We talked very little. The one idea in the mind of each of us was to get at the red stone, which we could see from where we sat, and we choked down our food as rapidly as possible. I forgot completely my injured shoulder. Watkins actually hurried himself in passing the eggs. Betty and Hugh crumbled a few bits of toast, and strangled over their coffee. Vernon King alone ate placidly, with the zest of a man who feels he has done a good job well. At last, Betty could stand it no longer, and she sprang up with an imitation of Kara's scowl so faithful that everybody, except Kara, laughed.
"Daddy, you've had time for two breakfasts," she decreed. "That's enough. Besides, I won't have you getting fat in your old age. Come! Everybody! We've got our chance, our chance that we began to think was gone aglimmering. The treasure of the Bucoleon is at our feet—under our feet, I mean. Up with the red stone!"
"Up she goes!" assented Hugh.
Crowbars, chisels, mallets, picks and shovels appeared, and Hugh paced the distance from the Fountain of the Lion. His calculations indicated the stone that I had roughly estimated on our first visit to the garden. We all watched him with madly beating hearts. It was really true! We were going to lay bare the secret covered by the red stone, to grasp the prize that the Emperor Andronicus had concealed seven centuries before, the prize that generation after generation of men had striven for in vain.
The thought exhilarated us, and when Hugh stepped aside and seized a chisel and mallet we all set to with superhuman energy. I was unable to do much, but I experienced a sharp pleasure in the mere act of holding with my one hand the head of a chisel upon which one of the others rained blows with a mallet. We could not take time for conversation. We worked. Even Vernon King, who had millions at his command, succumbed to the lure of the red stone's secret, and panted as he chipped the rotten mortar from the interstices between the red stone and those surrounding it.
Working at such a pace and with so many willing hands, it was only a matter of a few minutes before the stone was detached from its neighbors, and Nikka thrust the tip of a crowbar under its edge. Followed then a struggle of some duration, but in the end it sagged up and was overturned. Below it was a second stone of equal dimensions, granite, unmortared, although the dust of ages had sifted into the cracks around it. This yielded to our efforts much sooner than had the cap-stone, and Hugh, kneeling amongst the debris, peered down into a yawning hole in the pavement.
"Careful!" warned King. "A compartment which has been sealed for centuries will be full of carbonic-acid gas."
Hugh sniffed.
"It's as damp as—as—that beastly drain," he said. "But it smells reasonably sweet."
We poked our torches into the hole. All they showed was a steep flight of stairs descending straight into blackness.