"Well?" said Bonteck, with what seemed a certain breathless eagerness; "Go on and pick out your place. We'll dig for you—Preble and I."
"You haven't anything to dig with," she laughed, and then the laugh died, and I saw her eyes widen and her lip begin to tremble. But in an instant she was laughing again.
"I believe I had almost hypnotized myself," she confessed, with a little grimace of self-consciousness. "Do you see that white stone over there under the vines? The thought came to me like a flash, 'That stone was put there to mark the spot!' You have been making it all too uncannily real, Bonteck."
Van Dyck crossed the little open space and pulled away a mass of trailing vines so that we could examine the stone. It was a fragment of white coral the size, and approximately the shape, of a ship's capstan.
"It's a bit odd, anyway," Bonteck commented, still apparently in the grip of the curious eagerness. "There are no loose stones anywhere else on the island, so far as I know, excepting the small pieces we used in building our camp fireplace. You'd say this is a chunk of the outer reef, wouldn't you, Dick?"
"Why—yes, possibly," I answered. "But in that case it must have been quarried and carried ashore in some way, and——"
Bonteck straightened up and turned quickly to Madeleine.
"Suppose we try to be serious for a minute or so, if we can," he offered, with what appeared to me to be forced soberness. "There is about one chance in a hundred million that there really was a buried treasure. That hundred millionth chance is yours, Madeleine. Neither Dick nor I would have noticed this piece of coral hidden under the vines if you hadn't pointed it out. Shall we turn it over for you?"
"I should never forgive you if you didn't," she laughed back.
"All right. But it must be distinctly understood that if there should happen to be a gold mine under it, the treasure is all yours. Do you agree to that?"