"Dick,", he added, "do you see that?"
I looked in the direction indicated, and saw a small white star formed by the chalk bullet upon the face of the rock.
"I do," said I; "I do!"
"There or thereabout must be this diamond, which is never visible by day."
"But we have neither hammer, chisel, nor crowbar," said I; "and our fingers, I fear, won't avail us much."
Hislop threw the bridle of his horse over a laurel-bush; I did the same; and in a few minutes we had climbed to the spot indicated by the chalk mark; and there also we found the conical bullet of his Enfield rifle, flattened out like a florin, and adhering to the face of the rock.
For nearly twenty minutes we examined all the locality of these marks, and at last I discovered something that appeared to be a dull gray piece of rock crystal, half sunk and half projecting from the face of the basalt, and led Hislop to it.
Uttering an exclamation of joy, he declared that, beyond a doubt, it was the diamond!
We were almost breathless at this sudden discovery, and looked about us on every hand, like the perpetrators of a robbery, lest we might be observed; but, except our horses cropping the grass, and the golden canary birds that sang on every twig and tree, there appeared no living thing on the mountain above or in the ravine beneath us.
But how were we to extract our treasure, if a treasure indeed it was?