Spanish Doubloons

by Camilla Kenyon

The captain hesitated queerly. His wandering eyes seemed to be searching in every quarter for something they did not find. At last he mumbled that he thought he felt a touch of the sun, and had decided to lay off for the afternoon and make his way across the island. He said he wanted to shoot water-fowl and that they had all been frightened away from the cove, but that with the glass he had seen them from Lookout thickly about the other bay.

"Very well," said the Scotchman coldly. "I suppose you must suit yourself. I can get the boat in shape without help, I dare say." I saw him presently looking in an annoyed and puzzled fashion after the vanishing figure of the sailor.

Mr. Tubbs and the umbrellas soon disappeared into the woods. I believe the search for Bill Halliwell's tombstone was no longer very actively pursued, and that the trio spent their time ensconced in a snug little nook with hammocks and cushions, where Mr. Tubbs beguiled the time with reading aloud—Aunt Jane and Violet both being provided with literature—and relating anecdotes of his rise to greatness in the financial centers of the country. I more than suspected Mr. Tubbs of feeling that such a bird in the hand as Aunt Jane was worth many doubloons in the bush. But in spite of uneasiness about the future, for the present I rested secure in the certainty that they could not elope from the island, and that there was no one on it with authority to metamorphose Aunt Jane into Mrs. Hamilton H. Tubbs.

The waters of the cove had receded until a fringe of rocks under the high land of the point, usually covered, had been left bare. I had watched the emergence of their black jagged surfaces for some time before it occurred to me that they offered a means of access to the cave. The cave—place of fascination and mystery! Here was the opportunity of all others to explore it, unhampered by any one, just Crusoe and I alone, in the fashion that left me freest to indulge my dreams.

I waited until the Scotchman's back was safely turned, because if he saw me setting forth on this excursion he was quite certain to command me to return, and I had no intention of submitting to his dictatorial ways and yet was not sure how I was successfully to defy him. I believed him capable of haling me lack by force, while tears or even swoons left him unmoved. Of course he would take the absurd ground that the cave was dangerous, in the face of the glaring fact that a girl who had come to this island solely to protect Aunt Jane ought certainly to be able to protect herself. Besides, what right had he to care if I was drowned, anyhow?

But of course I was not going to be.

The retreating tide had left deep pools behind, each a little cosmos of fairy seaweeds and tiny scuttling crabs and rich and wonderful forms of life which were strange to me. Crusoe and I were very much interested, and lingered a good deal on the way. But at last we reached the great archway, and passed with a suddenness which was like a plunge into cool water from the hot glare of the tropic sunshine into the green shadow of the cavern.

At the lower end, between the two arches, a black, water-worn rock paving rang under one's feet. Further in under the point the floor of the cave was covered with white sand. All the great shadowy place was murmuring like a vast sea-shell. Beyond the southern archway spread the limitless heaving plain of the Pacific. Near at hand bare black rocks rose from the surges, like skeletons of the land that the sea had devoured. And after a while these walls that supported the cavern roof would be nibbled away, and the roof would fall, and the waves roar victorious over the ruins.

I wished I could visit the place in darkness. It would be thrice as mysterious, filled with its hollow whispering echoes, as in the day. I dreamed of it as it might have been when a boat from the Bonny Lass crept in, and the faint winking eye of a lantern struck a gleam from the dark waters and showed nothing all around but blackness, and more blackness.

From the ledge far above my head led off those narrow, teasing crevices in which the three explorers did their unrewarded burrowing. I could see the strands of a rope ladder lying coiled at the edge of the shelf, where it was secured by spikes. The men dragged down the ladder with a boat-hook when they wanted to ascend. I looked about with a hope that perhaps they had left the boat-hook somewhere.