Just at sunset the melancholy procession started off from the stable towards the ruins. Joe and Bobby were bearers, and carried between them the packing-case lid, draped with all the available flags that could be found, which bore what had once been poor Rollo. Peggy followed as chief mourner, her arms full of wreaths and flowers, and a piece of black crape, purloined from the scrap-bag, pinned conspicuously upon her hat. The place chosen was among the most perfect part of the old Abbey, not so much filled up with stones and rubbish as the great refectory or the remains of the choir. Tradition pointed it out as the abbot's house, and that name had clung to it through all the hundreds of years since the busy monks had lived and worked there.
'Suppose you dig just here, Joe,' cried Peggy, selecting a spot where a blackthorn was bursting forth into a sheet of white blossom and the primroses were yellowest and best.
Joe moistened the palms of his hands in the orthodox fashion, and seizing the spade began to shovel away at the loose, light soil. He had dug about three feet deep when his spade struck against a smooth, flat stone, which, instead of coming out easily amongst the rubbish, seemed to extend for some way underneath the surface.
'It looks like a paving-stone, for all the world,' he said, sweeping the soil away from it with his hand. 'I'll dig out the earth all around it, and see what it do be.'
It took Joe a considerable time to clear the stone, though Bobby went to his aid with a trowel; but he got it free at last, and Peggy stooped down curiously to examine it.
'There are marks on it, like letters and queer figures, but they're all filled up with soil,' she said. 'It seems to me it's a kind of lid, and if you dig round the edge a little more, Joe, we might lift it up. It's rather like the cover of one of those old stone coffins in the churchyard, only smaller. I wonder if there is anything inside?'
Joe set to work again with a will, clearing out the earth well from under the side of the stone; then, putting his fingers beneath it, he gave a mighty jerk of his strong arms, and up it came, nearly upsetting him with the force of the recoil. Three eager faces peered anxiously down into what certainly looked like the inside of a small stone coffin, but instead of containing mouldering bones, it held a good-sized chest of oak, bound with iron, rather rusted and crumbling, but still holding quite firmly together.
'Lift it out, Joe!' cried Peggy, in such excitement that Rollo was almost forgotten for the moment. 'Whatever can be inside it?'
'It bean't no light weight, Miss Peggy, whatever it be' groaned Joe, for it was as much as he could manage to heave the heavy chest from its resting-place on to the grass above.
'There may be money and all sorts of treasures in it,' suggested Bobby. 'Perhaps the smugglers left it behind.'