"Of course it will be mine," she answered in cheerful mockery. "I'll take Dick, here, for my witness. He will testify that it was I who first saw the stone—won't you, Dick? But we must make haste. It is growing dark, and I must go back to father."
We heaved at the coral boulder, Bonteck and I, and rolled it aside out of its bed in the soft, sandy soil. I was about to say that we couldn't dig very far with only our bare hands for tools, when Bonteck produced a huge clasp-knife of the kind that sailors carry.
"Where shall we dig—right where the stone lay?" he asked, with a queer grin.
"Right exactly where the stone lay," said the young woman, charmingly precise and mandatory.
We went down on our knees and fell to work as soberly as if the entire thing were not a poor flimsy bit of comedy designed to push the growing anxieties and fear tremblings a trifle farther into the background. Bonteck loosened the friable soil with the blade of his big knife, and I scooped it out, dog-fashion, with my hands. In a few minutes we had a hole knee-deep, and as we went on enlarging it, I saw, or thought I saw, a strange transformation taking place in Van Dyck. The playful manner had fallen away from him like a cast-off garment. His jaw was set and he was breathing hard. And when he took his turns in the little pit he dug like a madman.
It was not until after we had dug down to the pure white sand of the subsoil that he gave over and turned to Madeleine with a look in his eyes that mirrored, or seemed to mirror, a shock of half-paralyzing astoundment. I had never suspected him of having any histrionic ability, but if he were not really shocked, he was certainly giving a faultless rendering of a man completely dazed.
"It's—it's gone!" he exclaimed mechanically. "You've been robbed, Madeleine; it was yours—all yours, by the right of discovery—and—and it's gone!"
"What sheer nonsense!" she retorted lightly. "You are the one who is hypnotized now, Bonteck." And then, carrying out the little comedy to its proper curtain: "Of course, it is very singular that we shouldn't find the hidden treasure; singular, and dreadfully disappointing—after one has worked one's imagination up to the point of believing anything and everything. But we've had our laugh out of it, and that is worth while, isn't it? Now we must really be getting back to the others. It will be dark before long, and we mustn't keep Mrs. Van Tromp's dinner waiting."
Van Dyck was standing at the edge of the hole, still figuring as one helplessly dumfounded—and I wondered why he persisted in throwing himself so extravagantly into the part-playing. While Madeleine was speaking, I stooped to pass some of the sand of the pit bottom through my fingers. It was almost as fine as flour, and quite as white, but upon closer inspection I saw that it was flecked in spots with bits of black humus—humus like that formed by well-rotted wood.
"Hold on a minute," I said, seized suddenly with a notion that was to the full as absurd as that which had led us to follow the imagined trail of the Spaniards retreating from their burning ship; and catching up Van Dyck's dropped clasp-knife I stepped into the shallow hole we had dug.