And yet as, ready for the great adventure, they stepped outside the cave and their eyes fell on that heavy, lowering cloud of smoke hanging low above the mountain, they felt again uneasy and apprehensive.
It would be just as well to hurry the thing through. Bimbo was right. The island was a rather unhealthy place to linger in.
And so they worked feverishly, anxious to salvage the treasure without further delay. Everything went well with them, seemed to conspire to help them.
Once more Phil was lowered to the ocean bed but this time he carried a strong cable, the other end of which was held tightly by the boys some hundred and fifty feet above him.
This time there was no stumbling hesitation in his progress. He had been there before. He knew the way!
Straight for the hold he made, careful to keep both the line and cable free of the wreckage. It can’t be said that, as he passed through the cabin where he had first stumbled over the skeleton of the long dead pirate, he did not experience an uncanny thrill. He did but, as he told himself with an uneasy laugh, he was getting used to it by this time. Pretty soon he would be able to walk through a whole sea of dead men without turning a hair!
Just the same, the chest to which he fastened the cable was not the one against which leaned the second pirate’s skeleton. Phil had a weird feeling that to disturb it would be to invite disaster upon himself.
Of course when all the other chests had been hauled to the surface, he would be forced to disturb that awful, reclining figure. But, not yet!
He gave the signal agreed upon that all was in readiness and slowly the heavy chest left its fellows and moved along the littered floor. Phil went with it, sometimes before it, sometimes behind, moving objects out of its way pushing, hauling.
Then came the moment when he stood upon the scarred and mutilated deck of the schooner and watched the chest rise above his head, higher, higher, till he could no longer follow its ascent.