in which lay the mouth of the cave. My breath came quickly,
for at any instant a head might be thrust forth from the opening.
Already the sun was mounting toward the zenith. The noontide heat
and stillness was casting its drowsy spell upon the island. The
air seemed thicker, the breeze more languid. And all this meant
meal-time--and the thoughts of hungry pirates turning toward camp.
My hope was that they were still preoccupied with the fruitless
search in the cave.
Mr. Shaw and Cuthbert dropped down upon the ledge. Though under
whispered orders to retreat I could not, but hung over the edge of
the cliff, eager and breathless. Then with a bound the men were
beside me. Mr. Shaw caught my hand, and we rushed together into
the woods.
A quake, a roar, a shower of flying rocks. It was over--the
dynamite had done its work, whether successfully or not remained to
be seen. After a little the Scotchman ventured back. He returned
to us where we waited in the woods--Cuthbert to mount guard over
me--with a cleared face.
"It's all right," he said. "The entrance is completely blocked. I
set the charge six feet inside, but the roof is down clear to the
mouth. Poor wretches--they have all come pouring out upon the
sand--"
All three of us went back to the edge of the cliff. Seventy feet
below, on the narrow strip of sand before the sea-mouth of the
cave, we saw the figures of four men, who ran wildly about and
sought for a foothold on the sheer face of the cliff. As we stood
watching them, with, on my part, at least, unexpected qualms of
pity and a cold interior sensation very unlike triumph, they
discovered us. Then for the first time, I suppose, they understood
the nature of their disaster. We could not hear their cries, but
we saw arms stretched out to us, fists frantically shaken, hands
lifted in prayer. We saw Mr. Tubbs flop down upon his unaccustomed
knees--it was all rather horrible.
I drew back, shivering. "It won't be for long, of course," I said
uncertainly, "just till the steamer comes--and we'll give them lots
to eat--but I suppose they think--they will soon be just a lot more
skeletons--" And here I was threatened with a moist anticlimax to
my late Amazonian mood.
Why should the frequent and natural phenomena of tears produce such
panic in the male breast? At a mere April dewiness about my lashes
these two strong men quaked.
"Don't--don't cry!" implored Cuthbert earnestly.
"It's been too much for her!" exclaimed the once dour Scot in tones
of anguish. "Hurry, lad--we must find her some water--"
"Nonsense," I interposed, winking rapidly. "Just think of some way
to calm those creatures, so that I shan't see them in my dreams,
begging and beseeching--" For I had not forgotten the immensity of
my debt to Tony.
So a note was written on a leaf torn from a pocketbook and thrown
over the cliff weighted with a stone. The captives swooped upon
it. Followed then a vivid pantomime by Tony, expressive of eased
if unrepentant minds, while Mr. Tubbs, by gestures, indicated that
though sadly misunderstood, old H. H. was still our friend and
benefactor.
It was an attentive group to which on our return to camp I related
the circumstances which had made possible our late exploit of
imprisoning the pirates in the cave. The tale of my achievements,
though recounted with due modesty, seemed to put the finishing
touch to the extinction of Violet, for she wilted finally and
forever, and was henceforth even bullied by Aunt Jane. The diary
of Peter was produced, and passed about with awe from hand to hand.
Yesterday's discovery in the cave had rounded out the history of
Peter to a melancholy completion. But though we knew the end we
guessed in vain at the beginning, at Peter's name, at that of the
old grandfather whose thrifty piety had brought him to Havana and
to the acquaintance of the dying mate of the _Bonny Lass_, at the
whereabouts of the old New England farm which had been mortgaged to
buy the _Island Queen_, at the identity of Helen, who waited still,
perhaps, for the lover who never would return.
But even our regrets for Peter did not chill the exultation with
which we thought of the treasure-chest waiting there under the sand
in the cabin of the _Island Queen_.
All afternoon we talked of it. That, for the present, was all we
could do. There were the two prisoners in camp to be guarded--and
they had presently awakened and made remarks of a strongly personal
and unpleasant trend on discovering their situation. There was
Crusoe invalided, and needing petting, and getting it from
everybody on the score of his romantic past as _Benjy_ as well as
of his present virtues. The broken leg had been cleverly set by
Dugald--somehow in the late upheaval _Miss_ and _Mister_ had
dropped quite out of our vocabularies--with Cuthbert as surgeon's
assistant and me holding the chloroform to the patient's nose.
There was the fatigue and reaction from excitement which everybody
felt, and Peter's diary to be read, and golden dreams to be
indulged. And there was the delicate question to be discussed, of
how the treasure should be divided.
"Why, it all belongs to Virginia, of course," said Cuthbert,
opening his eyes at the thought of any other view being taken but
this obvious one.
"Nonsense!" I hastily interposed. "My finding the diary was just
an accident; I'll take a share of it--no more."
Here Miss Browne murmured something half inaudible about
"--confined to members of the Expedition--" but subsided for lack
of encouragement.
"I suggest," said Dugald, "that our numbers having most fortunately
diminished and there being, on the basis of Peter's calculations,
enough to enrich us all, that we should share and share alike."
And this proposal was received with acclamations, as was a second
from the same source, devoting a certain percentage of each share
to Cookie, to whom the news of his good fortune was to come later
as a great surprise.
As an earnest of our riches, we had the two bags of doubloons which
the pirates had recovered from the fleshless fingers of the dead
man. They were old worn coins, most of them, many dating from the
seventeenth century, and bearing the effigies of successive kings
of Spain. Each disk of rich, yellow Peruvian gold, dug from the
earth by wretched sweating slaves and bearing the name of a narrow
rigid tyrant, had a history, doubtless, more wild and bloody than
even that we knew. The merchant of Lima and his servant, Bill
Halliwell, and afterward poor Peter had died for them. For their
sake we had been captives in fear of death, and for their sake now
four wretched beings were prisoners in the treasure-cave and two
more cursed, fate and their bonds within hearing of our outraged
ears. And who knew how much more of crime and blood and violence
we should send forth into the world with the long-buried treasure?
Who knew--and, ah, me, who cared? So riotous was the gold-lust in
my veins that I think if I had known the chest to be another
Pandora's box I should still have cried out to open it.
Shortly before sundown Cuthbert and Cookie were despatched by
Dugald Shaw to the cliff above the cave with supplies for the
inhumed pirates. These were let down by rope. A note was brought
up on the rope, signed by Mr. Tubbs, and containing strangely
jumbled exhortations, prayers and threats. A second descent of the
rope elicited another missive, neatly folded and addressed in the
same hand to Miss Jane Harding. Cuthbert gave this privately to
me, but its contents must forever be unknown, for it went, unread,
into Cookie's fire. I had no mind to find Aunt Jane, with her
umbrella as a parachute, vanishing over the cliffs to seek the arms
of a repentant Tubbs.
The fly in the ointment of our satisfaction, and the one remaining
obstacle to our possession of the treasure, was the presence of the
two pirates in our midst. They were not nice pirates. They were
quite the least choice of the collection. Chris, when he was not
swearing, wept moistly, and so touched the heart of Aunt Jane that
we lived in fear of her letting him go if she got the opportunity.
He told her that he had lost an aunt in his tender youth, of whom
she reminded him in the most striking way, and that if this
long-mourned relative had lived he felt he should have been a
better man and not led away against his higher nature by the chance
of falling in with bad companions. Aunt Jane thought her
resemblance to Chris's aunt a remarkable coincidence and an
opportunity for appealing to his better self which should be
improved. She wanted to improve it by untying his hands, because
he had sprained his wrist in his childhood and it was sensitive.
He had sprained it in rescuing a little companion from drowning,
the child of a drunkard who had unfeelingly thrown his offspring
down a well. This episode had been an example to Chris which had
kept him from drinking all his life, until he had fallen into his
present rough company.
Aunt Jane took it very hard that the Scotchman seemed quite
unfeeling about Chris's wrist. She said it seemed very strange to
her in a man who had so recently known the sorrows of captivity
himself. She said she supposed even suffering would not soften
some natures.
As to Magnus, his state of sullen fury made him indifferent even to
threats of punishment. He swore with a determination and fluency
worthy of a better cause. For myself, I could not endure his
neighborhood. It seemed to me I could not live through the days
that must intervene before the arrival of the _Rufus Smith_ in the
constant presence of this wretch.
More than all, it made Dugald and Cuthbert unwilling to leave the
camp together. There was always the possibility that the two
ruffians might find means to free themselves, and, with none but
Cookie and the women present, to obtain control of the firearms and
the camp. For the negro, once the men were free, could not surely
be depended on to face them. Loyal he was, and valiant in his
fashion, but old and with the habit of submission. One did not see
him standing up for long before two berserker-mad ruffians.
What to do with the pirates continued for a day and a night a
knotty problem.
It was Cuthbert Vane who solved it, and with the simplicity of
genius.
"Why not send 'em down to their chums the way we do the eats?" he
asked.
It seemed at first incredibly fantastic, but the more you thought
of it the more practical it grew. It was characteristic of
Cuthbert not to see it as fantastic. For him the sharp edges of
fact were never shaded off into the dim and nebulous. Cuthbert,
when he saw things at all, saw them steadily and whole. He would
let down the writhing, swearing Magnus over the cliff as tranquilly
as he let down loaves of bread, aware merely of its needing more
muscular effort. Only he would take immense care not to hurt him.
Dire outcries greeted the decision. Aunt Jane wept, and Chris
wept, and said this never could have happened to him if his aunt
had lived. Oaths flowed from Captain Magnus in a turgid stream.
Nevertheless the twain were led away, firmly bound, and guarded by
Dugald, Cuthbert and the negro. And the remarkable program
proposed by Cuthbert Vane was triumphantly carried out. Six
prisoners now occupied the old cave of the buccaneers.
With the camp freed from the presence of the pirates all need of
watchfulness was over. The prisoners in the cave were provided
with no implements but spades, whereas dynamite and crowbars would
be necessary to force a way through the debris which choked the
mouth of the tunnel. A looking over of the ground at the daily
feeding time would be enough.
To-morrow's sun would see our hopes crowned and all our toil
rewarded by the recovery of the treasure from the _Island Queen_.