“By Jove! we may have some one before us,” Lang exclaimed, suddenly remembering. “Carroll has all your maps and photos, and he’s disappeared—Lord knows where.”
“It doesn’t matter. He’ll never find it,” Morrison declared. “It isn’t where any one would think. It’s a wild, g-glacier——”
He stuttered, and stuck fast.
“It’s a wild, rough coast,” Eva took up his words. “Small mountainous islands, a steep slope, and a rainy climate. They had trouble to find anything dry enough to burn for their fires, until they came on an outcrop of coal right on the coast. There’s a long valley running to the sea, and a wall of ice right across it, like a great gate—the head of the glacier that goes away up the mountain to the top, where there’s a pass. It was the pass that made father stop to examine it. He thought there might be traces of an ancient seaport—his prehistoric Chileans, you know.
“The glacier was melting away at the bottom, of course. The valley was choked with gravel and stones that the glacier had cast out through years and years. Here he found an old copper knife, and then he found the emeralds, right at the foot of the ice. They had come out of the ice.”
“Out of the glacier?” Lang exclaimed.
“It’s my belief,” Morrison broke in again, “that the glacier had gathered them up with all their surrounding rock and gravel, somewhere high up the mountain. The ice had torn up an emerald pocket, carried it down slowly, maybe through centuries, till at last it came near the bottom, and was washed out by the melting. Streams of water were flowing out of the glacier wall everywhere.
“Floyd stole the best of the two stones I found. He lied if he said that he was working on shares with me. I was paying him two hundred pesos a month, and nothing more. Those emeralds—would—would have——”
He stuck again, and glanced hopelessly at Eva.
“Father means,” the girl assisted, “that they could have been cut to I don’t know how many hundred carats if they hadn’t been flawed, and they would have been worth at least twenty thousand dollars apiece. He didn’t have them examined till after he was out of the hospital at Valparaiso. He would have gone back then, but he wasn’t strong enough, and besides he didn’t have the money. He had to go North to get that oil stock and sell it. He had bought it for thirty dollars a share, and was told that it would go to one hundred dollars.”