Whatever measure of grief James Strong may have felt for his unfortunate brother, his sorrow did not prevent him betaking himself very seriously to his digging work as soon as day dawned on the second morning after the mishap. He went about his business in grim silence, vouchsafing us, as before, neither word nor look.
Neither were we dilatory. I went back to my digging with back and shoulders still stiff from the labours of the first day, while Jack expressed his intention to search about for the fourth post.
"Either there's some trick about the position of that post," he said, "or it has got moved away by an accident; some elephant or other big brute has used it for a scratching-post, or knocked it down and perhaps rolled it away; in any case, we ought to know where it was."
I still thought that in all probability the fourth post had simply completed the square suggested by the other three, and that it had been in some way removed from its place—perhaps by an elephant, as Jack said, or more likely by a gust of wind. I did not consider the question at all important.
As it proved, Jack was right. He found the fourth post twenty yards at least out of the square, and planted right in the middle of a prickly-pear bush. But though I extended my operations to the new ground introduced by the change of area, and though the two other men and I together dug it superficially over, so that the entire space between the four posts had now been dug up—to a certain depth—the result of the day's work was "nothing to nobody," as Jack facetiously expressed it. Indeed, I, for one, began to wonder whether we had embarked upon a wild-goose chase, and whether the hundred thousand pounds ever existed save in the imagination of old Clutterbuck; and again, whether, supposing the money to have actually existed, the old miser had not purposely so hidden his treasure that no other human eye should ever behold it, since he himself could no longer gloat over it. But when I communicated these views to Jack Henderson, he said—
"Bosh! man; don't be a fool. Dig for all you're worth!"
If real hard work could have insured success, it would have been a difficult matter to judge between James Strong and myself as to who should bear away the prize. Clutterbuck laboured away too, after his kind; but he was of a different kidney from ours, and I think I turned up more soil in an hour than he did in half a day.
For the best part of a week we vied thus with one another, toiling day-long in the sweat of our brows and meeting with no success.
On the evening of the sixth day Jack said to me, as we walked together towards our camp fire—
"Do you believe in second sight and that kind of thing, Peter?"