“Look at this one—and this,” he said, “and think of what the jewelers charge you for a little emerald the size of a pea. And this! It would be worth a fortune in itself, but I’m afraid it’s imperfect. The smaller ones are better.”
By the daylight he could gauge the stones, and he was able to throw out a great many obviously worthless bits, rough greenish matrix, or plain fragments of stone. Between them they sorted the heap. Eva laid her little striped scarf on the ground, and they placed the pick of the stones upon it in a little, growing pile; and meanwhile Lang gave her a hurried, abbreviated account of his adventures—his kidnaping, his voyages, his shipwreck and subsequent struggles.
“Oh, what hardships! How you have suffered!” Eva exclaimed, almost tearfully. “And all for this,” pointing to the jewel heap; “it wasn’t worth it.”
“No, it wasn’t,” said Lang. “But it wasn’t all for that. It was——Well, if those emeralds should bring a million dollars they’d never be worth the feeling I had when I opened my eyes just now and saw your face looking down at me—and it was upside down, too.”
He looked into her eyes, half smiling, half appealingly. He could not mistake the look of tenderness in the brown eyes that met his unreluctantly. A surge of pride, of exultation rose through him. He put out his hand, but before he touched her the girl’s face changed sharply. She uttered a faint, startled cry; and Lang, jerking about, caught a glimpse of a huge, blurred figure emerging soundlessly from the fog, already hardly ten feet away.
He saw the black beard, the fur cap sparkling with drops of moisture; and without a word he snatched at the automatic pistol in his hip pocket.
“Drop that! Drop it, Lang, I say!” cried Carroll sharply, already with his weapon drawn. But Lang desperately pulled the trigger. The wet mechanism stuck.
“Hands up, Lang—both of you—or I’ll drop you cold!” Carroll ordered, drawing a bead on the doctor’s chest; and Lang savagely hurled the useless pistol down and put up his hands. Carroll looked triumphantly at them both.
“Do you know, I half expected to find you here,” he remarked. “Yes, I sort of guessed you’d got ahead of us, though I’m damned if I see how you did it; but you always were quick.”
His eyes fell suddenly on the little heap of stones. He bent forward, then straightened up with a hissed ejaculation, tense, glaring.