There was a low murmur from the Spaniards when Austin obeyed him, and he handed the wide-brimmed hat to Jefferson.
"Would you make it four pounds?" asked the latter.
"I certainly would not."
Jefferson laughed harshly. "Then it's probably worth some £200," he said. "It's rather a grim joke, considering what has no doubt been done for the sake of it."
He laid the hat down, and one of the Spaniards, glancing at the little pile of quills, broke into a torrent of horrible maledictions, while Austin, who said nothing, gazed at his comrade until the latter made a curious little gesture.
"There is still the gum," he said.
Austin smiled sardonically. "If you can still believe in it you are an optimist of the finest water. Any way, we'll go and look for it. It will be a relief to get done with the thing."
They waded to the surfboat, which lay close by on the beach, and slid down stream to an adjacent island, where they had no difficulty in finding the tree the man who made the note in the engineers' tables had alluded to. The moon had, however, sunk behind a cloud, and they toiled by the light of the blast-lamp for half an hour, until once more one of the Canarios struck something with his shovel. They dragged it out with difficulty, and found it to be a heavy, half-rotten bag, with something that appeared to be a package of plaited fibre inside it. Other bags followed, and hope was growing strong in them again when they had disclosed at least a score. Jefferson looked at Austin with a little smile in his eyes.
"There's a couple of hundred pounds, any way, in each of those bags, and if the man who told me was right, that stuff is worth anything over £100 the ton," he said. "So far as we have prospected, this strip of sand is full of them. It's going to be more profitable than gold-mining. We'll get this lot into the surfboat first. Put that lamp out."
Austin did so, and they staggered through a foot or two of water with the bags on their backs. Some of them burst as they carried them, but the fibre packages remained intact, and the big boat was almost loaded when Austin, who was breathless, seated himself for a moment on her gunwale. He could see by the silvery gleam on the cloud bank's edge that the moon was coming through again, and he was glad of the fact, for he had stumbled and once fallen heavily under his burden when floundering through the strip of thorny brushwood which fringed the beach. Still, he agreed with Jefferson that it was not advisable to use the big blast-light any longer than was absolutely necessary, for they both had an unpleasant suspicion that they had not done yet with Funnel-paint. It was, indeed, for that reason they had made the search at night and used the surfboat, which could be paddled almost silently, instead of the launch, though Tom had repaired her boiler, and she was then lying alongside the Cumbria, with steam up, ready.