"It will be low water two hours after daybreak," he said, "and by that time I will have brought the cutter and the boat round to the strip of beach nearest to the Keys. You might meet me there, Barbara, and bring some food and fresh water, and then we will begin. Meanwhile, let me have whatever tools and implements you possess for digging. I will take them with me and bring them in the cutter in the morning."
In the shed behind the hut they found what was required, an old spade and a nearly new one, a pickaxe and some ropes--for the Alderlys, father and son, had had to attend to their garden in this tropical island almost as much as though they had lived in Europe--and these would be enough, he thought.
So, shouldering them, he bade her "Good-night"--it seemed to each as though their hands were clasped together longer and more tightly now than they had ever been before!--and went his way down to the river once more.
It would have been strange if, to-night--the night before the story, that his ancestor had written in those long past and forgotten years, was to be realised--he should not have had a host of thoughts whirling through his brain; if past and present had not been strangely confused and jumbled up together in that brain.
There lay the cutter, a dark indistinct mass, in the midst of the stars reflected from above; in the very self-same spot where so many other small vessels, all connected with him, with Barbara, and with the treasure, had lain before. Itself the property of a villain whose villainy was inherited through centuries, it occupied the spot in that little river where once the Etoyle had been moored, where she had been sunk, and where Simon Alderly and his murdered victim, the diver, had got ashore. Also there, or close by, had been the galliot of honest Nicholas with its dying and dead crew, and with Nicholas sleeping, or trying to sleep, in that place of death, or watching Alderly in his murderous madness as he slew his companion. And he pictured to himself the sloop with the unknown Martin having probably been anchored there before those days--doubtless as full of reckless, bloodstained scoundrels as was the Etoyle herself; he remembered how, not twenty-four hours before, the graceful and pretty Pompeia had ridden at anchor on the river's bosom--and now she, too, had gone to join the other wrecks below the water.
He shuddered as these thoughts passed through his mind; shuddered at all that the treasure had led to in the way of murder and death.
"It was here, here where I stand," he whispered to himself, "that the diver was slain; there, in the river, that the bones of the pirates lie, and also those of the crew of the galliot; above--where she, the pure outcome of so much evil, dwells--that Simon Alderly died mad and without time to repent."
A slant of the rising moon gleamed through the wood on to the bank and played on the waters of the river lower down; the ray was thrown upon the very spot where, last night, he had seen the staring eyes and the glistening teeth of Joseph Alderly, as the limbless body swirled round with the stream--and he started and shivered.
"Heavens!" he exclaimed, "it is a charnel-house, a place of horror! I--I cannot sleep in that boat to-night."
He turned from the accursed spot--all beautiful as it was now beneath the rising moon, and illuminated with myriads of fireflies, while over and above all was the luscious perfume of tropical plants and flowers--and went his way through the thick underbrush to a part of the shore beyond the spot, where the body of Joseph Alderly had been buried, avoiding that place as he proceeded. Then, when he had gone some distance, he chose a bit of the beach high and dry above the line of the already receding sea, and, laying himself down upon it, gazed far over the waters to where a few lights sparkled at intervals from the little island of Tortola.