“And I thought a golf tournament was exciting!” she said, smiling in the dark. Softly she rose and crept to the window. It was very beautiful out there; mountains, hills, bushes, all a study in absolute stillness. The only sound that came to her ears was the howl of a wolf in the distance.
“Coming in at just the right moment,” smiled the girl. “What a country for effects! Oh dear, I believe I could sleep out there in the hammock if it wasn’t too chilly.”
Taking the couch cover over her arm she crept softly out of the door and out on to the veranda where the hammock swayed gently in the breeze. Polly adjusted herself in it with care; a fall would bring all the occupants of the house out with a bound.
“First they’d bound and then they’d fuss,” she said to herself. “I don’t want to be fussed at, I just want to snatch a few winks out under this gorgeous sky. I don’t understand how when skies and stars and mountains are all laid out for them, artists want to do the red and green futurist horrors that they love so. Now, what’s that noise?”
A queer kind of noise it was. Polly sat up quite suddenly. It seemed to come from behind a clump of bushes some distance to the right. It was a pounding, scraping sort of noise, not very loud, but distinctly disconcerting. You got the impression that whoever was doing it was trying not to make any more noise than he could help. Polly’s heart beat rapidly. She must call one of the men. She rose unsteadily and at the same moment the noise stopped. A tall figure stepped out from behind the bushes and came toward the house.
Polly stepped back into the shadow of the porch. She was about to dive into the open window when another sound caught her ear. The man was whistling softly—whistling the Slumber Motif from Die Walküre! Polly laughed aloud. She had taken Henry Hard for a bandit.
“Hello, what are you doing up on deck?” he said, whimsically. “I thought we’d sent the passengers below and battened down the hatches.”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I came out here. What are you doing with that pick? Was it you I heard digging?”
“Scott and me. I came up for a match.”
“But what can you be digging for at this time of night? Not buried treasure?” eagerly.