"I know nothing of that," said I.
"Then, you had best come with me," said Bannister. "The road's clear enough, though something extraordinary has happened."
We came forth together from the tunnel, and I was at once half-blinded by the sudden daylight, just as I had been before, when I first beheld the red rock standing forth from the ground in the very semblance of a fish with opened mouth. But when I could use my eyes again, I saw that everything in that strange place was just as I had left it, with the exception that the stone slab was no longer covered with earth, and a great boulder, round as a snowball, lay upon the top of it.
"Who placed this here?" I asked; and that was more than Bannister could answer.
We went together to the slab, and there he lay down and listened, with his ear upon the stone.
"I can hear nothing," said he. "It will be safe enough to enter."
At this we removed the boulder, lifted the slab, and went down the stone steps into the Treasure-chamber below.
It was quite dark, for we had neither torch nor lantern. We had made certain that the place would be deserted, and it therefore came to us something in the nature of a shock, when we beard a jingling sound--as if some one, who had been asleep upon the gold, had sprung on a sudden to his feet. And then a human voice cried out to us; and this was so loud and unexpected that I confess I jumped as if I had been pricked with the point of a knife. For all that, I recognised the voice at once as that of Joshua Trust.
"You've come back!" he cried. "Stand clear of me, or else I'll wring your neck! Who's he who swore that he never yet went back upon his friends?"
There followed a pause, during which I tried my best to make head and tail of what the man had said. It speaks much for John Bannister's intelligence that he tumbled to the truth at once. To my bewilderment, he answered in a voice that was like enough to that of Amos Baverstock.