“Full up again, mate,” cried Dan; “and look here, Buck; when I get down a bit deeper you had better come and take my place; you’re ’bout twice as long as I am. Stones again, lads!” And he handed up first one and then another on the flat of his spade.
“Both square ones, Dean,” cried Mark. “Think they have been chiselled into shape, doctor?”
“No, no; selected,” said the doctor, as he carefully examined the block which the boy held. “You see, that’s the under part where it lay in the wall, not weathered a bit. The other side has crumbled away, while the under part is comparatively fresh, and would show chisel marks if it had been chipped.”
The work went on for nearly an hour, the sailor having dug away in the most vigorous manner and cleared out a fairly wide, squarish hole, three of whose sides were cut down through earth, the fourth, near the foot of the wall, being bedded together loose stones and rubbish and pretty well open.
Almost every spadeful had been carefully examined for traces of the olden occupation, the doctor during the first portion of the time having been constantly stepping down into the hole and out again to examine some suggestive looking piece of rubbish, until Mark’s attention was drawn to Dan, who kept on trying to catch his eye and giving him nods and winks and jerks of the elbow, pointing too again and again at the doctor’s back, but all in vain.
“What does he mean by all that?” thought the boy. “Oh, bother your dumb motions! Why don’t you speak?”
“Pst!” whispered Dan. “Can’t you see? You tell him. He keeps on a-hindering me, hopping up and down like a cat on hot bricks. You tell him to stop up there and turn over every basketful as they chucks upon the heap.”
A delicate hint was given to the doctor, and from that time forward he left the little digger room to work.
All at once, just as Buck was depositing his empty basket within Dan’s reach, and the boys were standing at the edge looking on at where the sailor had begun to scrape away some of the loose crumbs, as he called them, from the side of the bottom of the hole, there was a faint rustling sound and the man dropped his spade, stepped back and bounded out of the excavation as actively as a cat.
“What’s the matter, mate?” cried Buck, “a arn’t given you a nip?”