“Well, George, it seems we’re done,” said Harold, with a ghastly attempt at a laugh. “There’s no treasure here.”
“Maybe it’s underneath that there stone corn bin,” suggested George, whose teeth were still chattering. “It should be here or hereabouts, surely.”
This was an idea. Helping himself to the shoulder-blade of some deceased hero, Harold, using it as a trowel, began to scoop away the soft sand upon which the stone chest stood. He scooped and scooped manfully, but he could not come to the bottom of the kist.
He stepped back and looked at it. It must be one of two things—either the hollow at the top was but a shallow cutting in a great block of stone, or the kist had a false bottom.
He sprang at it. Seizing the giant skeleton by the spine, he jerked it out of the kist and dropped it on one side in a bristling bony heap. Just as he did so there came so furious a gust of wind that, buried as they were in the earth, they literally felt the mound rock beneath it. Instantly it was followed by a frightful crash overhead.
George collapsed in terror, and for a moment Harold could not for the life of him think what had happened. He ran to the hole and looked up. Straight above him he could see the sky, in which the first cold lights of dawn were quivering. Mrs. Massey’s summer-house had been blown bodily away, and the “ancient British Dwelling Place” was once more open to the sky, as it had been for centuries.
“The summer-house has gone, George,” he said. “Thank goodness that we were not in it, or we should have gone too.”
“Oh, Lord, sir,” groaned the unhappy George, “this is an awful business. It’s like a judgment.”
“It might have been if we had been up above instead of safe down here,” he answered. “Come, bring that other lantern.”
George roused himself, and together they bent over the now empty kist, examining it closely.