The remembered call of the water came up insistent. Almost Napier could imagine that he made it out, that nook, a few yards below, which had always been the boys' first stopping-place. In the driest summer a thread of pure fresh water trickled out of a fissure in the granite down there among the ferns. In spring the trickle would swell to a torrent. It would go boiling over the worn boulders till it plunged down that last lap in noise and foam into the tiny lake, the small rock basin of steel-blue water, smiling in the sunshine of memory, but even in that light set warningly about with nearly perpendicular walls on three sides. On this southern arc, more terribly furnished still, with rocks of sharper tooth, calved later from the mother in labor of heat and frost.
After quenching their thirst, the boys' next stopping-place would be Table Rock, a third of the way to the bottom. There they would lie stretched out to the sun and eat their sandwiches. Then they would crawl to the far edge and peer over for that dizzy view of the great boss, the outcrop of granite eighteen to twenty feet below them on the left. By virtue of place or special constitution, it had possessed a power to resist the forces of disintegration. It treated the very torrent cavalierly, for it butted the torrent aside with that Giant's Head, and then bent leisurely over to look at itself in the lake.
There were days when the jutting forehead, with its crown of heather and veil of creepers interlaced, was seen more clearly mirrored in the water than when looked straight down upon from Table Rock or from the opposite cliff across the lake. Neither point of view gave one the smallest inkling of what was under the veil, behind the brow of granite.
Napier sniffed the wet air for smoldering wood. No whiff, no sound.
What the devil had been in Greta's mind? The cause of her panic, whatever it was, no longer inhabited here. Napier would feel his way down as quickly as due caution would permit, and in less than forty minutes he'd be back in the boat with McClintock.
All he had to do was to steer clear of Table Rock and follow the watercourse till it bore away to the left. Any one who knew his ground and kept to the right could easily enough let himself down to that comfortable ledge under the Giant's Head. Sometimes you found bilberries there. Anyway, you found the niche that sheltered you from rain. And then you went on to the discovery that took your breath.
In the old days you waited for McClintock with beating hearts, even if there were two of you. Gavan eight and Julian seven, would follow behind the old sou'wester to the end of the curving gallery, where a drop of some four feet landed you in the irregular-shaped stone chamber where the smugglers long ago had hid the contraband. How did they get it round the Giant's Head? you asked, remembering the narrow way. They didn't get it round. They lowered it over the top. McClintock could show you the grooves worn in the granite. Good days, those!
Wet and a little chilled, but without misgiving, Napier let himself down among the rocks. He began the descent with a swing of the rattan to take his immediate bearings. Before he brought the stick full circle, he dropped the hand that held it. What was this against the side of his knee? He bent down and found his face a few inches from a steel cable, screwed taut, and straining aslant skyward. His eye followed the outline of the twisted strand till it met a slender rod planted discreetly among the rocks. Planted so discreetly that it was completely masked from observation on three points of the compass and would not easily be detected on the fourth. Napier could not make out the wire connecting the farther one of the antennæ onto this one above his head; but he knew that it was there. He knew that he had set his knee against one of the guys of a wireless. He moved only a couple of inches away from that significant companionship and stood quite still.
Was this installation a pre-war dodge, abandoned now? And if not abandoned—
He found himself making his way down with his right hand in his pistol-pocket. Gull Island was another place with that wand of magic set up among the rocks.