Doubloons-and the Girl Part 31

"Are you hurt?" Drew asked the girl solicitously.

"Not a bit," she answered pluckily, and Drew reflected on what a thoroughbred she was.

The others also had sustained no injury. But their forebodings as to their safety on the island had been quickened by this striking example of nature's restlessness. The giant in the volcano was not dead. He was uneasy and had turned in his sleep. It was as though he resented the coming of these interlopers, and was giving them warning to go away and leave him undisturbed.

"Now if I was superst.i.tious," remarked Tyke, "I should say that something was trying to keep us from getting this treasure."

"Let it try then," said the captain grimly. "We haven't come as far as this to turn tail and run just when we're on the point of getting what we came for."

"Good for you, Daddy!" cried Ruth gaily. "We're bound to have that treasure."

They quickened their steps now. This was no time for leisurely investigation of the phenomena of earthquakes. They soon reached the point they had attained the day before. But as they had explored that section of the hillside already, they did not halt there, but pushed on to the west.

"Now," said the captain, as he and Drew disburdened themselves of the spades and mattocks they had brought along, carefully wrapped under the guise of surveyors instruments, "we'll go at this thing in a scientific way. We'll make a rough division of this whole section"--he included with a wave of his hand a s.p.a.ce half a mile square--"into four parts.

No, three parts. Tyke must rest his leg. Then each must search his section to find some rocks that look like those beauties marked on the map."

The three scattered promptly, and began the search. They looked diligently, but for a long time found nothing to reward their efforts.

Drew tried as conscientiously as the rest, although at times he could not make his eyes behave, and his gaze would wander over in Ruth's direction. It was in one of these lapses from industry that he saw her lift her arm and wave eagerly in his direction. He did not wait for a second summons, but hurried over, after calling to the others to follow.

The girl was flushed and excited.

"What have you found?" Drew asked, as soon as he got within speaking distance.

"Look!" she answered. "Doesn't that big rock over there seem to you like a witch's head--wild and ragged locks, and all that?"

From where he was then standing, he could trace no resemblance, but when he reached her side and looked from the same angle he raised a shout.

"The very thing!" he cried. "There can't be any doubt of it."

The rock in question stood apart from the rest on the slope of the hill. Nature had carved it in a moment of prankishness. There were all the features of an old crone, forehead, nose, sunken mouth, nut-cracker jaws, while small streams of lava, hardening as they had flowed, gave the similitude of scanty tresses.

Tyke and the captain, soon came up, and all their doubts disappeared as they gazed.

"The Witch's Head!" they agreed exultantly.

"With that to start with, the rest will be easy," cried Drew. "The Three Sisters can't be more than a few hundred feet or so away."

Ten minutes' further search revealed a group of three rocks, which, while having no resemblance to female faces, were the only ones that stood apart from all the rest as a trio.

The hands of the three men trembled as they got out the old map and pored over it.

"Thirty-seven big paces due north from the Witch's Head; eighty-nine big paces due east from The Three Sisters," muttered the captain.

"Paces, even big paces, is rather indefinite," commented Drew. "If it were yards or feet, now, it would be different. But one man's paces differ from another's, and a short man's differ from a tall man's."

"It was very inconsiderate of that old pirate not to tell exactly how tall he was," jested Ruth.

"Well, we can't have everything handed to us on a gold plate," said the captain. "We may have to dig in a good many places before we strike the right spot."

"Let's do this," suggested Tyke. "Each one of us men will mark off the paces, taking good long strides, an' see where we bring up. Then we'll mark off a big circle that will include all three results. It's a moral certainty that it will be somewheres in that circle if it's here at all."

They acted on this suggestion, Ruth, with pencil and paper, serving as scribe, while the men did the pacing. She was elated at the part she had played in the discovery.

It was an easy enough matter to make thirty-seven big paces from one point and eighty-nine big paces from another, but, as every student of angles knows, it was very difficult to make the two lines converge at the proper point. But though their methods were rough, they succeeded at last in getting a very fair working hypothesis. A rough circle of forty feet in diameter was drawn about the stake Drew set up, and within that circle they were convinced the treasure lay.

By this time the sun had reached the zenith, and before they started to dig they retreated to the shade in the edge of the jungle and ate their lunch.

"Hadn't you better wait until it gets a little cooler by and by?" asked Ruth anxiously. "It will be frightful under this hot sun. This is the hour of siesta."

"I guess we're too impatient for that," answered her father. "But we'll work only a few minutes at a time and take long resting spells between."

Fortunately the ground was moderately soft within the circle, and their spades sank deep with every thrust. Tyke was not allowed to share in this work of excavation, much to his disgust. As for Drew and Captain Hamilton, their muscular arms worked like machines, and they soon had great mounds of earth piled around their respective pits.

But fortune failed to reward their efforts. One place after another was abandoned as hopeless.

They were toiling away with the perspiration dripping from them, when Drew was startled by a cry from Ruth. He leaped instantly out of his excavation, and ran to her. Ruth was standing in the shade of the jungle's edge; but she was staring across the barren hillside toward the west.

"What is it?" demanded the young man. "What do you see?"

"I--I don't know. I'm not _sure_ I saw anything," she admitted. "And yet----"

"Some of the seamen?" demanded Drew. "I've been expecting that, though your father is so sure that Ditty and his gang will remain at the eastern end of the island."

"Oh, Allen! Not Ditty! Not one of the sailors! I--I could almost believe in--in ghosts," and she tried to laugh.

"What is it, my dear?" asked Tyke, who had come over. "What's happened? Did you see something?"

"Yes. It moved. It was there, and then it wasn't there. The s.p.a.ce it stood in was empty," said the girl earnestly.

"For the love o' goodness!" cried Tyke, mopping his brow. "You've got me all stirred up. Now, if I was superst.i.tious----"

"You will be if I tell you more about that--that thing," Ruth said.

She said it jokingly, and Tyke turned away, going over to where Captain Hamilton was still at work.

"It must have been the spirit of the old pirate come back to guard his h.o.a.rd," Drew said lightly.

Ruth looked at him very oddly.

"What do you think?" she whispered, when Tyke was out of hearing. "Why should the ghost of Ramon Alvarez look so much like Mr. Parmalee?"

Drew paled, and then flushed.

"Do you mean that, Ruth?" he asked, and he could not keep his voice from trembling.

"Yes," she said. Then she flashed him a sudden smile. "Of course, it was merely an hallucination. But, 'if I was superst.i.tious----'" and she quoted Tyke with a look which she tried to make merry.