Harry and his gang soon returned with a load of stout stakes, plenty of suitable trees for the purpose being found close at hand. Depositing these on the beach, he then returned into the woods for more material, Roger and his men meanwhile proceeding to plant the main posts in a ring round the guns.
It was not long ere they had driven a row of posts deep and firm into the sand, starting from the margin of the beach nearest the water’s edge.
This brought them, in the direction in which they were going, fairly close up to where the woods ceased at their junction with the beach.
Roger was watching the men drive in the next post with heavy wooden mallets, procured from the ship, when he observed that, although they were hammering hard at the stump, it did not seem to be going down as quickly as it should; indeed, upon closer inspection, it did not appear to be moving downwards at all. And, further, the mallets, instead of giving out a dull sound, as they had done whilst driving through sand, now gave out a sharper and quite different sound as the top of the post was struck.
One of the men engaged stepped up to Roger and touched his hat. “It seems to me, sir,” said he, “as though something was stopping of this here post from going down any furder. I expects as how there is a stone or summat in the sand under the point. Do you think that ere stump is down fur enough as it is, or shall us pull un up and put un in somewheres else?”
Roger stepped up and shook the post, and, finding it quite loose, decided that it would have to be driven deeper in order to be secure. Nevertheless it was necessary to space the posts at equal intervals one from another, if his ideas were to be carried out; he therefore ordered the stump to be pulled up, the obstruction removed, and the post driven down again in the same position.
The seamen thereupon laid hold of the post, and, all hauling together, it soon came out; and with shovels and crowbars they began to break down the sand and enlarge the hole, so as to get at whatever was in the way and remove it.
It was not long ere the shovel of one of the men struck upon something hard, and the man, dropping upon his knees, went to work to scrape the sand away with his hands, presently laying bare to view what was apparently part of a spar of some kind, not old or worm-eaten, but seemingly almost new. Having located this, they started to clear the sand away from the whole length of the piece of timber, and, while doing so, found that there were two other poles or spars laid alongside it. After an hour’s hard work the three spars were unearthed, and proved to be the three poles of a set of sheer-legs, which had evidently only quite recently been hidden.
Roger then instructed the men to start probing in the sand, to see whether there might be anything else buried, and he himself took a boat and pulled away over the bay to the Elizabeth to inform Cavendish of his discovery.
He found the captain lying in his bunk nursing his recent wound, and informed him of the circumstance, asking also what he should do in the matter.