The Adventures of Captain Horn

by Frank R. Stockton

He went on, throwing the light of the lantern on the ground before him, for he had now reached a part of the cave which was entirely dark. Suddenly something on the ground attracted his attention. It was bright—it shone as if it were a little pale flame of a candle. He sprang toward it, he picked it up. It was one of the bars of gold he had seen in the mound.

"Could I have dropped this?" he ejaculated. He slipped the little bar into his pocket, and then, his heart beginning to beat rapidly, he advanced, with his lantern close to the rocky floor. Presently he saw two other pieces of gold, and then, a little farther on, the end of a candle, so small that it could scarcely have been held by the fingers. He picked up this and stared at it. It was a commonplace candle-end, but the sight of it sent a chill through him from head to foot. It must have been dropped by some one who could hold it no longer.

He pressed on, his light still sweeping the floor. He found no more gold nor pieces of candle, but here and there he perceived the ends of burnt wooden matches. Going on, he found more matches, two or three with the heads broken off and unburnt. In a few moments the mound loomed up out of the darkness like a spectral dome, and, looking no more upon the ground, the captain ran toward it. By means of the stony projections he quickly mounted to the top, and there the sight he saw almost made him drop his lantern. The great lid of the mound had been moved and was now awry, leaving about one half of the opening exposed.

In one great gasp the captain's breath seemed to leave him, but he was a man of strong nerves, and quickly recovered himself; but even then he did not lift his lantern so that he could look into the interior of the mound. For a few moments he shut his eyes. He did not dare even to look. But then his courage came back, and holding his lantern over the opening, he gazed down into the mound, and it seemed to his rapid glance that there was as much gold in it as when he last saw it.

The discovery that the treasure was still there had almost as much effect upon the captain as if he had found the mound empty. He grew so faint that he felt he could not maintain his hold upon the top of the mound, and quickly descended, half sliding, to the bottom. There he sat down, his lantern by his side. When his strength came back to him,—and he could not have told any one how long it was before this happened,—the first thing he did was to feel for his box of matches, and finding them safe in his waistcoat pocket, he extinguished the lantern. He must not be discovered, if there should be any one to discover him.

Now the captain began to think as fiercely and rapidly as a man's mind could be made to work. Some one had been there. Some one had taken away gold from that mound—how much or how little, it did not matter. Some one besides himself had had access to the treasure!

His suspicions fell upon Ralph, chiefly because his most earnest desire at that moment was that Ralph might be the offender. If he could have believed that he would have been happy. It must have been that the boy was not willing to go away and leave all that gold, feeling that perhaps he and his sister might never possess any of it, and that just before leaving he had made a hurried visit to the mound. But the more the captain thought of this, the less probable it became. He was almost sure that Ralph could not have lifted that great mass of stone which formed the lid covering the opening of the mound, for it had required all his own strength to do it; and then, if anything of this sort had really happened, the letters he had received from Edna and the boy must have been most carefully written with the intention to deceive him.

[Illustration: Holding his lantern over the opening he gazed down into the mound.]

The letter from Edna, which in tone and style was a close imitation of his own to her, had been a strictly business communication. It told everything which happened after the arrival of the Mary Bartlett, and gave him no reason to suppose that any one could have had a chance to pillage the mound. Ralph's letter had been even more definite. It was constructed like an official report, and when the captain had read it, he had thought that the boy had probably taken great pride in its preparation. It was as guardian of the treasure mound that Ralph wrote, and his remarks were almost entirely confined to this important trust.

He briefly reported to the captain that, since his departure, no one had been in the recess of the cave where the mound was situated, and he described in detail the plan by which he had established Edna behind the wall in the passage, so as to prevent any of the sailors from the ship from making explorations. He also stated that everything had been left in as high a condition of safety as it was possible to leave it, but that, if his sister had been willing, he would most certainly have remained behind, with the two negroes, until the captain's return.