CHAPTER XXVI
The guests refused to go back to their city homes until they had seen the contents of the chest that had brought such woe to Kastle Krags; and there was nothing to do but to make an immediate search. When daylight came again Edith announced that she had fully recovered from the adventure of two days before, and was ready to help me recover the chest.
“I can’t wait to see if it’s really there,” she confessed.
We went in flow-tide, and we guided a boat over the place. But we weren’t trusting entirely to our theory that the sink-hole was only dangerous when the tide was running out. A stout rope was attached to the prow of the boat, and I lashed it about my waist before I stepped off into the water.
We had guessed right about the underground channel. At flood tide a swimmer could pass directly over it in safety. I located a great limestone boulder that I thought was undoubtedly the “white rock” of the script, but as the surface was rough and choppy from the tidal waves breaking against the rock wall, it was impossible to find the chest by power of vision alone. I found I had to dive again and again, groping with my hands.
But in scarcely a moment my foot encountered an iron chain at the base of the rock. In a moment more the search was ended. A small, iron-bound chest, hardly of twelve inch dimensions, was fastened to the chain, which in turn was hooked securely in a crevice of the boulder.
It was a rather wide-eyed, sober group that rowed back to the shore. In the first place it was almost impossible to believe that such a seeming legendary thing was actually in our hands, a thing of weight and substance and unquestioned reality.
The chest had been made of some sort of very hard wood, chemically treated, and showed not the slightest sign of decay in the eighty years it had lain in the water. How many little crafts had passed over it! What a scarlet trail it had left since the Arganil had borne it from Rio de Janeiro, so long ago. “But naked treasures breed murder!” Nealman had said—speaking truer than he knew.... “They get home to human imagination and human wickedness as nothing else can.”