"Walking the deck alone, Allen?" she said softly. "I wondered where you were."
"Just doing my usual forty laps after supper," he responded, trying to speak lightly.
"I should think your work to-day in the digging, to say nothing of our experience in the cave, would have been as much exercise as you really needed," she said, laughing. "And all for nothing!"
"We could scarcely expect success so soon," he replied.
"No? Perhaps success is not to be our portion, Allen. What then?"
"Well," and he tried to say it cheerfully, "we've had a run for our money."
"A run for the pirate's money, you mean. Let's see," she added slyly, "that confession did not state just how many doubloons were buried, did it?"
"The amount specified I failed to make out," he told her. "Time had erased it."
"Then we are after an unknown amount—an unknown quantity of doubloons. And perhaps we are fated never to know the amount of the pirate's hoard," and she laughed again. Then, suddenly, she clutched his arm more tightly as they paced the deck together, crying under her breath: "Oh! look yonder Allen."
A strangely flickering light dispelled the pall that hung above the hilltop. The cloud of smoke or steam, rising from the crater and which they had first seen that afternoon, was now illuminated and shot through with rays of light evidently reflected from the bowels of the hill.