There was truly nothing dangerous about the ledge. It was nearly three feet wide, and had an easy downward trend. Yet you heard the hungry roar of the surf below, and try as you would not to, caught glimpses of the white swirl of it. I moved cautiously, keeping close to the face of the cliff. Crusoe, to my annoyance, sprang down upon the ledge after me. I had a feeling that he must certainly trip me as I picked my way gingerly along.
An angle in the rock—a low dark entrance-way—it was all as Peter had described it. I peered in—nothing but impenetrable blackness. I took a hesitating step. The passage veered sharply, as the diary had recorded. Once around the corner, there would be nothing but darkness anywhere. One would go stumbling on, feeling with feet and hands—hands cold with the dread of what they might be going to touch. For, suddenly portentous and overwhelming, there rose before me the unanswered question of what had become of Peter on that last visit to the cave. Unanswered—and unanswerable except in one way: by going in to see.
But if by any strange chance—where all chances were strange—he were still there, I did not want to see. I did not like to contemplate his possible neighborhood. Indeed, he grew enormously more real to me with every instant I stood there, and whereas I had so far thought principally about the treasure, I now began to think with intensity of Peter. What ironic stroke of fate had cut him down in the very moment of his triumph? Had he ever reached the cave to bring away the last of the doubloons? Were they still waiting there unclaimed? Had he fallen victim to some extraordinary mischance on the way back to the Island Queen? Had a storm come up on that last night, and the weakened cable parted, and the Island Queen gone on the rocks, drowning Peter in the cabin with his gold? Then how had Crusoe got away, Crusoe, who feared the waves so, and would bark at them and then turn tail and run?
Speaking of Crusoe, where was he? I realized that a moment ago he had plunged into the passage. I heard the patter of his feet—a pause. A queer, dismal little whine echoed along the passage. I heard Crusoe returning—but before his nose appeared around the angle of the tunnel, his mistress had reached the top of the cliff at a bound and was vanishing at a brisk pace into the woods.
With bitterness, as I pursued my way to camp, I realized that I was not a heroine. Here was a mystery—it was the business of a heroine to solve it. Now that I was safely away from the cave, I began to feel the itch of a torturing curiosity. How, without going into the terrifying place alone, should I find out what was there? Should I pretend to have accidentally discovered the grave, lead the party to it, and then—again accidentally—discover the tunnel? This plan had its merits—but I discarded it, for fear that something would be found in the cave to direct attention to the Island Queen. Then I reflected that very likely the explorers would work round the island far enough to find the sea-mouth of the cave. This would take matters entirely out of my hands. I should perhaps be enlightened as to the fate of Peter and the last remaining bags of doubloons, but might also have to share the secret of the derelict with the rest. And then all my dreams of playing fairy godmother and showering down on certain heads—like coals of fire—torrents of beautiful golden doubloons, would be over.
On the whole I could not tell whether I burned with impatience to have the cave discovered, or was cold with the fear of it.
And then, so vigorous is the instinct to see one's self in heroic postures, I found I was trying to cheat myself with the pretense that I meant presently to abstract Aunt Jane's electric torch and returning to the tunnel-mouth plunge in dauntlessly.
XIV
MR. TUBBS INTERRUPTS
I had determined as an offset to my pusillanimous behavior about the cave to show a dogged industry in the matter of the Island Queen. It would take me a long while to get down through the sand to the chest, but I resolved to accomplish it, and borrowed of Cookie, without his knowledge, a large iron spoon which I thought I could wield more easily than a heavy spade. Besides, Cookie would be less sleuth-like in getting on the trail of his missing property than Mr. Shaw—though there would be a certain piquancy in having that martinet hale me before him for stealing a spade.