"I begin to feel very nervous now we have reached here, and the search is about to begin," Barbara said. "Oh! what shall we find--or shall we find anything?"
"Make your mind easy," Reginald replied, although he himself felt unaccountably excited, too, at what was before them. "The story left by Nicholas bears the stamp of truth on every line of it; I would stake my existence on his having buried the boxes as he wrote. And as to their having been disinterred, why! there is no possibility of that. Come, let us begin."
He looked round at the sea as he spoke, and scanned the little crisping waves as they rolled on to the Key's shore, and, involuntarily and sailor-like, searched the horizon to see if there was any sail in sight, any likelihood of their being observed. Yet, as he knew and told the girl by his side, there was no chance of that.
"On this, the east side of the Key," he said, "there is nothing nearer than the Cape de Verd Islands and the African coast, and nothing passes east or west within twenty miles of this place. We will make a beginning."
Then they sat down on the brushwood of the island, disturbing as they did so a great two-hundred-pound turtle that crawled gasping away, and Reginald, taking out the now water-stained and blurred pages of Nicholas, began to read over carefully his measurements and instructions for finding the exact spot where the buried treasure lay.
"'From the north side of the middle Key is fifty-one good strides of three feet each,'" he repeated from the paper; "'from the south side is fifty-three, from the east is forty-nine, from the west is fifty strides and a half.' Barbara, let us measure. I will begin from this, the south side."
Very carefully he paced out the strides, "good ones," as his predecessor had directed, only, instead of sticking in the ground a sword--which, of course, he did not possess here--he put a large white stone. Then, as Nicholas had himself done, three times did he go over the ground, making all the strides correspond with the ancient manuscript; and at last he said to Barbara, "Now we will dig."
"It is only three feet from the surface to the topmost turtle shell," he remarked, as he took off his light jacket and rolled up his sleeves. "Ten minutes will show if we have hit it right."
At the end of those ten minutes he found that, though he had made a mismeasurement of a foot and a half from the east to west, he had otherwise judged his distance with sufficient accuracy. The treasure, certainly the topmost turtle shell, was there. The spade struck against the edge of that shell instead of the exact middle of it; in a few minutes more, by digging the sand up further to the west, the whole of it was exposed, its convex side rising towards them.
"We have found it," he exclaimed. "We have found it, Barbara! The treasure is--yours!"