No one paid any attention to me. Hamish was groping desperately with his fingers. “I c-can’t—seem—to—get hold——!” he panted.
“Let me have a try?” Michael put in quietly. Reluctantly Hamish moved a little and, kneeling down in his turn, Michael thrust one bare brown arm into the hole. A minute later he was holding up a small, dirt-encased object. As he shook off the clinging earth, we saw an oblong tin box like a tobacco tin. I stared dazedly at it—“Royal Plug” I read.
Hamish seized the box from Michael’s hand. He shook it. It rattled! Hattie May screamed again. “It’s the emerald—the blue emerald!”
Hamish was prying at the lid with fumbling awkward fingers. His sister snatched at it impatiently. “It would take you a week to get that cover off!” she cried.
But the cover stuck obstinately. Michael took out his jackknife. “Perhaps this will do it,” he offered.
XIX
The Treasure
Hamish took off his spectacles and wiped them carefully as if he hoped by so doing to see something different from the object which was lying in Michael’s open palm. The object at which the rest of us were also incredulously staring. It was just a key—a long old-fashioned rusty key!
“Is—is that all?” Hattie May’s voice at last broke the silence; it seemed to come from the region of her shoes. For answer Michael took up the tobacco tin and turned it upside down. “B-but there must be something else,” she faltered. “Something else buried—the treasure—the blue emerald!”
With a shrug Michael again picked up the shovel and set to work anew on the hole. But though he dug steadily for as much as five minutes, he turned up nothing more.